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Great moments of IRONY in science

kittynh

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In what was perhaps one of the greatest moments or irony in science, British physicist, Fred Hoyle, disparagingly refers to a theory of the beginning of the universe as the "Big Bang" on a BBC radio program in 1948. Hoyle is an ardent supporter of the Steady State Theory. The name sticks.

Any other moments of irony in science?
 
This isn’t really ironic, but it’s reminiscent of the Hoyle story.

It was John Wheeler who coined the term “black hole.” This turned out to be extremely upsetting to the French, since the phrase translated into a rather rude way of referring to a particular region of the female anatomy.

Wheeler later went on to describe a certain property of black holes -- their lack of distinguishing properties, actually -- by using the phrase, “black holes have no hair.”

No one's quite sure if he did this maliciously, but as you might imagine, it did not endear him to the already embarrassed French.
 
If we class mathematics as a science like Gregory Chaitin does then here.
It turns out Newton wasn't the obly important opponent that Leibniz had had.
The satirical novel candide by voltaire, which was made a musical comdery when I was a child, is actually a caricature of Leibniz. Voltaire was Leibniz's implacable opponent, and a terrific Newton booster- his mistress La Marquise du Chatelet translated Newton's Principia into French. Voltaire was against one and in favor of the other, not based on an understanding of their work, but simple because Leibniz constantly mentions God, whereas Newton's work seems to fit in perfectly with an atheist, mechanisitic worldview.
Poor Voltaire- if he had read Newton's private papers, he would realised that he had backed the wrong man! Newton's belifes were primitive and literal-Newton computed the age of the world based on the Bible. Whereas Leibniz was never seen to enter a church, and his notion of God was sophisticated and subtle.
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Gregory Chaitin Metamaths

This made me laugh for ages. Voltaire was a idiot, however philosophy is for science rejects:duck:

P.S. Only kidding about the philosophy science rejects comment. I would quote Leizbiz about philosophy, however lets hear Einstein's view on philosophy
The man of science is a poor philosopher.
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How about Millikan's series of experiments intended to prove that Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect was wrong, which actually ended up providing the proof that it was correct?

Of course, this isn't so much irony as science working as it is supposed to.
 
How about Millikan's series of experiments intended to prove that Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect was wrong, which actually ended up providing the proof that it was correct?
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Reversing the situation, Einstein and other coming up with the EPR effect to prove quantum mechanics wrong, which actually proved it right(well more correct).

Of course, this isn't so much irony as science working as it is supposed to.
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You raised a good point, is their irony in science?
 
Marie Curie, killed by the discovery that won her a Nobel prize.

Now that's ironic!
 
Marie Curie, killed by the discovery that won her a Nobel prize.
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Well, thats not a bad thing. Many people have died from radiation poisoning, however she got the nobel prize for it. Plus thats the only woman scientist I can think off, well decent scientist.
 
becomingagodo said:
...Plus thats the only woman scientist I can think off, well decent scientist.
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Wasn't Rosalind Franklin a decent scientist?

OT: I don't really think you can have true irony in science. Some of the more
egregiously inaccurate predictions of some scientists maybe come closest (eg.
the likes of J.J. Thompson saying that physics has gone as far as it can, or
whoever it was who said that "In the future, computers may weigh no more
than 1 and a half tons")
 
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kittynh said:
In what was perhaps one of the greatest moments or irony in science, British physicist, Fred Hoyle, disparagingly refers to a theory of the beginning of the universe as the "Big Bang" on a BBC radio program in 1948. Hoyle is an ardent supporter of the Steady State Theory. The name sticks.

Any other moments of irony in science?
Click to expand...

After a huge, international contest in 1993 to rename "The Big Bang Theory" to something more appropriate, the winning name was "The Big Bang Theory".
 
becomingagodo said:
Well, thats not a bad thing. Many people have died from radiation poisoning, however she got the nobel prize for it. Plus thats the only woman scientist I can think off, well decent scientist.
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Someone as interested as you are in the history of mathematics should know at least of some women mathematicians. Haven't you heard of Emmy Noether, for example?

