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The Stolen Credit For What Makes Up the Sun
StartsWithABang writes: Sure, it's easy today to look at the Sun and know it's a ball of (mostly) hydrogen, generating energy by combining those protons in a chain into helium through the process of nuclear fusion. But before we even knew that nuclear fusion was possible, we needed to figure out what the Sun was made out of, a more difficult task than you'd imagine. The credit was given to Henry Norris Russell (of Hertzsprung-Russell diagram fame), but he completely stole the work from a woman you never heard of: his student, Cecilia Payne, after discouraging her from publishing her work on the subject four years prior.
This is not even wrong. Payne had the idea first, Russell thought it was wrong, Russell later changed his mind and gave Payne credit: http://blogs.britannica.com/20... His work cites hers.
This is how science is supposed to work, although there is always a factor of fame involved in credit-giving, and women have in general not been as forceful in claiming or defending credit as men.
Furthermore, how many people claiming to be "outraged" by this were even aware of who had been given credit for figuring out the composition of the sun in the first place? Who amongst us is "shocked, shocked" that Russell--whom they had been giving credit to all these years, citing in papers, talking up at cocktail parties--didn't actually make the discovery that is commonly and incorrectly attributed to him?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
HA! This reminds me of my days at Rice University, in the early 70s. The Post grad students there each year would award one of their number the "Young Marsden" award. It was presented to the student whose work had been most egregiously ripped off by a faculty member that year. It was called the Young Marsden award, in memory of Marsden, since Rutherford and Geiger got credit for his work on alpha particle scattering
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
he completely stole the work from a woman you never heard of: his student, Cecilia Payne,
He didn't "steal" it, and she wasn't his student.
Cecilia Payne's dissertation originally concluded that stars (particularly our Sun) were composed primarily of ionized hydrogen and helium, with smaller amounts of other elements, mostly metals. Russel reviewed her dissertation, and dissuaded her from presenting that conclusion, because the common wisdom at the time was that the Sun was made of the same stuff as the Earth, but heated to incandescence.
Later, Russel realized that Payne was right, and gave her brief credit in one of his papers for the idea. Unfortunately the idea was still attributed to Russel for a long time. Payne did get the recognition she deserved, albeit belatedly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I think that SJW is a quite appropriate subject to bring when talking about this article.
Let me list a few ways in which just the summary is wrong, deliberately twisting the truth so that SJW can get their righteous anger on.
o Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin is not someone I have not heard of. She was a professor at Harvard, a department chair, and hers is a name that you are very likely to hear even if you have just taken classes there.
o Her credit was not stolen. The man who dissuaded her from publishing part of her theory thought that the claim, unsupported, would expose her to ridicule. He did not do it to steal the credit - once he actually proved the claim, he gave her credit in the paper, and actually admitted there, without having to, that he was originally wrong.
And seriously, do we have to twist the facts to make things more interesting? There are enough wrongs to get angry about, and every time lies that are meant to inflame are discovered, assholes get to cast doubt on other, true injustices.
No good deed goes unpunished...