3 ms·
Today, sure. It's famous. But as https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14645180310001603962 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1464518031000160
by btilly 4y ago
Today, sure. It's famous.
But as https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14645180310001603962 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1464518031000160... points out, the analysis technique that makes it possible to deduce the structure from the image was first developed 2 years earlier in a paper by Crick, Cochran and Vand. Note the lead author. In 1953, Francis Crick was one of a handful of people on the planet who would have made the connection. In fact he was able to make it from James Watson's description of the photograph! Rosalind Franklin can be pardoned for having failed to make the connection.
- peterfirefly 4y agoBut, but... we were always told that Franklin was an expert crystallographer and that Watson and Crick were bumbling amateurs who knew nothing, NOTHING, about crystallography!
- btilly 4y agoFranklin was. Which is why she was the one who actually produced that image. And if the problem could have been solved by deducing the crystalline structure from variant A, she would have been a much better choice. The fact that Crick was the world expert on the one obscure thing about crystallography that mattered here doesn't mean that Franklin wasn't the real expert. Every expert has gaps in their knowledge.
- dekhn 4y agoGosling produced the image, not Franklin.
- peterfirefly 4y agoUsing Fourier transforms doesn't seem obscure to me. It seems to me -- today -- that it is an obvious thing to do. It probably was back then, too, if you were a physicist who was good at math.