Re: When good scientists go bad?
Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2023 4:51 pm
Not a Nobel Laureate by a long way but Eric Laithwaite comes to mind. Eric went certifiably bonkers later in his career with beliefs about gyroscopes, where his mathematical treatment was just wrong, he dropped a minus sign giving values that added instead of subtracting to zero, thus yielding a fallacious net force. This was pointed out to him but yet he continued to believe.
Then he had strange ideas about moths, arguing that their antennas were Yagi arrays in the infra red, they're not.
And it is not as if his electrical work was flawless either. He wrote a quite astounding article for a niche and now defunct publication called 'Electronics in Education' intended both for teachers and pupils. In the article he argued that superconductivity was useless because you could never get a current to flow in finite time, because the time constant L/R was infinite. I kid you not. Of course he should have considered V=L di/dt.
Laithwaite was an outstanding presenter, he made a good career promoting the linear electric motor and was often to be found on science programmes on the BBC. I think having had his ego stoked by these early successes, it all went to his head and he believed that everything he said was right.
I think this is the root cause of many of the example Nobel laureates cited.
Then he had strange ideas about moths, arguing that their antennas were Yagi arrays in the infra red, they're not.
And it is not as if his electrical work was flawless either. He wrote a quite astounding article for a niche and now defunct publication called 'Electronics in Education' intended both for teachers and pupils. In the article he argued that superconductivity was useless because you could never get a current to flow in finite time, because the time constant L/R was infinite. I kid you not. Of course he should have considered V=L di/dt.
Laithwaite was an outstanding presenter, he made a good career promoting the linear electric motor and was often to be found on science programmes on the BBC. I think having had his ego stoked by these early successes, it all went to his head and he believed that everything he said was right.
I think this is the root cause of many of the example Nobel laureates cited.