3 ms·

Wrong. Bell was first to make the connection. She discovered them. "first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them." is way different than "guy cleani

Wrong. Bell was first to make the connection. She discovered them. "first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them." is way different than "guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America." in the first case, other people might not (and had not) noticed. Equating "holy shit! these are multi-solar-mass nucleons rotating at a significant fraction of lightspeed" to the common experience of "land ho!" is absurd.

mjburgess 9y ago
Let me refine my comment, "discovery qua social recognition of discovery" does not mean being the first to see something. We award "discoveries" to those people who own and arrange circumstances that permit "discovery" in the narrow sense. Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. The existence of the project, the running of the project, etc. had nothing to do with the grad. students it employed. In the narrow sense then, the Nobel Prize is not about giving the "first human" a gold star. It is about recognizing the drivers of progress in some area. The former is accidental, the latter deliberate. In some situations, esp. in early science, these were the same people (ie. the person who put all the work into creating the project was also the first-recogniser of results). Since the victorian era, increasingly we have to distinguish between whose ambition a project was, and whose effort saw its realization -- and which individual happen to be the first to press-play on the peak-detection software.
- creep 9y ago
  >Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. I mean, sure, but that doesn't mean any grad student would have looked at the logs and found the pulsar patterns. Bell did. If she hadn't said anything the data may have been overlooked for years. What matter is her position on the project?

3 ms·

Wrong. Bell was first to make the connection. She discovered them. "first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them." is way different than "guy cleani

by jakeogh 9y ago

mjburgess 9y ago
Let me refine my comment, "discovery qua social recognition of discovery" does not mean being the first to see something. We award "discoveries" to those people who own and arrange circumstances that permit "discovery" in the narrow sense. Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. The existence of the project, the running of the project, etc. had nothing to do with the grad. students it employed. In the narrow sense then, the Nobel Prize is not about giving the "first human" a gold star. It is about recognizing the drivers of progress in some area. The former is accidental, the latter deliberate. In some situations, esp. in early science, these were the same people (ie. the person who put all the work into creating the project was also the first-recogniser of results). Since the victorian era, increasingly we have to distinguish between whose ambition a project was, and whose effort saw its realization -- and which individual happen to be the first to press-play on the peak-detection software.
- creep 9y ago
  >Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. I mean, sure, but that doesn't mean any grad student would have looked at the logs and found the pulsar patterns. Bell did. If she hadn't said anything the data may have been overlooked for years. What matter is her position on the project?