3 ms·

I think those articles are silly. If you ask random people on the street, they usually won't be able to name a lot of scientists. So male and female scientists

I think those articles are silly. If you ask random people on the street, they usually won't be able to name a lot of scientists. So male and female scientists tend to be forgotten. Also, I'm sure Marie Curie would also be in the list of the unforgotten ones - the research they did was a Google search??? Einstein is famous not only for his physics, but also because of the circumstances, overthrowing the whole established world of physics, all the while not even getting tenure in academia but working in the patent office instead. Darwin, Newton - sorry, most female scientists are not Darwins or Newtons, and neither are most male scientists. And a lot of the supposedly forgotten women actually received Nobel prices, had chemical elements named after them, became first female professors in their subject and what not. Edit: I was too lazy this time, but last time that sort of meme spread through the networks I made the effort to go to Wikipedia. I think I remember Lise Meitner - she is the one who has a chemical element named after her. Hardly "forgotten", only few people get that honor. Apparently the decision was made to leave her out of the Nobel prize to protect her against the Nazis. A decision that led to much debate over the years - but hardly the "she was forgotten and deprived of her achievements because she was a woman" that this feminist narrative wants to make out of it. If you read her Wikipedia page, she received all sorts of honors (I couldn't find the reference to the Nobel/Nazi issue, but I only skimmed it right now). Maybe Rosalind Franklin wasn't included in the Nobel prize because only living people get the Nobel?

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
I have to agree. All the talk about STEM eating the world in mind, the fact remains that the vast majority of scientists, no matter how well distinguished, are not celebrities.
hga 11y ago
They are. Like many other people including Robert Oppenheimer, Rosalind Franklin died before she might have gotten a Nobel. Only 5-6 years after the research, 4 years before the prize was given for it; and looking at the details, I think this is particularly silly because by definition she had all the data and nonetheless failed to deduce the structure ... and she had a lot of company, including the 20th Century's preeminent chemist, Linus Pauling, who proposed a bizarre 3 strand structure. The case of Lise Meitner is particularly silly, because she would get at best equal billing with her nephew Otto Frisch; they were together in Sweden on Christmas vacation when Meitner's radiochemistry colleague Otto Hahn sent the startling data to her first, even before any of the physicists in his (Nazi) German chemistry institute (a truly prejudicial action indeed!). Together they figured out the likely mechanism and energetics (how the electrostatic force of all those protons could overpower the strong nuclear force), and Frisch was then was able to do some confirming experiments when he got back to Bohr's lab in Denmark (Meitner was not in a position to do that, her Austrian citizenship allowed her to stay in Germany until the Anschluss 1938, by which time there weren't many physics positions left in the world and she had to settle for a poor one in Sweden). And leaving both these Jewish physicists out of the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry also protected Otto Hahn; Meitner was in potential danger in neutral Sweden, Frisch not so much having gone to work in the US on the Manhattan project. I don't know how many physicists have won Nobel Chemistry prizes for physics, and I suspect Hahn's radiochemisty work was significantly more notable than Meitner and Frisch's. Per Rhodes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Hahn was manipulating just a few thousand atoms at a time in his work (!!!), and was of course willing to believe his data, no matter how far out from what everyone believe about the nucleus. Whereas Meitner and Frisch's greatest advantage was being the first physicists to get Hahn's data; but, that said, they did make sense of it, per Rhodes while on a walk out in the snow (Meitner was pretty amazing in having all the needed physical data in her head, then again there's a reason we have so much respect for the physicists of the first half of the 20th Century :-).

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

I have to agree. All the talk about STEM eating the world in mind, the fact remains that the vast majority of scientists, no matter how well distinguished, are not celebrities.

hga 11y ago

They are. Like many other people including Robert Oppenheimer, Rosalind Franklin died before she might have gotten a Nobel. Only 5-6 years after the research, 4 years before the prize was given for it; and looking at the details, I think this is particularly silly because by definition she had all the data and nonetheless failed to deduce the structure ... and she had a lot of company, including the 20th Century's preeminent chemist, Linus Pauling, who proposed a bizarre 3 strand structure. The case of Lise Meitner is particularly silly, because she would get at best equal billing with her nephew Otto Frisch; they were together in Sweden on Christmas vacation when Meitner's radiochemistry colleague Otto Hahn sent the startling data to her first, even before any of the physicists in his (Nazi) German chemistry institute (a truly prejudicial action indeed!). Together they figured out the likely mechanism and energetics (how the electrostatic force of all those protons could overpower the strong nuclear force), and Frisch was then was able to do some confirming experiments when he got back to Bohr's lab in Denmark (Meitner was not in a position to do that, her Austrian citizenship allowed her to stay in Germany until the Anschluss 1938, by which time there weren't many physics positions left in the world and she had to settle for a poor one in Sweden). And leaving both these Jewish physicists out of the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry also protected Otto Hahn; Meitner was in potential danger in neutral Sweden, Frisch not so much having gone to work in the US on the Manhattan project. I don't know how many physicists have won Nobel Chemistry prizes for physics, and I suspect Hahn's radiochemisty work was significantly more notable than Meitner and Frisch's. Per Rhodes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Hahn was manipulating just a few thousand atoms at a time in his work (!!!), and was of course willing to believe his data, no matter how far out from what everyone believe about the nucleus. Whereas Meitner and Frisch's greatest advantage was being the first physicists to get Hahn's data; but, that said, they did make sense of it, per Rhodes while on a walk out in the snow (Meitner was pretty amazing in having all the needed physical data in her head, then again there's a reason we have so much respect for the physicists of the first half of the 20th Century :-).