The part of David Mermin's Reference Frame (Physics
Today, May 2004, page
10) that I enjoyed most was his exposition of
the Matthew effect, which was an exquisitely ironic
example of what he was writing about.
The term is very unfair to Mark, Luke, and John,
who also wrote "Unto him that hath shall be given
. . ." (or near enough). An earlier letter from
me (Physics Today, October 1991, page 154) provides
more detail.
In two of his recent essays, David Mermin underscores
the unreliability of human memory. In the February
2004 issue of Physics Today(page
10), he discusses a position that Aage Peterson
attributed to Niels Bohr and the conflicting views
from Viktor Weisskopf and Rudolf Peierls of whether
that was really Bohr's position. A Google search attributes
it to Bohr directly in over 90% of the citations.
In the May issue, Mermin attributes a particular admonition
to Richard Feynman, although the statement may actually
have been Mermin's own.
Memory is often—perhaps usually—unreliable.
Eyewitness testimony, as Elizabeth Loftus and others
have shown,1−4
is notoriously unreliable. Misidentifications appear
to arise through a process called confabulation: When
we remember only part of an incident we unconsciously
look for the most likely candidate to fill the gap
and provide a logically complete story. Historians
are aware of the problem. Their investigations also
suffer from a similar phenomenon, the Rashomon effect
(from the movie), in which any incident is seen differently
by the different participants. The controversy of
Werner Heisenberg's role in the German atomic program
is a good example of that effect.
Perhaps the best known example of attributing statements
and positions where they best fit and to the most
logical people is that of Thucydides, in his history
of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, explaining his
methodology, says: "As to the speeches which
were made either before or during the war, it was
hard for me, and for others who reported them to me,
to recollect the exact words. I have therefore put
into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper
to the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be
likely to express them, while at the same time I endeavoured,
as nearly as I could, to give the general purport
of what was actually said." This is what Michael
Frayn did in his play Copenhagen.Both writers
did deliberately what is normally done unconsciously.
As to the Matthew effect, I first ran across the
citation, "even from him that hath not shall
be taken away," in graduate school some 50-odd
years ago in the textbook Organic Chemistry
by Louis F. Fieser and Mary Fieser (D. C. Heath, 1944).
It is, however, a comment with many applications,
and I have remembered it ever since. Although I usually
attribute it to Fieser and Fieser, I add the caveat
that it came from the New Testament (Matthew 13:12,
25: 29; Luke 19:26).
References
1. E. F. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony,
Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, MA (1996).
2. E. M. Borchard, Convicting the
Innocent, Yale U. Press, New Haven, CT (1932).
3. C. R. Huff, A. Ratner, E. Sagarin,
Convicted but Innocent, Sage, Thousand Oaks,
CA (1996).
4. D. L. Schachter, ed., Memory Distortion,
Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, MA (1995).
Sam Silverman
(smpr@rcn.com)
Lexington, Massachusetts
I was enjoying reading David Mer- min's May 2004
Reference Frame when I found his discussion of the
Matthew effect. It is amusing that his citation of
Robert Merton as the originator of this concept is
itself a superb example of the Matthew effect! Many
of us who took elementary organic chemistry as undergraduates
knew this phenomenon under the slightly different
name, "Matthew's rule," with the chapter
and verse quoted in our textbook, copyrighted in 1944.
Mermin replies: The Matthew ef- fect only
comes into play when one possible source is overwhelm-ingly
more distinguished than any other. Richard P. Feynman
and N. David Mermin constitute a fine example. The
evangelists do not. Matthew did not tower head and
shoulders above his colleagues. One might argue that
we should call it the Mark effect, since the Gospel
of Mark was the earliest, but this would make the
term "Matthew effect'' a simple misattribution
of priority, and not an example of the effect itself,
as Douglas Brewer incorrectly maintains.
Merton and the Fiesers are another matter. While
the Fiesers are overwhelmingly the more distinguished
chemists, Merton is overwhelmingly the more distinguished
sociologist. Since the Matthew effect is a sociological
and not a chemical phenomenon, if the Fiesers really
did introduce the terminology in 1944, its widespread
attribution to Merton (1968) is indeed an example
of the Matthew effect. I suspect that the author of
On the Shoulders of Giants would have greatly
enjoyed this delicious twist.
Hoping to learn more, I dug Fieser and Fieser out
of the library. But the index was of no help in hunting
down Sam Silverman's citation, and I'm ashamed to
say I lacked the patience to search for it page by
page. Stephen Berry's memory of long-ago organic chemistry
classes certainly lends credence to Silverman's claim.
But the question of whether the Fiesers, as amateur
sociologists, have indeed been matthewed (or matthewed,
marked, luked, and johned, as Brewer would have us
say) by Merton himself remains open, as far as I'm
concerned. Perhaps some reader of Physics Todaycan
supply the missing citation.
While on the subject, I would like to report here
that I received more than 40 e-mails in response to
my request for evidence that Feynman had used "shut
up and calculate'' to characterize the Copenhagen
interpretation. While these contained many delightful
anecdotes and personal reminiscences, nobody could
cite a Feynman text in which the phrase appears or
recall ever having heard him say it or anything I
judged to be very much like it.
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