"What was his Name Again?"

It is a famous story (ok, it’s famous in the physics world) how Penzias and Wilson, while working at AT&T, and not doing anything to do with physics, stumbled upon the background radiation of the universe. Meanwhile, just 60 km away, astrophysicists at Princeton had predicted that very background radiation but hadn’t found it yet. 14 years later, Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize. For accidentally finding something.

 

The story usually ends there. Little is said about the Princeton guys who had predicted it got nothing. Even though they had predicted it.

 

If you’re wondering how the Princeton guys felt about all this, look no further than the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory. Sheldon and his wife Amy come up with a theory they call the Super-Asymmetry Theory. Being theorists, they need others to devise and perform the experiments to confirm their theory. As luck would have it, a bunch of physicists named Pemberton and Campbell find experimental confirmation of Sheldon and Amy’s theory. When they all meet up, here is how the conversation goes:

Sheldon: “Listen, we just published a few months ago. How did you have time to design an experiment?”

Pemberton & Campbell: “We didn't. This whole thing is actually a gigantic accident. Yeah, we've been working with kaons, and our data made absolutely no sense. A few weeks ago, someone told us about your paper, and we realized that our failed experiment confirmed your theory.”

Sheldon: “(stammers) So you weren't even thinking about super-asymmetry?”

Campbell: “Thinking about it? (chuckles) We don't even understand it.”

And then comes the punch line:

Pemberton: “And now look at the four of us, changing the face of physics!”

 

Later, Sheldon is venting to his friends about the unfairness of it all:

“Can you believe this? Doctors Pemberton and Campbell have been doing a press tour trying to take credit for super-asymmetry. They didn't even know what they were finding.”

One of his friends tries being supportive:

“So what? I mean, no one's gonna give them credit for accidentally discovering something.”

His friend Wolowitz though decides to have some fun:

“Yeah, who remembers the guy who was trying to find India and discovered America instead? What was his name again? (chuckles)”

 

What can I say? Life’s like that: the Penzias’s, Wilson’s and Columbus’s of the world get the glory. Just because they stumbled on something accidentally…

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