Naming phenomena after discoverers is traditional, but not necessarily permanent
I imagine astronomers are feeling pretty pleased with themselves. That’s because the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – the long-awaited successor to Hubble – is nearing the L2 Lagrange point, roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, with all seemingly going to plan.
The JWST’s spectacular 6.5 metre primary mirror, which had been folded up on the telescope’s journey from Earth, has been unfurled, aligned and cooled, protected by a massive, tennis-court-sized sunshield. The first infrared images – yielding secrets of everything from exoplanets to the first galaxies – could be in by June.
More than 20 years in the making, the JWST has suffered its fair share of budgetary, operational and technical headaches – and further hitches cannot be ruled out. But one thing NASA has also had to contend with is a dispute over the mission’s name.
That’s because the mission is named after James Webb, a former NASA administrator who died in 1992. Webb has been accused of being involved in anti-LGBT+ activities before taking up the reins at NASA. He is also said to have been in charge when a budget analyst at the agency was sacked in 1963 on suspicion of being gay. More than 1200 people signed a letter last year demanding the JWST be renamed.
NASA declined to do so – prompting the resignation of a member of its astrophysics advisory committee. But similar demands are already being made elsewhere in physics. One such demand has come from Michael Pepper, a semiconductor physicist at University College London. In a letter to the Times in November, he said he thinks it’s time to rename the “Stark effect”, which describes the splitting of an atom’s spectral lines in an electric field.
The term honours the German Nobel-prize-winning physicist Johannes Stark (1874–1957), an anti-semite who was an early supporter of Adolf Hitler. He backed the notion of “German physics”, in contrast to the supposedly “Jewish” physics being developed by, among others, Albert Einstein. Stark received a four-year suspended sentence from a denazification court after the Second World War.
In light of this history, Pepper feels the Stark effect should be rebranded. “It could be called electric quantization or something like that,” Pepper said on a recent episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast. That doesn’t mean, he argued, we should strip Stark of his Nobel prize. “One can’t the change the past – and one shouldn’t even try – but we can change the future.”
Cutting through the quantum hype, why the Stark effect should be renamed
In related news, a petition to rename the Schrödinger Lecture Theatre at Trinity College Dublin is now doing the rounds. The facility is named after the Austrian quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was based at Trinity from 1938 to 1955. During his time in Ireland, he is said by the Irish Times to have “indulged his Lolita complex”, grooming and sexually abusing two young girls.
“We can acknowledge the great mark Schrödinger has left on science and this petition does not wish to diminish the impact his lectures or ideas had in physics,” the petition states. “However, it seems in bad taste that a modern college such as Trinity could honour this man with an entire building.”
Some physicists might blanch at the prospect of combing through phenomena, statues, labs, buildings or departments for examples of other less-than-honourable honorees. Who next, they might wonder, will be “cancelled” from physics for incidents or episodes that might have happened decades or centuries ago? But on the other hand, if things are named after awful people, surely it’s better to make amends for these past wrongdoings now, rather than continuing to compound them?
