Just another Gedanken experiment

December 13, 2006 at 11:20 am | | literature, nerd

I’m sure most of you who’ve taken physics classes have heard of some of the famous gedankens of history. Maybe you remember some of Einstein’s gedankens, or Schrodinger’s, but did you ever wonder about Gedanken’s gedankens? I didn’t until I was scrolling through the TOC alerts for J. Phys. Chem. and I saw the authors for this article:

MnO Octahedral Nanocrystals and MnO@C Core-Shell Composites: Synthesis,
Characterization, and Electrocatalytic Properties
Sangaraju Shanmugam and Aharon Gedanken
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jp0657585

Now, I admit that this is pretty nerdy but the second author’s last name was funny and ironic to me on several levels. First, the paper he’s publishing is a real experiment, not a gedanken experiment, yet everything he does is at least partially a Gedanken experiment so how does he ever achieve anything? Secondly, it’s also ironic that a guy working at a university in Israel should have a last name that means “thought” in German. I leave that to you to wonder about….

Until then, I’ll continue with my gedanken experiments seeing as I haven’t been able to do any real ones for several months.

2 Comments »

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  1. Eastern European Jews make up about half of the Jewish population of Israel (and most of the Jewish population of the USA), and since their ancestral language (Yiddish) is a dialect of German, it’s not surprising that their last names are derived from German.

    Comment by Jordan — December 14, 2006 #

  2. Interesting, I didn’t know that. Cool.

    Comment by David — December 14, 2006 #

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