Emmy Nother is probably the most important unknown mathematician (unkown by the general public, that is). The most important unkown physicists is maybe Gibbs.

TX50 said:
Some of the more
egregiously inaccurate predictions of some scientists maybe come closest (eg.
the likes of J.J. Thompson saying that physics has gone as far as it can, or
whoever it was who said that "In the future, computers may weigh no more
than 1 and a half tons")
Click to expand...
Nobody beats Lord Kelvin in this kind of quotes:
  • "X-rays will prove to be a hoax."
  • "I accept no theory of gravitation. Present science has no right to attempt to explain gravitation. We know nothing about it. We simply know NOTHING about it."
  • "Quaternions came from Hamilton [...]and [...] have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way"
  • [The vector] "has never been of the slightest use to any creature."
  • "Radio has no future."
  • "I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible."

More in the spirit of the OP, I can think of a few examples, maybe I'll write some of them later. One that comes to mind is Einstein's adventures with the cosmological constant. Einstein's theory of gravitation revolved around the following formula

[latex]\footnotesize
\[
R_{\mu\nu} -\frac12 R g_{\mu\nu} = 8\pi T_{\mu\nu}
\]
[/latex]

Working with it, he realised that it implied an expanding or contracting universe, which he thought was absurd. So he tinkered with his formula and added an extra term. This extra term was perfectly reasonable (it satisfied all the postulates) but unnecessary, so it was not considered at first. He called it cosmological constant:

[latex]\footnotesize
\[
R_{\mu\nu} -\frac12 R g_{\mu\nu} - \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} = 8\pi T_{\mu\nu}
\]
[/latex]

A very precise negative value for Lambda allowed him to cancel the effect of the expansion and achieve a static universe. He thus missed the opportunity of predicting the expansion of the universe from his desk, which would have been a remarkable prediction indeed. After Hubble's observations he claimed that the cosmological constant was the 'greatest blunder of his life'. Lambda was discarded (or set to zero).

But many decades later, in the last years of the 20th century, physicists realised that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, not deccelerating as it should, given Einstein's equation. The simplest way to account for this (and the one we still use) was to reintroduce the very same cosmological constant that Einstein had first thought of and then discarded (though with a different value).
 
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wollery said:
Marie Curie, killed by the discovery that won her a Nobel prize.

Now that's ironic!
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Many chemists and physicists have had their lives shortened by their discoveries- the fluorine martyrs, for example.

I don't think it's so much ironic as it is alannic.
 
Irony in science?

How about Hans Christian Oersted?

Oersted had a kind of "travelling science show" where he gave lectures in various cities and demonstrated cute tricks with (then primitive) electric gizmos and magnets. Near the end of every lecture, he would set up a bar magnet on a pinion so that it could freely spin, and position it inside a coil of wire so that it was perpendicular to the coil. He then ran Direct Current through the coil, which produced no noticeable effect on the magnet. "And therefore," he inevitably concluded, "Electricity and magnetism aren't related."

Well ... after one of these lectures, a spectator came up to Oersted and said, "I notice that in each of these shows, you demonstrate the lack of any connection between electricity and magnetism by starting out with the magnet perpendicular to the coil of wire. What if you were to start out with the magnet parallel to the coil of wire?" Oersted tried this, and to his amazement, the magnet rotated on its own -- quite noticeably -- when direct current was applied to the coil.

What's ironic about this? Well:

Today, we call the effect of a coil of wire rotating a bar magnet "The Oersted Effect."
 
TX50 said:
Wasn't Rosalind Franklin a decent scientist?

OT: I don't really think you can have true irony in science. Some of the more
egregiously inaccurate predictions of some scientists maybe come closest (eg.
the likes of J.J. Thompson saying that physics has gone as far as it can, or
whoever it was who said that "In the future, computers may weigh no more
than 1 and a half tons")
Click to expand...

