Bad luck in attempts to make scientific discoveries

JAN 01, 1967

People who get prizes are usually expected to tell the assembled dinner guests about the research that won them recognition. The recipient of the Fifth Fritz London Award chose instead to describe how he had just missed making a number of very important discoveries.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3034140

C. J. Gorter

Henry A. Boorse

WHEN THE Committee for the Fifth Fritz London Award asked me to give my recipient’s address a somewhat personal nature, I hesitated about how to combine the modest review that I could give of certain recent advances made in the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory with this request. Not finding a satisfactory solution, I remembered that from time to time I am asked why I have just missed making certain discoveries. Since I have received a favorable reaction from the committee chairman, Dean Boorse, to my enquiry about whether it would be admissible to drop all discussion of recent work and to speak only on apparent bad luck in my attempts to make certain scientific discoveries, I shall do so in the hope of satisfying once and for all those who have asked or would like to ask me about these matters. I shall talk mainly on attempts to observe nuclear and electron magnetic resonances, gamma anisotropy after orienting atomic nuclei, anisotropy of beta emission, and flux quantization in superconductors.

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More about the authors

C. J. Gorter, Director, Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory.

Henry A. Boorse, Barnard College, Columbia University.