The fraud who worked with Einstein

[n2doc]

Emil Rupp spent the late 1920s and early 1930s being lauded as the most impressive experimental physicist in the world. He managed to pull off experiments that no one else could. He worked with Einstein. And he'd made it all up.

Emil Rupp was born in Germany in 1898; he had an interest in physics, which meant that he was born at the perfect place in he perfect time. Germany was a nearly holy site for physicists throughout the first part of the 20th century — people traveled there to learn, to collaborate, and to become the best in the world. By age 27, Rupp was the best in the world.

His work focused on canal rays, which were produced in little glass tubes. On one side of a tube was an anode, a positively charged electrode. At the center of the tube was a cathode, a negatively charged electrode with little holes — sometimes called canals — drilled in it. Positive ions would shoot from the anode to the cathode, and some would shoot through the holes; these would continue into a vacuum on the far side of the tube, where they emitted enough light that they could be studied with the naked eye.


Rupp was one of the researchers studying these rays, particularly their interference patterns as they came through the canals and the coherence of the beams in the vacuum. He came up with some remarkable results. Basically, his observable phenomena, from interference patterns, to wave trains (a series of waves traveling in sync), to beam coherence were larger than anyone else had every observed. By studying them, he noticed that the rays underwent two different kinds of Doppler shift. One shift was due to the acceleration of the ion in the ray. The other was thermal Doppler shift, the shift that comes about from the random jiggling of the ion.

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http://io9.com/the-fraud-who-worked-with-einstein-508295378

[clarice]

1. I'm curious, don't have time to research this but it is interesting.

What part of his research was fraudulent?

[caraher]

5. He made up data

He claimed to have performed experiments for which he did not have necessary equipment, for instance.

[clarice]

6. Yep, that's fraud. Thanks. nt

[TxDemChem]

2. When I get a chance, I hope to look into this

[dimbear]

3. That era in Germany was very bizarre for intellectuals. Many, as Einstein,

ran for their lives. One imagines that many strange stories are yet to be told. When we say publish or perish over here now we mean 'no tenure for you.' Then?

Grim situation.

[hunter]

4. I read somewhere, can't find it, that Einstein's letters of recommendation...

... were not exceptionally valuable.

Einstein gave most everyone the "benefit of the doubt" and plenty of helpful suggestions.

Maybe it was Richard Feynman. If Feynman ever bothered to pay attention to you, and his letter of "recommendation" didn't simply eviscerate you, then it was the highest praise. You got the job or the graduate slot.

My wife lives in that kind of academic environment and I suspect the letters of recommendation she writes are more Feynman than Einstein, minus the evisceration; brutally honest reflections upon a student's strengths and weaknesses.

I'm a lone wolf. I wouldn't like being in a position where I had to do that.

Now suppose there was no Emil Rupp. You go back in time and neutralize him somehow, not by killing him, but by granting him a few wishes.

Is the resulting a world a better or worse place than it is now?

My nightmare scenario is always that the Nazis get the bomb first.