Jim Peebles (Princeton) visited today. Roweis and I spent an hour or so advertising to him our data analysis projects. Late in the day he gave a talk on the history of cosmology, which made a number of remarkable points, like that Hoyle was (almost) the first person to identify the cosmic microwave background (despite the fact that he thought it was impossible). An argument broke out about the importance of Friedman; Peebles takes the (tough) view that to be really important in cosmology you must have not just done theory but connected it directly to experiment, or not just done experiment but had the theorists realize that it was relevant. That's a high bar.
See
ReplyDeletehttp://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CMB.html#HoyleCN
Almost all solutions obtained in GR, and widely
ReplyDeleterecognized today as being important for astrophysics,
did not have any influence on observers or experimentalists at the time of their discovery.
Examples: Friedman cosmological solutions,
Oppenheimer-Volkov-Snyder results on gravitational
collapse, Kerr metric, etc. We rightly name
these theoretical discoveries after those who made
them and hold them in high regard. This is
justice, but also it teaches us
to be attentive to new theoretical concepts
and ideas, even if they are somewhat
decoupled from
the current mainstream.
Peebles' way of doing science is great, but it is
not the only way to make an important contribution.