PITY poor Johann Loschmidt, an Austrian scientist who calculated in 1865 that the number of molecules in a mole of gas is 6 脳 1023. This figure will be familiar to anyone interested in chemistry as Avogadro鈥檚 number.
And yet the Italian chemist Amedeo Avogadro never calculated it. His name became attached to the number some years after Loschmidt鈥檚 death, when a few chemists campaigned to name it in Avogadro鈥檚 honour. The history of science is littered with such injustices over the credit taken for discoveries, so much so that historians of science have taken to categorising the slights.
鈥淭he history of science is littered with injustices鈥�
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The case of Loschmidt is a prime example of the zeroth theorem, which states that a discovery, rule or insight named after an individual often does not originate with that person. Others include the Dirac delta function, a mathematical trick used by engineer Oliver Heaviside 30 years before the English physicist Paul Dirac; the Lorentz gauge condition, an electromagnetic effect discovered by Ludvig Lorenz almost 40 years before Hendrik Lorentz published it in 1904; and Olber鈥檚 paradox, that the night sky is dark even though the endless succession of stars in an infinite universe should fill the entire sky. German astronomer Heinrich Olber discussed it in 1823, but it was well known to Johannes Kepler more than 200 years before.
Another class of injustice results from the Matthew effect, by which eminent scientists get more credit for discoveries than lesser-known ones. The name comes from a passage in the Bible from the gospel according to Matthew: 鈥淔or unto every one that hath shall be given鈥� but from him that hath not shall be taken away.鈥�
Consider, for instance, the career of Albert Schatz, who isolated the antibiotic streptomycin in 1943 only to see his supervisor Selman Waksman win a Nobel prize for the discovery in 1952. The effect may also have been at work when the British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a postgraduate in the 1960s. It was her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, who received the controversial Nobel prize in 1974. Bell鈥檚 case might be more accurately attributed to the Matilda effect, however, which describes how the work of women in science is often neglected (named after 19th-century feminist Matilda Gage).
Several campaigns have sprung up to right the injustices of the zeroth theorem. Some physicists already refer to the Lorenz gauge condition, and Avogadro has been knocked off his perch in Germany, where 6 脳 1023 is called the Loschmidt number.
Clearly, historians have a new effect to study, as the gospel according to Luke appears to have anticipated: 鈥淔or whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.鈥� The Luke effect, anyone?