Perhaps you are thinking of the brilliant Prof. John Frink, inventor of the Frinkiac 7, who predicted that in 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

Michael
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
After a huge, international contest in 1993 to rename "The Big Bang Theory" to something more appropriate, the winning name was "The Big Bang Theory".
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well my preschoolers get names mixed up a lot. Yeah, in preschool we study the Big Bang! It's the perfect name for preschoolers and they get really it.

But they forget the real name, so they call it

"The REALLY big explodiun" (explosion is hard to say at age 3)

"The Big big big big big big big big ....BANG!"


"that time we got blown up so we could form"

and mainly, when they forget the name they go to sound effects like


"KABOOM!!!" and jump around.

the only question I've not been able to answer was from one 4 year old that asked,

"does this mean God has dynamite?"

(preschoolers for some reason know a lot about dynamite. I blame Wiley Coyote)
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
After a huge, international contest in 1993 to rename "The Big Bang Theory" to something more appropriate, the winning name was "The Big Bang Theory".
Click to expand...

Personally, I prefer "The Horrendous Space Kablooie". I think we should let cartoonists name more things.
 
becomingagodo said:
Well, thats not a bad thing. Many people have died from radiation poisoning, however she got the nobel prize for it. Plus thats the only woman scientist I can think off, well decent scientist.
Click to expand...

TX50 said:
Wasn't Rosalind Franklin a decent scientist?
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Yep. The only reason she never recieved a Nobel Prize for her work is because they're not awarded posthumously, and she died very young.

Interestingly enough, Watson plays like Franklin was only a technician in The Double Helix, because she didn't have a degree. But, she attended Cambridge, which didn't award degrees to women at the time.
 
sthomson said:
Interestingly enough, Watson plays like Franklin was only a technician in The Double Helix, because she didn't have a degree. But, she attended Cambridge, which didn't award degrees to women at the time.
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In the 1953 Nature Paper in which Crick and Watson published the structure, she is acknowledged as "Dr. R. E. Franklin".

As far as the Nobel Prize is concerned, if she had still been alive there would have been the problem that a prize cannot be shared between more than three people.
 
Mojo said:
As far as the Nobel Prize is concerned, if she had still been alive there would have been the problem that a prize cannot be shared between more than three people.
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Entire organizations have won Nobel Peace prizes in the past (for example, Doctors Without Borders), although I can't find any information as to whether a scientific prize has been awarded to a whole lab before.
 
becomingagodo said:
Reversing the situation, Einstein and other coming up with the EPR effect to prove quantum mechanics wrong, which actually proved it right(well more correct).
Click to expand...


I think that's the best example so far. Einstein (along with Podolsky and Rosen) came up with the EPR paradox because they didn't like the randomness inherent to quantum mechanics and they also didn't like "spooky action at a distance".

Then John Bell comes along, takes the EPR paradox, tweaks it a bit, and shows that if quantum mechanics agrees with experiments (which it does), you MUST accept one of the following:

- Nature is inherently random
- Nature is non-local (i.e. "spooky action at a distance")
 
Poisson

Poisson was against the notion that light was a wave. "By my calculations," he said (paraphrasing), "If light were really a wave, then every time an object casts a shadow, there would be a little bright spot in the middle of the shadow! Preposterous."

Later, it was discovered that there really IS a tiny little bright spot in the middle of a shadow, if the rays striking the object are parallel. Poisson was dead wrong, and light really was a wave.

Today, this tiny bright spot is called ... the Poisson spot.
 
Reminds me of Heaviside. He invents what is now known as the Laplace transform and could only get his papers printed in todays equivalent of Popular Mechanics. His response to the fact that he couldn't create the proofs to get the paper published in journals:
Why should I refuse a good dinner simply because I don't understand the digestive processes involved?
 
