Why do the names of two past Church presidents and one current apostle appear in this month’s Physics Today?
This month of Mormon media madness marches merrily on in May’s Physics Today, a magazine of the American Institute of Physics for members of its member societies. It’s much more low key than a movie, a four-hour television program, or the umpteenth query “Could America elect a Mormon President?”, and only tangentially connected with Mormonism, but there on page 60 are the names of six Latter-day Saints. Their names but not the people; that is, what is really being mentioned are entities that have been named for Latter-day Saints, but, hey, that’s why we name things after people: so that a reminder of them endures.
Michael Fletcher Perry, great-grandson of Harvey Fletcher wrote the article “Remembering the oil-drop experiment,” and interestingly that’s what the article is about: how the participants in the experiment remembered it. From writings of Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher, Mr. Perry addresses what Fletcher’s particular contributions as a graduate student were to his advisor’s Nobel Prize winning work that first measured the charge of the electron. A bit of mythology has grown that Millikan robbed Fletcher of proper credit and even that the Nobel Prize should have been awarded jointly to Millikan and Fletcher. Mr. Perry’s article shows that this mythology exaggerates matters quite a bit. There is some conflict in their recollections as to who hit on using oil drops instead of quickly evaporating water drops. Also, Millikan took sole author credit for the first paper that reported results of the oil-drop experiment, but even that is somewhat justified by the need due to degree requirements that Fletcher had for a sole author credit for other joint work. In all of his accounts of the experiment Millikan acknowledged Fletcher amply, and Fletcher was quite satisfied with the role he was able to play in Millikan’s project.
As for those names I mentioned in the first paragraph, Perry’s source for Harvey Fletcher’s recollections is an unpublished autobiography that he wrote for his family. It can be found in the Harvey Fletcher Sr. Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Other information for the article came from the George H. Brimhall Presidential Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, and from the Harvey Fletcher Papers, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
Hey John, nice alliteration in the first sentence.
I’m always impressed when I hear how many Latter-day Saints are prominent in various scientific fields.
Someday I want to have so many nifty things written down that a university library is willing to foot the bill for the storage of all that paperwork. I think that’s the easiest and most cost-efficient way of getting your name on the end of a lot of academic papers.
I’m glad that the LDS actors in this little science drama have shown themselves to be mature and non-whiny. It’s surprising how much drama there ends out being in a field full of dusty notebooks and countless hours stuck in a dimly light lab — okay, maybe not that surprising. I’m relieved that Mr. Fletcher and by extension his great-grandson haven’t harbored a burning hatred for Mr. Millikan all these years.
Sarah, I agree. Harvey Fletcher was very classy in this matter, taking pains not to do anything that could be considered unflattering of Millikan. It appears that the two regarded one another highly.
Geoff, Harvey Fletcher returned to BYU, but following Millikan’s advice, he accepted a position at Western Electric that had been offered him each spring for six years in a row. From Mr. Perry’s article: “There [New York City] he enjoyed a distinguished career that spanned four decades, and he made great strides in the study of speech and hearing, achievements that led at his eventual appointment as director of physical research at Bell Telephone Laboratories. One scientist has described Fletcher as ‘the singular intellectual force in the development of present-day communications acoustics and telephony.’”
Geoff,
Your grandfather worked in Harvey Fletcher’s Acoustics Laboratory at Bell Labs. They travelled together in the early 1940’s to Hollywood, where they developed stereophonic sound for the movie industry.
Wow, the kinds of things you can learn on the internet! My grandfather was nearly a movie star.