And the award for most understated irony goes to ...
Bill Bryson. Note the use of the word “great” in the following passage:
… on January 15, 1934, the journal Physical Review published a very concise abstract of a presentation that had been conducted by Zwicky and Baade the previous month at Stanford University. Despite its extreme brevity-one paragraph of twenty four lines- the abstract contained an enormous amount of new science:it provided the first reference to supernovae and to neutron stars; convincingly explained their method of formation; correctly calculated the scale of their explosiveness; and , as a kind of concluding bonus, connected supernovae explosions to the productions of a mysterious phenomenon called cosmic rays, which had recently been found swarming through the universe. the ideas were revolutionary to say the least. neutron stars wouldn’t be confirmed for thirty-four years. the cosmic rays notion, though considered plausible, hadn’t been verified yet. altogether, the abstract was, in the words of Caltech astrophysicist Kip S. Thorne, “one of the most prescient documents in the history of physics and astronomy”.
[…] Zwicke also was the first to recognize that there wasn’t nearly enough visible mass in the universe to hold galaxies together and that there must be some other gravitational influence- what we now call dark matter. one thing he failed to see was that if a neutron star shrank enough it would become so dense that even light couldn’t escape its immense gravitational pull. you would have a black hole. unfortunately, Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideas attracted almost no notice. when, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky’s work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall.
Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”
(thanks astrido)
