The history of science is full of mythical stories that we repeat, even when we suspect that they are probably wrong. Robert P Crease recounts several and asks for yours
Richard Feynman starts his book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter with a remarkable confession. He tells a brief story about the origins of his subject – quantum electrodynamics – and then says that the "physicist’s history of physics" that he has just related is probably wrong. "What I am telling you", Feynman says, “is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development, which I do not really know!”
Like Feynman, many teachers and textbooks are unashamed to retell “damn good stories”: colourful versions of people and events that are oversimplified and often inaccurate. All of the scholarly fields are afflicted. Ivan Morris, a British-born scholar who taught Japanese studies at Harvard University, once expressed an intention to write a book about myths embraced by his academic colleagues, tentatively entitled The Bull Must Die. Unfortunately, Morris died before he could finish the work and the bull continues to flow unchecked.
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