Here are some candidates from Claude and Gemini (Claude Opus seemed considerably better than Gemini Pro for this task). Unfortunately they are quite unreliable: I’ve already removed many examples from this list which I already knew to have multiple independent discoverers (like e.g. CRISPR and general relativity). If you’re familiar with the history of any of these enough to say that they clearly were/weren’t very counterfactual, please leave a comment.
Noether’s Theorem
Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance
Godel’s First Incompleteness Theorem (Claude mentions Von Neumann as an independent discoverer for the Second Incompleteness Theorem)
Feynman’s path integral formulation of quantum mechanics
Onnes’ discovery of superconductivity
Pauling’s discovery of the alpha helix structure in proteins
McClintock’s work on transposons
Observation of the cosmic microwave background
Lorentz’s work on deterministic chaos
Prusiner’s discovery of prions
Yamanaka factors for inducing pluripotency
Langmuir’s adsorption isotherm (I have no idea what this is)
Mendel’s Laws seem counterfactual by about ˜30 years, based on partial re-discovery taking that much time. His experiments are technically something which someone could have done basically any time in last few thousand years, having basic maths
I agree, but, he seems to have rather low counterfactual impact. His discovery was definitely very counterfactual, but it seems like his work was only recognized around the time it would’ve been rediscovered.
I would guess that Lorentz’s work on deterministic chaos does not get many counterfactual discovery points. He noticed the chaos in his research because of his interactions with a computer doing simulations. This happened in 1961. Now, the question is, how many people were doing numerical calculations on computer in 1961? It could plausibly have been ten times as many by 1970. A hundred times as many by 1980? Those numbers are obviously made up but the direction they gesture in is my point. Chaos was a field that was made ripe for discovery by the computer. That doesn’t take anything away from Lorentz’s hard work and intelligence, but it does mean that if he had not taken the leap we can be fairly confident someone else would have. Put another way: If Lorentz is assumed to have had a high counterfactual impact, then it becomes a strange coincidence that chaos was discovered early in the history of computers.
Feymann’s path integral formulation can’t be that counterfactually large. It’s mathematically equivalent to Schwingers formulation and done several years earlier by Tomonaga.
I don’t buy mathematical equivalence as an argument against, in this case, since the whole point of the path integral formulation is that it’s mathematically equivalent but far simpler conceptually and computationally.
Idk the Nobel prize committee thought it wasn’t significant enough to give out a separate prize 🤷
I am not familiar enough with the particulars to have an informed opinion. My best guess is that in general statements to the effect of “yes X also made scientific contribution A but Y phrased it better’ overestimate the actual scientific counterfactual impact of Y. It generically weighs how well outsiders can understand the work too much vis a vis specialists/insiders who have enough hands-on experience that the value-add of a simpler/neater formalism is not that high (or even a distraction).
The reason Dick Feynmann is so much more well-known than Schwinger and Tomonaga surely must not be entirely unrelated with the magnetic charisma of Dick Feynmann.
I think they’re talking about a formulation with the same essential point having come up earlier? I’m personally not familiar with Schwinger’s formulation so cannot intelligently comment much. I’ll also note that the true significance of path integrals took a while to realize (at least going by a comment in Shankar’s Princples of Quantum Mechanics, a standard QM textbook, where the preface to the 2nd edition says something like “In the first edition I put a chapter on path integrals because I thought they were important even though most people don’t include them. Boy, they became really important. I’ve added 100 extra pages on path integrals”)
However, I’ll note that Feynmann diagrams are another example of a conceptual advancement that was huge. Though, it seems like the mathematical development of the perturbation series and the fundamental concept was already around. Furthermore Stueckelberg came up with something similar, but didn’t provide as good a way of mechanically translating perturbation expansion terms into diagrams, and didn’t have the path integral (this is additional evidence for counterfactualness of the path integral, if you can apparently get halfway to Feynmann diagrams without coming up with path integrals). Likewise the diagrams took a while to become standard.
Thus it seems likely that Feynmann was pretty counterfactual here. Plausibly others that may have come up with the notation may have dismissed it like the people that dismissed Feynmann.
Feynmann was also famously good at this sort of conceptual insight, and so I am willing to believe that his unique abilities were actually important here.
