Plagiarism in physics

Sep 15, 2021
55
10
1,535
Visit site
...and even as though I walked upon your floors I saw many statues to many gods, and many statues to many thoughts, and I found this one, one that said: "TO AN UNKNOWN THOUGHT" !!!!!

****************************************************************************

Today I was shocked to see that Newton was a plagiarist who gave no credit to Aristotle when he came up with his first law of motion. I had mentioned the old philosophical theory of plenism in my previous discussion subject about photons, so it was necessary to find out more about this and saw that it's linked to the Greek thinker's idea about Nature disliking vacuums, or "horror vacui".

In the Wikipedia entry on the latter they include the following passage of his PHYSICS (Book IV, Section 8).

"In a void, no one could say why a thing once set in motion should stop anywhere, for why should it stop here rather than there, so that a thing will either be at rest or must be moved 'ad infinitum', unless something more powerful gets in its way."

That's precisely the first law of motion.

... but that's not all. On that same passage he also anticipates the rule that division by zero is meaningless (we say "undetermined"), which I thought belonged exclusively to modern mathematics.

"(...) there is no ratio of 0 to a number, for if 4 exceeds 3 by 1, and 2 by more than 1, and 1 by still more than it exceeds 2, still there is no ratio by which it exceeds 0; for that which exceeds must be divisible into the excess plus that which is exceeded, so that will be what it exceeds 0 by plus 0."

Our explanation is quite different and embarrassingly more roundabout, but the conclusion is the same. We start by saying that, for instance ...

8 ÷ 2 = x

... which, since dividing is exactly the opposite of multiplying, means that ...

2 • x = 8

We must find a number that multiplied by 2 gives us 8, and so, as anybody will discover ...

x = 4

Now let's see what happens if you divide 8 by zero and apply the same procedure:

8 ÷ 0 = x

... means that ...

0 • x = 8

... but since we can't find any value for x that will fit there, because all numbers multiplied by zero give us zero, we say that 8 ÷ 0 is "undefined".

... but someone could say: so what if we divide zero by zero and apply the procedure? Wouldn't it work in that case, since ...

0 ÷ 0 = x

... means ...

0 • x = 0

... and ...

x = 0?

Yes, but x could also be equal to 1, or 5, or 7,524.009, or -14 ...

x = 1
x = 5
x = 7,524.009
x = -14

That x could be ANY number, and since in our modern mathematics we always want to get the same answer for a problem, whoever it is that tries to solve it, then 0 ÷ 0 is undefined, period.

... so what was explained in just one sentence two millennia ago we explain in what looks like an entire treatise. Who has been outwitted by whom???

... but that second matter was a distraction, just to show once again that "there's nothing new under the sun" (also something said a long time ago). Many years ago I had found out that infinitesimal calculus is not a recent idea either. Archimedes's "exhaustion method" anticipated it more than 2 ,000 years ago.

...but going back to what's the main topic here, some people accuse Einstein of stealing other people's ideas, including those of Poincare` ("accent aigu" on the letter e there, not "accent grave", which is somewhat like what my crazy tablet has) and Lorentz (cp. the Lorentz transformation), because he gave no due credit in his famous 1905 research paper on the special or restricted theory of relativity (not "special relativity" because what's special, or general, is the theory, not relativity), but bearing the rather misleading title "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies". He didn't bother to give a list of sources, something all credible papers are expected to have.

... so it turns out that he invented no theories: all he did was appropriate them. Newton was aware of the fact that matter and energy are interchangeable and he expressed it in his own way, thus: "Gross bodies and light are convertible into one another."

Newton, then, slyly grabbed Aristotelian lore and nobody ever told me about it --if I hadn't accidentally happened upon this, I would never have found out-- but then the same thing was done unto him, so the latter cancels out the former and he may now finally R.I.P. in Westminster Abbey.

Even the energy-mass equation was not really his own. At least another three people had had the same idea before 1905: Poincare`, Olinto de Pretto and S. Tolver Preston.

Eventually this case of plagiarism will have to be recognized by the scientific community, and the scandal will be at least as shocking as what I have just found in something written in the 4th century B.C.

Millikan, too, did it. It was his lab helper who suggested that he use oil drops, not water drops, to measure the charge of a single electron, but Millikan never told the world about it, a serious case of scientific dishonesty.

...and it was Lise Meitner, not Otto Hahn, who understood what was happening in his nuclear experiments and had to explain it all to him, but it was he who was given a Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission. All he had was the hardware. It was she who had the necessary brainpower.

A rover named after Rosalind Elsie Franklin will be sent to Mars, much too late to give the credit she deserved and for which she should have shared a Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick for the discovery of the structure of DNA.

In the Einsteinian fashion, I refuse to mention any sources, because in our time it's all on the Net, and they keep saying to us that what's not there doesn't exist.

All of the above would seem to be out of place at a website on astronomy and astronautics, but no: without the Newtonian laws of motion, rocket science would have been impossible, especially without the third one, the one about action and reaction, and there you also have the complaint about Rosalind Franklin and the device bearing her name that will fly all the way over to another planet.
 
