Volume 30, Number 15 · October 13, 1983
Unholy Science
By David Joravsky
Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science
by William Broad, by Nicholas Wade
Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 256 pp., $14.95; $6.95 (paper)
Learned audiences smile happily when they hear the story of Einstein's defiant response to Kaufmann. Walter Kaufmann was a professor of physics who had been measuring the relation between charge and mass in electrons when Einstein, a twenty-six-year-old employee of the Swiss patent office, published the special theory of relativity. Kaufmann declared the theory to be incompatible with his experimental findings. So much the worse for your ephemeral findings, Einstein replied—and for the limited theoretical vision that informs them. And then the happy ending: other experimenters produced findings that suited Einstein's theory.
Review, 3252 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |