“A terrible book. They do many things badly. But it was all we had at the time.”

Sic transit gloria mundi. That’s probably the best thing one can hope anybody ever says about one’s thesis … Nice detective work. That means “The distribution function of absolute luminosity.”
I think it is actually an article in a book; there is one in our library titled “Probleme der Astronomie. Festschrift fur Hugo v. Seeliger” and I bet that’s it. Also the title yielded enough to find this glossary entry, skip down to the entry for Hess diagram. There is a figure.

I have no idea when people even started using filters! Hearnshaw’s book might say; it is more interesting than the title sounds. Or we could just ask George. A fond memory of my first day as a new postdoc at the Carwash is when George, accompanied by Andy McWilliam, barged into my new office and announced, “Did you know that this is the office in which technetium was discovered in stars???” by way of introduction.

[27] R. Hess, “Die Verteilungsfunktion der absol. Helligkeiten etc”. Seeliger Festschrift, Springer, Berlin, 1924.

The one I want to track down is the person who first figured out that it would useful to take images of astronomical objects through different filters. George Preston (yet another ESP) told me the name, but I forgot.

searching google is not much help; the ADS abstracts turn up a use as early as 1948 by Payne-Gaposchkin but even she doesn’t give a citation. the only way i know to solve this problem is that i once heard Bob Kraft (an ESP) once say he knew the Hess Identity - but either he didn’t give it up that day, or i forgot.

it is like bit rot in uncommented code. there is lore that everybody knows, and therefore no one knows it at all.

Chris W asked “… Any lawyers reading this? …”.

Yes, I am a lawyer, and as such I try to check facts before suing (unfortunately, that is not a universal practice among lawyers). In doing so, I found a Phys. Rev. Lett. paper by Weck, Loubeyre, and Letoullec - see
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13578182
entitled “Observation of structural transformations in metal oxygen”.
The abstract says:
“X-ray diffraction and Raman measurements have been performed on solid oxygen up to, respectively, 115 and 120 GPa. Metallization at 96 GPa is shown to be associated with a continuous displacive structural transformation. At 110 GPa, a new structure is stabilized. The evolution of the vibron mode reflects also the sequence of phase transitions through the continuity of the vibron frequency at 96 GPa, then the broadening of the vibron peak into the background and finally the reappearance of a sharp vibron at 110 GPa with a -2.5% discontinuity in the frequency. The observation of the vibron peak demonstrates that metallic oxygen is molecular up to at least 120 GPa.”.

So, it seems to me that Julianne and her fellow astronomers have solid ground to refer to oxygen as a metal, and would probably win any lawsuit asserting otherwise.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

PS - Thanks, Julianne, for a very interesting blog entry.

I am idly wondering who the ESP was….

There’s a funny paleo-physics anecdote along similar lines in magnetics. The person largely responsible for the initial study of magnetic memory was a fellow named Erwin Madelung. Back at the start of the 20th century he wrote his thesis on magnetic hysteresis and came up with some rules for classifying the magnetic memory properties (or lack of) in different materials. His name has often been overshadowed by those that followed him even though his rules and language are still used today. And I’m sure you can readily appreciate how important magnetic memory is today!

What makes this a bit more fun, is that I can guarantee that many of you (especially the physicists?) have actually seen Madelung’s published work with your own eyes. You see, he also happens to hold a rather unique place in the history of physics. If you go and look for his very first published paper, the bound journal should fall open almost directly to his paper. In fact, the book should open to the last page of his paper. Why might you ask?

His very first paper appeared in 1905 and just happens to immediately precede the special relativity paper by Albert Einstein. So, as many young physical scientists are prone to seek out those most famous of papers at least once in their lives, they see at least the very last page of Erwin Madelung’s great paper on magnetic hysteresis.

oort