Category: Subjects of priority disputes

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• The age of the Earth – Kelvin cooled the planet from first principles and got twenty-four million years. His own former assistant had the right answer in 1895, and let it go.
• Charles Babbage – Designed three calculating engines and completed none. Held Newton's chair eleven years, never lectured. The Times got his birth year wrong in his obituary.
• Albert Einstein – German-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955) whose relativity dispensed with the aether – and who, told Dayton Miller had found it, said only that the Lord is subtle but not malicious.
• John Flamsteed – First Astronomer Royal. Forty-three years on a star catalogue, a refusal to print it unfinished, and a bonfire of the three hundred copies printed for him.
• Edwin Hubble – He proved the universe is bigger than our galaxy, got every distance seven times too short, and refused to the end to call it expanding.
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt – Employed at thirty cents an hour to measure star brightness on glass plates, she found the relation that tells us how far away everything is.
• The longitude problem – Not a question about where you are but about what time it is somewhere else. It was solved twice, by two methods that went to sea together for a century.
• Hendrik Lorentz – Dutch physicist (1853–1928) who tried to save the aether by letting moving bodies contract – and supplied the transformations Einstein used to abolish it.
• The Mud Geometer – Bavarian controversialist (c. 1815 – after 1871) who would credit no curvature he could not be handed across a table, and drew, by his own hand, the plates that were meant to prove it.
• Occam's razor – The principle of parsimony, named for a man who did not write the words, did not originate the idea, and was not the person the phrase was coined about.
• Stigler's law of eponymy – No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer – a law its author credited to somebody else, making it an instance of itself.
• The telescope – Refused a patent in 1608 for being too easy to copy. Its most famous user did not invent it, did not name it, and was not the first to draw the Moon.
• Thomas Young – The physician who established that light is a wave, took the first real steps into hieroglyphs, and published much of it anonymously to protect his practice.

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