There was a recent post here that suggested that Einstein's first wife was much more involved in doing the science for which he became famous than she was given credit for. They wrote the papers together and published under his name because that was the thing that had some hope of working.
It took two attempts to come up with proof of his hypothesis and these two attempts happened years apart. The first attempt to photograph the sun during a total eclipse occurred during World War I -- known as The Great War at the time -- and one of the teams was arrested. The other failed to get good photos due to bad weather.
Although there are two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses most years, total eclipses aren't common and occur several years apart. IIRC, there were six teams trying to get photographs the second time and only one (or maybe two) succeeded). There was no war on but weather was again a factor.
Einstein himself was not on any of the teams that took the photos that were seen as proof of his theory.
Scientific breakthroughs are frequently a team effort while one person takes the lion's share of the credit and ends up with the big name recognition. And I sometimes wonder how often it's kind of like Pinky and The Brain where the real genius of the show is actually Pinky but he never gets any credit.
> And I sometimes wonder how often it's kind of like Pinky and The Brain where the real genius of the show is actually Pinky but he never gets any credit.
I found your comment generally thoughtful and interesting, but couldn't let this part stand. The P and the B episodes I remember were all about Pinky messing up Brain's plans. Is this true or do I have a serious case of the Piaget effect??
My recollection is that Pinky saves Brain's ass on a regular basis and it goes completely unnoticed. Yes, he routinely "messes up Brain's plans" but that's in part because Brain's plans are almost always idiotic and Pinky prevents him from doing what he wanted to do, much like as a mom I often interfered with first-born child's attempts to climb on the oven door to check out what I was cooking on the stove top and similar shenanigans.
I'm sure that as a toddler my oldest son thought I was an idiot and a meanie face who spent all my time thwarting his brilliant plans. (I know for a fact he read late in part because when I bought some reading program and would go through the exercises with him, he was looking at me and thinking stuff along the lines of "I already told you ten times that is the letter P. How much repetition do you need to remember it? God!")
Edit: I will add that the lyrics to the theme song include the line "One is a genius, the other's insane" and fail to specify which is which, leaving room for people to either accept the obvious interpretation that Brain is the genius or to go with the less obvious interpretation that Pinky is the real genius and Brain is merely an insane megalomaniac.
It took two attempts to come up with proof of his hypothesis and these two attempts happened years apart. The first attempt to photograph the sun during a total eclipse occurred during World War I -- known as The Great War at the time -- and one of the teams was arrested. The other failed to get good photos due to bad weather.
Although there are two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses most years, total eclipses aren't common and occur several years apart. IIRC, there were six teams trying to get photographs the second time and only one (or maybe two) succeeded). There was no war on but weather was again a factor.
Einstein himself was not on any of the teams that took the photos that were seen as proof of his theory.
Scientific breakthroughs are frequently a team effort while one person takes the lion's share of the credit and ends up with the big name recognition. And I sometimes wonder how often it's kind of like Pinky and The Brain where the real genius of the show is actually Pinky but he never gets any credit.