But at least in the case of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, even though she put in a lot of the legwork, it was her supervisors who did much of the theoretical work to explain the discovery. Also of note is that she agreed with the Nobel committee decision. From her Wikipedia page:
"First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!"
Yes, (1) is true even in this case. It’s not that her supervisors didn’t deserve to share in the prize, it’s that she should not have been excluded.
I know of her statements about the incident. I think she’s being modest, and I disagree with her idea that awarding the Prize to someone who happened to be a student during the time of discovery would somehow demean the Prize. Her work was as crucial as theirs. It wasn’t just “legwork”, she discovered the regular signals and recognized them as something new and important.
This is correct. But the belief in Aristotle's philosophy was even more powerful:
"The medieval followers of Aristotle, first in the Islamic world and then in Christian Europe, tried to make sense of the lunar spots in Aristotelian terms. Various possibilities were entertained. It had been suggested already in Antiquity that the Moon was a perfect mirror and that its markings were reflections of earthly features, but this explanation was easily dismissed because the face of the Moon never changes as it moves about the Earth. Perhaps there were vapors between the Sun and the Moon, so that the images were actually contained in the Sun's incident light and thus reflected to the Earth. The explanation that finally became standard was that there were variations of "density" in the Moon that caused this otherwise perfectly spherical body to appear the way it does. The perfection of the Moon, and therefore the heavens, was thus preserved."
I was going to purchase this phone but apparently we have to rely on the kindness of ZTE if we're to get OS updates, or go through a complicated process much like it is for Android. This is massively disappointing for a supposedly 'open' phone and has put me off entirely.
It's not even as useful as the Wikipedia list as the main page fails to specify which codes are from WebDAV, etc., and it even copies some made-up non-RFC codes without including the caveats.
"First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!"