Random Scientist Generator

What the random scientist generator does

You need a scientist. A subject for a report, a name for a school project, a starting point for an evening of reading about somebody you have heard of and could not actually tell you anything about.

Press the button and you get one.

What follows is not really about who is in here. It is about two people who are not, and what their absence turns out to be evidence of.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One if you are deciding, more if you are browsing.
2. Press Generate. A fresh draw every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

Two names you will not find in here

Otto Hahn is not in this list.

Hahn won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission, which is not a small thing to have discovered. He won it on his own.

Lise Meitner is in this list.

Meitner had worked with Hahn for thirty years. She was the physicist; he was the chemist. When his experiments produced a result that made no sense, barium appearing where barium had no business being, he wrote to her, because she was the one who could explain it. She and her nephew Otto Frisch worked it out over Christmas in Sweden, sitting in the snow doing the arithmetic: the nucleus had split, and here was where the energy had gone. Frisch gave it the name fission.

Her name was not on Hahn's paper.

It was not on the paper because she was Jewish and had fled Germany that year with a few hours' notice and ten marks in her pocket, and a German chemist in 1938 could not publish with a Jewish refugee. So the discovery went out under his name, because the alternative was that it did not go out at all.

Six years later the Nobel committee looked at the paper, saw one name on it, and gave the prize to the name. Niels Bohr and others said plainly at the time that she had been central to it. It made no difference. She was a physicist, and this was the chemistry prize, and she was a woman, and she was a refugee, and she wrote to a friend that being a woman in Sweden was very nearly a crime. One member of the physics committee worked actively against her.

She never got it. She died in Cambridge in 1968.

Antony Hewish is not in this list either.

Hewish won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, shared with Martin Ryle, for the discovery of pulsars. It was the first time the physics prize had ever gone to astronomy.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is in this list.

In 1967 she was a graduate student at Cambridge. She had helped build the radio telescope, physically, with her hands. The thing produced its output as ink on paper and she read it, all of it, something like three miles of it, and in the middle of three miles of ink she noticed a smudge that was too regular. She went back through the record and found it again. Then she found the pulse: something in the sky flashing every 1.3 seconds, with a precision nothing in the sky had any right to have.

Her supervisor told her it was interference.

She did not accept that. She went and found more of them, in other parts of the sky, until it could not be explained away. They were neutron stars, which had been predicted and never seen, spinning fast enough to sweep a beam past the Earth like a lighthouse.

The prize went to her supervisor. She was a student, and students were not what the committee looked at.

The effect that has a name

In 1968 the sociologist Robert Merton described something he called the Matthew effect, after a line in Matthew 13:12: to him that hath, more shall be given. Credit in science, he observed, flows uphill. When a famous scientist and an unknown one work on the same thing, the famous one gets remembered, and the effect compounds, because being remembered makes you more famous, which gets you more credit next time.

Merton did not think this was a scandal. He thought it was efficient, and he went as far as suggesting that unknown scientists could work the system by handing their ideas to famous ones who would carry them further.

In 1993 the historian Margaret Rossiter pointed out that Merton had only read half the verse.

The other half says: from him that hath not, even what he hath shall be taken away.

Rossiter had spent years collecting cases, and the cases had a pattern in them that Merton's version could not see, because Merton was looking at who gains and the pattern was in who loses. Over and over, the person whose work got absorbed into somebody else's name was a woman. Not occasionally. Systematically, across centuries and disciplines, in medicine and art history and literary criticism as well as in science.

She named it the Matilda effect, after Matilda Joslyn Gage, an American suffragist who had written about exactly this in 1870 and then, with a precision that is almost too neat, been mostly forgotten herself.

Gage's observation was that the claim women have no inventive genius was so common nobody bothered to check it, and that the United States census did not trouble to count women among the country's inventors at all. She was making the argument, and being an example of it, at the same time.

What a list of famous scientists knows that Stockholm did not

Now go back to the absences, because they are doing something nobody intended.

Nobody sat down to build a list that would correct the Nobel committee. This is a list of scientists people have heard of. That is the only criterion. It has Einstein and Newton and Curie in it, exactly where you would expect them.

And Meitner is in it, and Hahn is not.

And Bell Burnell is in it, and Hewish is not.

