> - When Rontgen discovered a new kind of light, he called it "x-
> rays". Now only the Germans call them Rontgen rays.
Thanks for a great essay! Since I have nothing of real value
contribute here, I won't pass over the opportunity to be a
"besserwisser" (as the Swedes say, using a borrowed word...) the
Röntgen moniker has stuck here in northern Europe too: in Swedish:
Röntgenstrålning, in Danish and Norwegian: Røntgenstråling, in Dutch:
Röntgenstraling. Also thanks to Wikipedia, I can inform you that it's
called Röntgengeislun in Icelandic and Röntgensäteily in Finnish.
Eastern Europe seems to have adopted various forms based on "Rentgen",
but I won't pretend I knew that before 5 minutes ago ;-)
Derek
>
>
> - When the largest protein ever was discovered, it was called
> "connectin", but a subsequent paper called it "titin" and the second
> name has stuck. I actually can't remember who the "connectin" guy
> was ...
>
> - When Joseph Fourier discovered that heat radiated from the earth
> could be reflected back by gasses in the atmosphere, he simply named
> it by describing it (in French). Now this is (incorrectly) called
> the "greenhouse effect". Why not the Fourier effect? Fortunately
> for Fourier, a mathematical series was named after him, although he
> neither discovered it (Budan did that), nor implemented it (Navier
> did that). All Fourier did was present a theorem based on a flawed
> premise that turned out to be right anyway.
>
> So, I decided to look up Friedel and Bijvoet in the Undisputed
> Source of All Human Knowledge (wikipedia) and found that Friedel's
> Law "... is a property of Fourier transforms <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform
> > of real functions."
>
> I am willing to believe that. And considering this origin I would
> think it appropriate to call (hkl) and (-h-k-l) a "Friedel pair" (or
> "Friedel's pair" as it is described in the USAHK). G. Friedel was
> indeed a crystallographer, but I doubt he considered more than this
> simple centrosymmetric property. Who would care in 1913 which is F+
> and F-? The atomic scattering factors had not yet been worked out
> at that time. Ewald may have predicted it, but anomalous scattering
> was not shown to exist until the classic work of Koster, Knol and
> Prins (1930). I guess that goes to show that if you want something
> named after you... keep it at one or two authors.
>
> Perhaps it has to do with the original paper getting old enough that
> it gets too hard to find. I'm sure in G. Friedel's paper in 1913 he
> cited Joseph Fourier's Paper from 1822. Or did he? I wonder if
> they were already calling it a Fourier Transform at that time?
>
> Okay, so what, exactly did Bijvoet do? Everyone cites his Nature
> paper (1951), but one thing that I was NOT KIDDING about in my April
> Fool's joke was that this paper (like so many other high-profile
> papers) contains almost no information about how to reproduce the
> results. I was also not kidding that boring little details like the
> reasoning behind the conclusion (the hand of the microworld) were
> relegated to a more obscure journal (the one in the Proc. Royal.
> Soc. Amsterdam). I WAS kidding about having found and read that
> paper. I have never seen it. Still, Bijvoet did the first
> experiment to elucidate the absolute configuration, and he
> definitely deserves credit for that.
> So, particularly in that light, I would agree that any pair of
> reflections that would be equivalent if not for anomalous scattering
> effects could be called a "Bijvoet pair". This is because they
> contain the information needed to apply Bijvoet's technique.
> Something that has always eluded me is who decided which is F+ and
> F-? After all, the reciprocal lattice is very very nearly
> centrosymmetric. You cannot tell by looking at a single diffraction
> image whether that spot at a given X,Y pixel coordinate is F+ or F-,
> you need to know the axis convention of the camera. At some point
> in writing the CCP4 libraries with their asymmetric unit
> definitions, someone must have established a convention. What is
> it? To me, the reasoning behind these assignments is, in fact, they
> key to assigning the absolute configuration, not the anomalous
> scattering effect itself. So, who worked this out? Should we
> really be calling them Dodson pairs?
>
> -James Holton
> MAD Scientist
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