I’ve heard an argument that Mendel was actually counter-productive to the development of genetics. That if you go and actually study peas like he did, you’ll find they don’t make perfect Punnett squares, and from the deviations you can derive recombination effects. The claim is he fudged his data a little in order to make it nicer, then this held back others from figuring out the topological structure of genotypes.
I’ve heard, in this context, the partial counterargument that he was using traits which are a little fuzzy around the edges (where is the boundary between round and wrinkled?) and that he didn’t have to intentionally fudge his data in order to get results that were too good, just be not completely objective in how he was determining them.
Of course, this sort of thing is why we have double-blind tests in modern times.
Noether’s theorem is an interesting one. The evidence was there, but it’s the sort of discovery that’s incredibly nonobvious even if you have a pile of evidence staring right at you. Perhaps Einstein would’ve gotten it. That she figured it out while working with Hilbert and Einstein on relativity suggests that the ideas that lead to relativity help you think of the ideas of Noether’s Theorem. But I think it’s pretty likely she was quite counterfactual here.
Observation of the cosmic microwave background was a simultaneous discovery, according to James Peebles’ Nobel lecture. If I’m understanding this right, Bob Dicke’s group at Princeton was already looking for the CMB based on a theoretical prediction of it, and were doing experiments to detect it, with relatively primitive equipment, when the Bell Labs publication came out.
Onnes discovery seems clearly not counterfactual. My understanding was that multiple people were quite interested in the question of what happens to the resistance when you cool something down using the new tech of Dewars (invented by Dewar) and liquefied helium. For example, Dewar himself was looking into it! Onnes was motivated by an ongoing research agenda with multiple researchers trying to do the thing he was trying. Note also that it was a very short time between when the tech to cool down enough was invented to when Onnes made his discovery.
Onnes’s was the first to liquefy helium, but he bought the device he used (which had the novel innovation of exploiting the Joule Thomson effect to liquefy gases) from the inventors of the device (Linde Machine, using the Hampson-Linde cycle). Onnes performed an earlier resistance measuring experiment, this time with mercury, and then observed the superconductivity. Both of these seem like they would’ve been done pretty soon by someone else.
Surely others would’ve tried cooling a bunch more metals in the already ongoing quest to understand the resistance at cold temperatures, and then realized the superconductivity in some of them. Mercury, lead, and niobium superconduct at low temperatures—surely someone would’ve tried metals as obvious as mercury and lead. At the very least, observation of the superfluidity of liquid helium should’ve spurned people into cooling random stuff and seeing if anything weird happened.
Langmuir’s adsorption isotherm is a little bit of statistical mechanics that, given my understanding of what you know already, I think you’d find really easy to understand. Undergrad classes derive it nowadays.
If it’s counterfactual, it would have to be due to spurning some development of statistical mechanics, because after some of the basics were developed someone would’ve derived it. I think it was actually a homework problem! All you have to do is consider a two state system (gas molecule attached to substrate/not attached), then use the grand partition function (the chemical potential, case of the partition function), then substitute a term for the value it has for an ideal gas. You’ll then get something that tells you the fraction of the substrate that will have an attached gas molecule. A neat application is hemoglobin and myoglobin attaching oxygen gas.
For a reference, see Chapter 5 Page 140-143 of Kittel’s “Thermal Physics”, a standard book on undergrad level statistical mechanics.
CMB seems not counterfactual. The discovers did have to notice it and remain confused about how it was unexplained by problems with their equipment, and then be receptive to being told about a paper about how there might be radiation from the early universe. But the discovers were just looking at a sensitive radio detector meant to detect radio waves reflecting off hot air balloons. Anyone that developed sensitive equipment and then try to see faint signals would’ve noticed the mysterious noise.
Given the sheer importance of radio technology, I think there’d be many instances of people developing a similarly sensitive device and noticing the noise. It surprised me to learn that already at the time there was a paper about the possibility of radiation from the early universe, which plausibly sped up discovery. Note also that some astrophysicists nearby were (independently of the first discoverers, not independently of the paper as some of the people wrote the paper) about to look for a signal in the right region with the explicit intent of looking for background radiation.
So, if anything here is counterfactual, it would be Dicke and Peebles predicting the CMB. But I still don’t buy it, because even if nobody predicted it, people would’ve seen it not that long in the future. In fact before the main discovery in 1964, McKellar in 1941 observed a background appearing like a blackbody with the right temperature while observing the spectra of a star. He even guessed it had some significance.
