C'est la vie. Else Henry Cavendish would be accredited with Ohm's Law, Dalton's Law of Partial Pressues, Richter's Law of Reciprocal Proportions, Charles's Laws of Gases, the principles of electrical conductivity, kelivins tidal friction on earths rotation, Larmor's local atmospheric cooling etc...

There must be at least 100 people in the history of science that have been credited with the discovery when really they where just the first to make themselves heard (or the first to be listened to anyway). Newton was one of the only to claim he walked on the shoulders of giants when he in fact was a giant himself.

Of course the real giants like him are vaguely discernable to us now in terms where we start to realise that if they hadn't existed we may still now be dealing with the same problem they where working on. Special Relativity would have come along within a decade of Einsteins paper. General Relativity could well still be eluding us now if it weren't for Einstein. And thats quite a thought!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/05/2005 06:00PM by Simon.