Scientific discoveries and their acceptance

I begin with a well known example from my native town. Mendel published his experiments with inheritance of flower colors in 1882. The importance of his discovery was recognized after about 40 years, and Mendel was lucky, since his followers knew and recognized his work.

Redfield published only one forgotten paper, his second paper was rejected, because reviewers did not recognize the importance of his approach for the group theory. It was published 37 years after his death.

Who can tell, how many such discoveries are buried in libraries between unread journals, yearbooks of provincial colleges, or just evaporated unremarked, when authors thought that they could spend their time more agreably than rewriting and resubmitting their works?

A scientist must not only make a discovery, but he must have a high inough authority and visibility to be able to sell it to his peers.

Even if a work is recognized and accepted, it does not follow, that its idea is understood clearly. Since old classical papers are studied from the second or the third hand, mostly, nobody nows, what they really contain, if these, who studied them, did not gasp their true problems.

Sometimes, scientists had difficulties with formulation of their thoughts, because some parts of theory, needed for understanding were, not yet developped.

Weinberger in his lecture about importance of mathematics  gave as an example the problem of partitions, the number of ways, how it is possible to split a number m into n parts. This task was solved by the genial Indian matematician Ramanudjan with cooperation with the Englishman Hardy. Hardy rejected "practical problems". Weinberger thought as an irony, that partitions got recently importance in the elementar particles theory.

But partitions had such importance even before Ramanudjan and Hardy started to study them. Only their clue position remained unrecognized. Boltzmann had a genial thought, but he was able to formulate it only in terms of his age and so till now his proof of his H theorem remained misinterpreted.

Boltzmann pronounced the quantum hypothesis in 1877 and immediately denied it and returned to a continuum which theory was better developped.

Today, all "high" physics is based on the group theory. In Boltzmann´s times, it was used in crystallography, only.

Now, many theoretical papers deals with the Hilbert space. Then Hilbert was only a pupil.

Boltzmann considered all partitions of thermal energy in an isolated system of gas molecules as a simple example of all partitions the number 7 into 7 parts. He arranged them into an onedimensional table, we give them the form of a diagram.

          The partitions into n parts are isomorphic with a crossection through n dimensional plane which is orthogonal to the diagonal unit vector I. A partition represents an spherical orbit, since all vectors obtained by its permutation have the equal lengths.