Journal of Theoretics - Recommended Links

The Unsung Heroes of Science

General Website Links:

• National Inventors Hall of Fame: info about important inventors since 1790.

• Non-Academics Get Nobel Cold Shoulder:  a WSJ letter by Dr. Siepmann about Nobel snubs of non-academic scientists and a WSJ article about the Nobel snub of Robert Noyce in the article "The Missing Nobelist". 

Scientists though relatively unknown, contributed much (alphabetical listing):

• Arp, Halton C.:  His landmark compilation of peculiar galaxies led him to challenge the fundamental assumption of modern cosmology, that redshift is a uniform indicator of distance.

• Avery, Oswald T.: physician who discovered and proved that genetic material was made of DNA.

• Curtiss, Larry:  inventor of the modern optical fiber.

• Farnsworth, Philo Taylor:  the inventor of the components that made television possible.

• Gould, Gordon: a series of articles about the inventor of the laser who was scorned by academia and the Nobel Committee because he lacked a completed PhD.  He finally got his patents about 20 years later.

• Gross, Al:  the inventor of the walkie-talkie, CB radio, portable pager, and cordless telephone.  He is also the pioneer of today's wireless personal communications revolution.

• Harrison, John:  John Harrison was a working class joiner from Lincolnshire with little formal education who solved the greatest problem of his time...that of determining longitude with the invention of the watch.

• Miller, Dayton: looks at Miller's ether-drift experiments how they were probably more significant than the more famous work of Michelson & Morley.

• Tesla, Nikola: though he was the greatest inventor/engineer of the last century, the majority of enginneering students do not know who he is. Websites: Nikola Tesla--Erased at the Smithsonian , Nikola Tesla Museum (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) , Tesla's Patents .

• Velikovsky, Immanuel: Russian born theorist who in the 1940's developed theories of previous cataclysms of which the most famous was that Venus was a purged portion of Jupiter.  Bizarre as this seemed to be, his predictions of Venus were later confirmed in 1962 by Mariner 2 (see "Neptune, Velikovsky, and the Name of the Game" by Gingerich in the Sept. 1996 issue of Scientific American). A Velikovsky archive is available at: http://www.varchive.org.