The Balto/Togo theory of scientific development

Transistors were invented by Lilienfeld, yet everyone knows about the work of Bardeen et al. at Bell Labs. Einstein in relativity is the Balto of Lorentz-Poincare, which is why his Nobel prize mentioned the photoelectric effect and not relativity.

Simple formulas of scientific credit tend to stick better; the path of scientific progress is usually anything but. This is ok. The main thing is the knowledge itself, not who came up with it after all.

And yet it is very frustrating!

Does this mean no more awards? Like, will the Nobel prize always go "to the institution" that made the discovery? Should biographies be titled POTUS: Period X-Y?

You see what I mean? Part of why we attach credit to people, is because people are inherently interesting. Institutions are inherently boring, and supposed to be. Storytelling is maybe not as important as the actual achievement, but it's not nothing either. No child will ever want to grow up to be a nameless crank of the system.

Certainly those people worked with a groundswell, but it took their extreme individual interests (or lack thereof) to determine those big outcomes.

I think this is generally true across congress too -- stuff that just happens to have a powerful champion goes far, other equally popular issues languish. My wife works in hospice policy and the selection of members who just happen to have had a good (or bad!) experience with a family member in hospice really changes which bills happen.

Your mention of the Newton-Ortega distinction is the first I've heard of it by those names, so I'm not entirely familiar with its scope, but in reading the Wikipedia entry it seems to assume the contributions of the scientists in question are somehow known, and it's a matter of "does science progress with lots of little contributions or a few big contributions?"

You can turn this on its head though, and suggest that "contribution" really means "discussion in the literature" which is a property of the citers and not the cited. So, if say, a Newton comes along and has a brilliant discovery, but no one understands it or it goes into the wrong outlet and isn't read, then there will be no impact. Conversely, though, if something comes along and there's a rush of recognition of a concept, and someone publishes it first, is that because this "big innovation" was associated with that first publisher, or because the readers all had the same collective idea, and they're just citing the first to goal?

The issue is that scientific development is not actually a property of the discoverer -- the discovery is necessary but not sufficient -- and the "size" of a discovery and who makes that discovery aren't really the same thing either.

I think that e.g., (1) finding that science progresses in big leaps rather than small steps, and that (2) there is a "first post" phenomenon doesn't mean that the big leaps are necessarily due to the first poster.

My personal experience is that all of this bibliometric research is a little distorted because so much rapid change in process has happened even in the last 20 years, and much of what actually happens in science and scientific credit is much more complex than bibliometric models allow. It's difficult to study big versus small contributions accurately when political maneuvering and social dynamics is such a big part of what happens.

It's interesting to think about, in any event.

My takeway is not that Togo is a better choice for the hero than Balto, it's that there is no correct choice. Balto, Togo, and a lot of other dogs were part of a group effort. Balto became the mascot. But humans need a simple story, so they confuse a mascot with a hero.

America is named like that because someone named Amerigo claimed columbus was wrong in thinking he was in India. People had to name it something, so they shortened 'Amerigo's continent' to America. Was he worthy to name a whole continent? Probably not, but still he has a continent named after him.