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wow! Now I just read that light is both a wave and a particle.

I was an art major and I'm making up for lost time.
 
well this is kind of happy, the man who invented the first practical sulfur medication ended up giving it to his daughter and saved her arm from being amputated. Problem was, she ended up a bright red. Forever. So, she kept her arm, and never needed to use a tanning booth.
 
Charles Darwin, in his On the Origin of Species, hardly talked about the origin of species (i.e. speciation) at all.
 
My geometry class last quarter had quite a bit of history in it, focusing mainly on the problems with Euclid's Fifth Axiom.

One of my favorite amusing bits is that Saccheri attempted to construct a rectangle using two right angles as the base and two congruent legs. Now, the line at the top is parallel to the line at the base,(I'm saying this weird, imagine a topless rectangle) are the summit angles obtuse, right, or acute? He disproved the obtuse hypothesis, but try as he might, he could not prove that the summit angles were not acute. In the end, he dismissed the, "inimical acute angle hypothesis," since it was contrary to intuition.

In short: Saccheri found hyperbolic geometry and basically dismissed it for being weird.

Tom Lehrer has the song Lobachevsky in which a mathematician divulges the great secret to math that Lobachevsky taught him:

...Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".
...
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Janos Bolyai was a contemporary of Gauss. His father, Farkas, wrote a text on geometry, and Janos had written an appendix about his work in non-Euclidean geometry, specifically, hyperbolic. Farkas sent a copy to Gauss, who responded warmly but basically said, Cool, but I found that too, I just never published it." (Gauss, having already done everything, published rather little since he wanted his published works to be complete. Funny, since I recall hearing at least his first proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra was wrong.) Janos reportedly though Gauss was trying to steal his work.

Gauss later backed Lobachevsky and his work on hyperbolic geometry and it's Lobachevsky who loans his name to the geometry...

As bad as that looks, as I understand it, it does turn out that Bolyai and Lobachevsky both came up with hyperbolic geometry on their own, around the same time.

Perhaps, Lehrer's song is Bolyai's revenge from beyond....:D
 
Taffer said:
Charles Darwin, in his On the Origin of Species, hardly talked about the origin of species (i.e. speciation) at all.
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Interestingly, he does mention the possibility of punctuated equilibrium in his book, a concept usually ascribed to Stephen J. Gould. (Gould did provide the mechanism, however.)
 
Another ironic fact about Uncle Chuck Darwin. He always felt that his book on worms on the Formation of Vegetable Moulds... was a far more significant book than On the Origin of Species...
 
becomingagodo said:
Well, thats not a bad thing. Many people have died from radiation poisoning
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Yes, but how many who got radiation poisoning got it from carrying around a vial of radium in their breast pocket, inches from their heart?

Also, does it count as irony that "Madam Curie" is an anagram for "Came Radium"?
 
LostAngeles said:
Tom Lehrer has the song Lobachevsky in which a mathematician divulges the great secret to math that Lobachevsky taught him:....:D
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" One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame , and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was his name."
And Freud sucked cigars.
 
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Jeff Corey said:
" One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame , and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was his name."
And Freud sucked cigars.
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Sounds like Lehrer plagiarized an old English music hall song:

"It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor wot gets the blame
It's the rich wot gets the pleasure
Ain't it all a bloomin' shame?"
 
Ryan O'Dine said:
This isn’t really ironic, but it’s reminiscent of the Hoyle story.

It was John Wheeler who coined the term “black hole.” This turned out to be extremely upsetting to the French, since the phrase translated into a rather rude way of referring to a particular region of the female anatomy.

Wheeler later went on to describe a certain property of black holes -- their lack of distinguishing properties, actually -- by using the phrase, “black holes have no hair.”

No one's quite sure if he did this maliciously, but as you might imagine, it did not endear him to the already embarrassed French.
Click to expand...

The
already embarrassed French
Click to expand...
?

Must be a different part of French society.
 
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