Last night, I began reading HP Lovecraft’s Dreams In The Witch-House. So far, the story involves a connection between seventeenth century witchcraft and four-dimensional physics “… a mediocre old woman of the Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.”
Planck’s constant.
Heisenbergian uncertainty.
And everybody knows Einstein.
But I had never head of de Sitter. I thought he might be a fictional figure, like Olais Wormius, Van Junzt or AlHazred. But a web search turned up this.
Have I led a sheltered life or is de Sitter more obscure than Heisenberg, Fermi, and Oppenheimer?
Were his contributions less significant?
Has the world just forgotten him?
[sub]BTW-Please no spoilers for the story. I haven’t finished it yet.[/sub]
I don’t know if this is off topic, but recently a neutrino telescope has been installed and is being used to try to prove the existance of up to 11 different undiscovered dimensions. This is thought to be why the pull of gravity is so much smaller, relatively, than the force with which an electron is pulled toward the nucleus of an atom. Google link: http://antares.in2p3.fr/
de Sitter is a well-known guy among the cosmology/relativity circles (I’m making the logical a ssumption here that we’re talking of the same de Sitter as in de Sitter space). However, he is not up there in name recognition with Einstein or Heisenberg or Planck, and for what I would suggest are darned good reasons, namely that he didn’t basically found one of the two major new fields of physics.