Absolutely fascinating story of missed scientific opportunity over at Steinn Sigurdsen’s blog.
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August 19th, 2007 at 5:13 am
Cool! This reminds me the classical story of GRB discovery! I wonder if the military “observers” could have made some other serendipitous findings as they might get special wavelength/spatial/time coverages that are inaccessible to civilians facilities …
August 19th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Who knows? Perhaps they have discoverd axions and are using axion-photon conversions in strong magnetic fields (Primakoff effect) to communicate with submarines.
The CIA may be using quantum computers to read RSA encripted messages.
August 19th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Count Iblis:
Yes who knows?
Why the CIA?
Why not the Russians?
Or the Chinese?
August 20th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
How wonderful, absolutely charmed by this unassuming and delightful man.
August 21st, 2007 at 1:14 am
If you don’t publish you don’t get credit. It’s that simple.
The US Air Force discovered NOTHING. And likewise for these claims the GCHQ “discovered” public key cryptography, and so on. Likewise for any commercial organization that never publishes.
That’s the way the system works, and it’s a damn fine system.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Not exactly. Someone working for the Air Force discovered highly variable extrasolar radio sources, but it would have taken followup to know that they were pulsars – they did not observe the defining characteristic of pulsars, the coherent pulsations.
I was actually at the talk, and it was fascinating, but let’s not overstate the case. Certainly if Mr. Schisler had been working in a less secretive environment there’s a good chance his persistence and care would have made him a codiscoverer of pulsars, but this mostly demonstrates how inimical secrecy is to scientific discovery.