Sep 15, 2021
55
10
1,535
Visit site
My e-mail inbox had one of those automatic Space.com messages that announce that a new comment has been added to a thread one has been following, and it was supposed to be the first one on this my new thread, but the thread had no comments, and the links were fake ones: there's no one with the user name "StearneAmenta" and there's no thread titled "Plagiarism results in physics". This is the message:
----------------------------------
StearneAmenta replied to a thread you are watching at Space.com Forums.

Plagiarism in physics

Hey thanks for the super helpful reply. I'm not sure how I missed that thread. I haven't quite mastered the search function on here. I think I'll pass with him this time around. If i want any further guideline we will contact you here -----------------------------------
... so this was not an automatic message but a deliberate message with an unknown purpose. Someone decided to have some fun and turned Holy Week into April Fools' Day, but that's all right because it led me to use the search tool at Space.com, look for threads about scientific plagiarism and discover another case.

In one thread titled "It's Official: Vera Rubin Observatory Named to Honor Dark Matter Scientist", about the LSST observatory, which was re-christened and given the name of Vera Rubin, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky's son reveals that she was a plagiarist who claimed to have invented dark matter.

His complaint is of great historical importance, so let me place all of it here:
------------------------------------
I was denied the opportunity to present my opposition to H.R. 3196 before the House and the Senate nor did I receive a response from any one of them.

If my father were alive today, he would be appalled to have his name/work associated with Vera Rubin, who attached herself in parasitic fashion to his groundbreaking work on Dark Matter, and failed to acknowledge his pioneering discovery while advancing self-promotion in conjunction with Carnegie among others.

Rubin has been a constant nuisance to my father's legacy in regard to Dark Matter and often took false credit for its discovery, crowning herself as "Discoverer of Dark Matter." The naming of LSST after Rubin, is an undeserved honor for this celebrated plagiarist.

Vera Rubin was celebrated in the press and by several institutions for her work in specific in regard to Dark Matter, my father's discovery, as well as responsible for the roughshod over my father, his memory, and credit for his original work, by falsely assigning that credit to herself in numerous incidents involving the media and even nomenclature of her lecture: “I left Vassar and Found Dark Matter.” I consider Vera Rubin a person who attached herself to my father's original work in parasitic forced credit, repeatedly advanced this unethical agenda and academic dishonesty, crowning herself as “Discoverer of Dark Matter,” the published achievement of another. Rubin's dictates of conscience revealed a failed ethical compass as she assigned herself credit for my father's methodology and that of others in the sciences in regard to the mathematical calculations in regard to the rotational speeds of galaxies, as well as claiming to be the “Discoverer of Dark Matter.” Vera Rubin was a constant unwanted barnacle that was attached to my father's discovery, Dark Matter. The advancement of bringing the gravitational phenomena of Dark Matter to light and into the modern consciousness of physicists worldwide would have regardless been unsealed from the echoes of my father's original work in 1933. Fritz Zwicky: “I consequently engaged in the application of certain simple general principles of morphological research, and in particular the method of Directed Intuition that would allow me to predict and visualize the existence of as yet unknown cosmic objects and phenomena.” Fritz Zwicky's eidolon was realized from the results of his observations published in “Die Rotverschiebung von extragalaktischen Nebeln”, Helv. Phys. Acta 6, 110-127 (1933). English translation Johannes Nicolai Meyling – Barbarina Exita Zwicky (2013). Fritz Zwicky discovered Dark Matter and coined, dunkle (kalte) Materie (cold dark matter) in his 1933 article referenced above. The Mass-Radial Acceleration Discrepancy by measuring the speeds of galaxies in the Coma Cluster originated with Fritz Zwicky, not Rubin, as using the more challenging methodology of the virial theorem, by relating the total average kinetic energy and the total average potential energy of the galaxies of the Coma Cluster. He advanced that the virial for a pair of orbiting masses is zero, and used the principle of superposition to craft the argument to a system of interacting mass points. Zwicky then used the position and velocity measurements to determine the mass of the galaxy cluster. The LSST will endeavor to discover Dark Matter and should not be renamed at all, and certainly not after Vera Rubin, who plagiarized discovery in regard to Dark Matter, without acknowledgment of its provenance and pioneer, Fritz Zwicky, and deprives rightful illumination to the Father of Dark Matter. It will highlight this interloper and celebrate this forced credit from the rightful person due, Fritz Zwicky, by memorializing the name of LSST after this faux “pioneer” and self-proclaimed “Discoverer of Dark Matter.”
 
Last edited:
Sep 15, 2021
55
10
1,535
Visit site
What appeared here unexpectedly as a box with the Space.com emblem and the first words of the present thread appears in the message, not like that but with an URL that leads here, but it includes the title of a nonexistent thread, followed by a number: "plagiarism-results-in-physics.55367" .
 
Last edited:

Latest posts