Here are some candidates from Claude and Gemini (Claude Opus seemed considerably better than Gemini Pro for this task). Unfortunately they are quite unreliable: I’ve already removed many examples from this list which I already knew to have multiple independent discoverers (like e.g. CRISPR and general relativity). If you’re familiar with the history of any of these enough to say that they clearly were/weren’t very counterfactual, please leave a comment.
Noether’s Theorem
Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance
Godel’s First Incompleteness Theorem (Claude mentions Von Neumann as an independent discoverer for the Second Incompleteness Theorem)
Feynman’s path integral formulation of quantum mechanics
Onnes’ discovery of superconductivity
Pauling’s discovery of the alpha helix structure in proteins
McClintock’s work on transposons
Observation of the cosmic microwave background
Lorentz’s work on deterministic chaos
Prusiner’s discovery of prions
Yamanaka factors for inducing pluripotency
Langmuir’s adsorption isotherm (I have no idea what this is)
Mendel’s Laws seem counterfactual by about ˜30 years, based on partial re-discovery taking that much time. His experiments are technically something which someone could have done basically any time in last few thousand years, having basic maths
I agree, but, he seems to have rather low counterfactual impact. His discovery was definitely very counterfactual, but it seems like his work was only recognized around the time it would’ve been rediscovered.
I buy this argument.
I would guess that Lorentz’s work on deterministic chaos does not get many counterfactual discovery points. He noticed the chaos in his research because of his interactions with a computer doing simulations. This happened in 1961. Now, the question is, how many people were doing numerical calculations on computer in 1961? It could plausibly have been ten times as many by 1970. A hundred times as many by 1980? Those numbers are obviously made up but the direction they gesture in is my point. Chaos was a field that was made ripe for discovery by the computer. That doesn’t take anything away from Lorentz’s hard work and intelligence, but it does mean that if he had not taken the leap we can be fairly confident someone else would have. Put another way: If Lorentz is assumed to have had a high counterfactual impact, then it becomes a strange coincidence that chaos was discovered early in the history of computers.
I buy this argument.
Feymann’s path integral formulation can’t be that counterfactually large. It’s mathematically equivalent to Schwingers formulation and done several years earlier by Tomonaga.
I don’t buy mathematical equivalence as an argument against, in this case, since the whole point of the path integral formulation is that it’s mathematically equivalent but far simpler conceptually and computationally.
Idk the Nobel prize committee thought it wasn’t significant enough to give out a separate prize 🤷
I am not familiar enough with the particulars to have an informed opinion. My best guess is that in general statements to the effect of “yes X also made scientific contribution A but Y phrased it better’ overestimate the actual scientific counterfactual impact of Y. It generically weighs how well outsiders can understand the work too much vis a vis specialists/insiders who have enough hands-on experience that the value-add of a simpler/neater formalism is not that high (or even a distraction).
The reason Dick Feynmann is so much more well-known than Schwinger and Tomonaga surely must not be entirely unrelated with the magnetic charisma of Dick Feynmann.
I think they’re talking about a formulation with the same essential point having come up earlier? I’m personally not familiar with Schwinger’s formulation so cannot intelligently comment much. I’ll also note that the true significance of path integrals took a while to realize (at least going by a comment in Shankar’s Princples of Quantum Mechanics, a standard QM textbook, where the preface to the 2nd edition says something like “In the first edition I put a chapter on path integrals because I thought they were important even though most people don’t include them. Boy, they became really important. I’ve added 100 extra pages on path integrals”)
However, I’ll note that Feynmann diagrams are another example of a conceptual advancement that was huge. Though, it seems like the mathematical development of the perturbation series and the fundamental concept was already around. Furthermore Stueckelberg came up with something similar, but didn’t provide as good a way of mechanically translating perturbation expansion terms into diagrams, and didn’t have the path integral (this is additional evidence for counterfactualness of the path integral, if you can apparently get halfway to Feynmann diagrams without coming up with path integrals). Likewise the diagrams took a while to become standard.
Thus it seems likely that Feynmann was pretty counterfactual here. Plausibly others that may have come up with the notation may have dismissed it like the people that dismissed Feynmann.
Feynmann was also famously good at this sort of conceptual insight, and so I am willing to believe that his unique abilities were actually important here.
