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Lise Meitner – the forgotten woman of nuclear physics (2019)
- cafard 7y agoYet somehow I've heard of her. (Not a physicist, not especially a reader about physics.)
- perl4ever 7y agoI've heard of her, so long ago I think I've forgotten almost everything I knew. I do associate her with fission and Otto Hahn. I've come to find it unbearable to read most journalism about science or technology that I would otherwise find interesting, because it's more and more uniformly aimed at people who are completely ignorant. And that's perfectly logical, because most of the people who are interested in any given piece of knowledge don't know anything about it. Online advertising pressure has exposed a lot of deep truths about what most people like - other people knowing stuff makes people feel stupid, so why should anything ever be written that presumes knowledge? And if not, why should writers know anything?
- downerending 7y agoPutting it in a larger context, everyone is forgotten, and quite quickly. This is lamented in Ecclesiastes, for example. Along these lines, there's an excellent little documentary on Netflix right now about one of the 20th centuries worst disasters, the failure of the St. Francis Dam. You've never heard about it, because it's already been forgotten.