Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Perpetual Motion Machine?

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, Jonathan King wrote:

> Hmm, I just looked, and the wikipedia article on this includes other 
> interesting things I didn't know about Chandrasekhar and how his work 
> was received.  (Which was derisively by the English scientific 
> establishment of his time, so he moved to the US.)
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit


That is interesting.  Here is the quote:

  When Chandrasekhar eventually presented this work in a Royal Society
  meeting in 1935, it was ridiculed and put down by Arthur Eddington.
  Particularly harsh on the young physicist was the fact that the senior
  English and European physicists were not willing to openly support his
  work although many of them approved of it privately. This embittered him
  and eventually led to his moving to the United States where he remained
  at the University of Chicago for the rest of his career. The drama
  associated with this episode has now been brought out as a novel "Empire
  of the Stars" by Arthur I. Miller. Some suggest that the autocracy of
  Eddington may have delayed the progress of astrophysics by 1 or 2
  decades.

A young RA Fisher had a similar problem with the senior Karl Pearson.  In 
Wikipedia:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Pearson

  In the 1930s he had a protracted feud with R.A. Fisher over a
  statistical disagreement, which continued after his death through his
  son.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher

  With the end of the war he went looking for a new job, and was offered
  one at the famed Galton Laboratory by Karl Pearson. Because he saw the
  developing rivalry with Pearson as a professional obstacle, however, he
  accepted instead a temporary job as a statistician with a small
  agricultural station in the country in 1919.

There is some more here:

http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/journals/brit_j_phil_sci/198306_Baird_Fisher-Pearson_chi-square_debate.pdf

It is interesting to me that the Pearsons could be so persistent when they 
were so obviously wrong (from our perspective today anyway).

Mike

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