Authors comment on authorship commentary

Unfortunately for Philip Wyatt, sarcastic irony only works when the proffered irony is valid. I refer to his harangue that “I have found the presence of the basic building blocks of the science decreasing with each passing year. When a recent PhD in a physical science said that helium formed diatomic molecules, I knew we were in trouble!”

Wyatt might wish to consult the 1996 paper by Wieland Schöllkopf and Peter Toennies. ¹ That would be, let’s see, 16 years ago now. Schöllkopf and Toennies diffracted helium atoms and dimers from a manmade transmission diffraction grating to show, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the neutral helium dimer exists as a stable diatomic species (albeit extremely weakly bound). Given the highly quantum mechanical nature of this extraordinary dimer and the fact that it has perhaps the most weakly bound ground state of any dimer, it is of considerable fundamental interest.

In fact, the interaction between two neutral helium atoms has been a test bed for quantum mechanical calculations dating back to John Slater’s pioneering work ² in the 1920s, and the helium dimer itself has been the subject of numerous experiments since the beautiful Göttingen measurements of Schöllkopf and Toennies. Clearly, the younger generation has no monopoly on the lack of “basic building blocks.”

Contrary to the trend toward many authors on a paper, as also bemoaned by Wyatt, I point out that there were only two authors on that groundbreaking 1996 Göttingen paper.