I’ve heard an argument that Mendel was actually counter-productive to the development of genetics. That if you go and actually study peas like he did, you’ll find they don’t make perfect Punnett squares, and from the deviations you can derive recombination effects. The claim is he fudged his data a little in order to make it nicer, then this held back others from figuring out the topological structure of genotypes.
I’ve heard, in this context, the partial counterargument that he was using traits which are a little fuzzy around the edges (where is the boundary between round and wrinkled?) and that he didn’t have to intentionally fudge his data in order to get results that were too good, just be not completely objective in how he was determining them.
Of course, this sort of thing is why we have double-blind tests in modern times.
Noether’s theorem is an interesting one. The evidence was there, but it’s the sort of discovery that’s incredibly nonobvious even if you have a pile of evidence staring right at you. Perhaps Einstein would’ve gotten it. That she figured it out while working with Hilbert and Einstein on relativity suggests that the ideas that lead to relativity help you think of the ideas of Noether’s Theorem. But I think it’s pretty likely she was quite counterfactual here.
Observation of the cosmic microwave background was a simultaneous discovery, according to James Peebles’ Nobel lecture. If I’m understanding this right, Bob Dicke’s group at Princeton was already looking for the CMB based on a theoretical prediction of it, and were doing experiments to detect it, with relatively primitive equipment, when the Bell Labs publication came out.
Onnes discovery seems clearly not counterfactual. My understanding was that multiple people were quite interested in the question of what happens to the resistance when you cool something down using the new tech of Dewars (invented by Dewar) and liquefied helium. For example, Dewar himself was looking into it! Onnes was motivated by an ongoing research agenda with multiple researchers trying to do the thing he was trying. Note also that it was a very short time between when the tech to cool down enough was invented to when Onnes made his discovery.
Onnes’s was the first to liquefy helium, but he bought the device he used (which had the novel innovation of exploiting the Joule Thomson effect to liquefy gases) from the inventors of the device (Linde Machine, using the Hampson-Linde cycle). Onnes performed an earlier resistance measuring experiment, this time with mercury, and then observed the superconductivity. Both of these seem like they would’ve been done pretty soon by someone else.
Surely others would’ve tried cooling a bunch more metals in the already ongoing quest to understand the resistance at cold temperatures, and then realized the superconductivity in some of them. Mercury, lead, and niobium superconduct at low temperatures—surely someone would’ve tried metals as obvious as mercury and lead. At the very least, observation of the superfluidity of liquid helium should’ve spurned people into cooling random stuff and seeing if anything weird happened.
Langmuir’s adsorption isotherm is a little bit of statistical mechanics that, given my understanding of what you know already, I think you’d find really easy to understand. Undergrad classes derive it nowadays.
If it’s counterfactual, it would have to be due to spurning some development of statistical mechanics, because after some of the basics were developed someone would’ve derived it. I think it was actually a homework problem! All you have to do is consider a two state system (gas molecule attached to substrate/not attached), then use the grand partition function (the chemical potential, case of the partition function), then substitute a term for the value it has for an ideal gas. You’ll then get something that tells you the fraction of the substrate that will have an attached gas molecule. A neat application is hemoglobin and myoglobin attaching oxygen gas.
For a reference, see Chapter 5 Page 140-143 of Kittel’s “Thermal Physics”, a standard book on undergrad level statistical mechanics.
CMB seems not counterfactual. The discovers did have to notice it and remain confused about how it was unexplained by problems with their equipment, and then be receptive to being told about a paper about how there might be radiation from the early universe. But the discovers were just looking at a sensitive radio detector meant to detect radio waves reflecting off hot air balloons. Anyone that developed sensitive equipment and then try to see faint signals would’ve noticed the mysterious noise.
Given the sheer importance of radio technology, I think there’d be many instances of people developing a similarly sensitive device and noticing the noise. It surprised me to learn that already at the time there was a paper about the possibility of radiation from the early universe, which plausibly sped up discovery. Note also that some astrophysicists nearby were (independently of the first discoverers, not independently of the paper as some of the people wrote the paper) about to look for a signal in the right region with the explicit intent of looking for background radiation.
So, if anything here is counterfactual, it would be Dicke and Peebles predicting the CMB. But I still don’t buy it, because even if nobody predicted it, people would’ve seen it not that long in the future. In fact before the main discovery in 1964, McKellar in 1941 observed a background appearing like a blackbody with the right temperature while observing the spectra of a star. He even guessed it had some significance.