It's as futile to try to un-learn students who have learned incorrectly as it is to talk politics to the misinformed. One aspiring physicist signed off in disgust after I told him a 14th century French scholar, Nicole Oresme, had correctly described all objects as falling uniformly in vacuum three hundred years before Galileo, and that Galileo had correctly quantified the acceleration of gravity over fifty years before Newton, and that Newton and Leibniz founded Differential Calculus using work done by obscure mathematicians in the previous century, and that the basis of their Integral Calculus was presented two thousand years before them all. And yet, it's true.

This led me to look at other scientific mis-attributions, or at least over-accreditations, and I ran across Stigler's Law, which he published in 1980.

"No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

A number of them are listed at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examp...Stigler%27s_law

Maybe I'll add a couple, when I find time to adequately research them. If you are inclined to correctly identify contributions made by meditation and genius rather than populist labels, this can be very interesting study. Well, hope you enjoy the thought

Hmmm, that's like trying to un-learn folks that George Washington was NOT America's first President. Rather, it was John Hanson.

That's kinda' misleading isn't it Marv? He was the first president of the United States Congress Assembled under the Articles of Confederation. (i think that's what it was called) Anyway since George Washington was the first president under the current constitution he is the first president of the current USA - instead of the independant states as they were considered under the confederacy... But that's also misleading because he was the third or fourth presiding officer over the congress of the united states - but that job now would be the VP's job, and there was no established executive branch at the time.

I don't know all of it, I know it's a bit confusing in terms of timelines, the constitution, and the technical coining of President as commander and chief...

Chubby, note that I was careful to use that ubiquitous term, "America's". But that's okay, you're forgiven.

It's a good bar bet, but you better go armed 'cause a lot of folks never bothered with "American" History........mostly extreme left liberals.......

A cousin to this topic might be from history, myth, social sciences and even music. Columbus "discovering" America, whites are responsible for slavery (who invented slavery? Who sold the black captives to the white exploiters.......... white African's?) - Martin Luther's reformation (I am Lutheran and admire his guts and theology) was built on centuries of thinkers - so and so invented a "new" type of music but when you read these people's biographies they always tell you that they stole the sound, Europeans slaughtered all the Indians (95% were killed by disease and the American Indian was screwed the minute they came in contact with us - no society survives 50% rapid loss much less 95%) and so on.

I have no particular problem with Stigler's law as it appears to be buried in human nature. It is only a problem when someone tries to use the fact that the law is in play to overplay the political or cultural consequences and motivations behind the law's outcomes. Someone is going to get credit and it nearly always is the person who popularized the phenomenon regardless of how much, in most case, their very real talent and contribution to the discovery or new interpretation was.

ET

equal algorithm - the guy who throws the second punch is the one who gets arrested/fined/sent to the office.

I agree with ET's statement:



Still there are exceptions to Stigler's Law....

"Salk vaccine", "Hubble Constant", "Newtonian telescope"....and "Stigler's Law" itself....

I do have a problem with conclusions folks make from false data, but in general I have no problem with who gets what named after whom. In science, very often the mis-attributions are more justice than not.

Einstein's Nobel Prize wasn't for E=Mc^2, it was for proving the quantum nature of light by demonstrating the photo-electric effect (photons in - electrons out). Who really cares if someone mistakenly praises him for the wrong stroke of genius? (Did you know that Einstein wasn't a very good mathematician? Did you know he actually took a really good mathematician with him to important conferences in case he needed help? Does anyone really care? But iit's true, and isn't that interesting?)

Galileo gave a mathematical basis for uniform gravitational acceleration, but used another man's optical concept, the telescope, to prove the earth wasn't the center of the universe. And paid for it. Let him have whatever credit anyone can think of. Newton accomplished so many incredible scientific feats that any one of a dozen could be ascribed to him falsely and who would care? Leibnitz and he fought over who discovered Calculus, and probably neither of them actually discovered it, but they both codified it so that today the world uses it every day, much as they brought it together and applied it to the world about us, for our amazement.

To me, Stigler's Law is mostly an amusing comment, worth thinking about mostly by those interested in both people, and science, who take pleasure in studying how the great ideas actually developed, and inspired. But, it does tend to make one careful, doesn't it?