Which means that at some point in the last fifty years, without a committee or an announcement or a correction being issued, fame quietly overruled the prize. The two people who were passed over are now the two people anybody has heard of. The men who took the awards home have become footnotes in the stories of the women who did not.

The Matilda effect turned out to have an expiry date. Not a short one. Meitner waited until after her death. But it ran out.

The physical evidence is on the periodic table. Element 109 is meitnerium. There is no hahnium: the name was proposed, argued over for decades, and eventually went elsewhere. Hahn got the prize and Meitner got an element, and only one of those is permanent.

Bell Burnell got hers while alive, which is better. In 2018 the Breakthrough Prize gave her three million dollars in what everyone understood to be a correction. She gave the entire amount away, to fund physics scholarships for women, minorities and refugees, on the grounds that she had noticed the thing that had happened to her and would prefer it stopped happening. She has said since, and appears to mean it, that she did rather well out of not winning a Nobel: win one and you get a spectacular week and then the world considers the matter closed, whereas miss one and people keep handing you things for the rest of your life.

The correction is not clean, though, and it would be dishonest to tidy it.

Rosalind Franklin is in this list. So are Watson and Crick. Maurice Wilkins, who actually shared their prize, is not. Franklin died in 1958 at thirty-seven, four years before the award, and the Nobel is not given posthumously, so there was never a version of this where she received it. What happened to her is not that the prize went to the wrong people. It is that she got sorted, by seventy years of retelling, into being the wronged one, and the wronged one is a role with fame attached. Wilkins simply evaporated. That is not justice arriving late. That is the same machinery that erased her in the first place, running in a different direction and still not looking at anybody very carefully.

Which is worth keeping hold of when you pull a name out of this list. Fame is not a measurement. It is a story that got told often enough, and the story has been wrong before, and there is no particular reason to think it has finished being wrong now.

Where these come from

The scientists come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, with the fields each of them worked in attached. Your browser picks from them at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Why could Rosalind Franklin not have been given the Nobel?

She died in 1958 and the prize was awarded in 1962, and the Nobel is not awarded posthumously. That rule is real and it settles the narrow question. It does not settle the wider one, which is what happened to her data while she was alive, and that argument is still going.

Why do only three people ever share a Nobel?

Because the statutes cap it at three, which made sense when science was done by individuals and makes progressively less sense every year. Modern physics papers routinely carry thousands of authors. The rule guarantees that the machinery of credit will keep producing exactly the outcome described above, and it has not changed.

Is there really an element named after Lise Meitner?

Element 109, meitnerium, symbol Mt. Naming rules allow an element to be named after a scientist, and it is a considerably rarer honour than a Nobel. Roughly a hundred and eighteen elements exist and rather more than a hundred and eighteen people have won the prize.

What is the difference between the Matthew effect and the Matilda effect?

They are the two halves of the same verse and the same phenomenon. Matthew describes credit accumulating on the already-famous. Matilda describes credit being taken from those who had little to start with, and the specific observation that the person it gets taken from is, with striking regularity, a woman.

Does this still happen?

Rossiter's paper was 1993 and the research since has kept finding it in awards, in citation counts, and in who gets named on patents. The fact that Meitner and Bell Burnell eventually won the fame argument is not evidence that the machinery stopped. It is evidence that it takes about fifty years to notice.

Can the same scientist come up twice?

Not within a single draw. Ask for ten and you get ten different ones. Press again and everything is back in play.

References

1. Rossiter, M. W. (1993). The Matthew Matilda effect in science. Social Studies of Science, 23(2), 325 to 341. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631293023002004
2. Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew effect in science. Science, 159(3810), 56 to 63. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.159.3810.56
3. Physics World. Overlooked for the Nobel: Lise Meitner. https://physicsworld.com/a/overlooked-for-the-nobel-lise-meitner/
4. NPR (2018). In 1974, they gave the Nobel to her supervisor. Now she has won a $3 million prize. https://www.npr.org/2018/09/06/645257118/in-1974-they-gave-the-nobel-to-her-supervisor-now-shes-won-a-3-million-prize
5. Smithsonian Magazine (2018). Decades after being passed over for a Nobel, Jocelyn Bell Burnell gets her due. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/decades-after-being-passed-over-nobel-jocelyn-bell-burnell-gets-her-due-180970248/