But a dissertation and a diary are all about content. I mean, what is a diary save for its content?
Suppose Einstein first scribbled “E = mc[sup]2[/sup]” on the back of an envelope. The envelope isn’t intended for public consumption, either. Would you be surprised of no one ever heard of Einstein’s envelope? I doubt you would.
So what’s the difference between Einstein’s envelope and dissertation content that later (or, more often, previously) makes its way into an academic paper?
This is a really important point.
And I mentioned before that Emily Dickinson’s poems were on scraps of paper not intended for public consumption. People all over the world have been leaving notes behind on scraps of paper for a thousand years. Most are forgotten. But somehow, some way, Emily’s words made it into public awareness.
PhD dissertations are not handicapped by being scribbled on scrap pieces of paper. Yes, they are not on the bookshelves of Barnes&Noble but they also aren’t hidden away stuffed into cookbooks and the cracks of walls in houses. Therefore, it’s surprising that one hasn’t become famous yet given the statistical sample size.
However, I think we will eventually have such a specimen. With the ever changing information age, perhaps Claude Shannon’s paper will become more and more famous. Perhaps some of the PhD work already mentioned in this thread will be known by lay people in a hundred years and exceed the recognition of Shannon’s master’s thesis.
In the OP, I anticipated the lack of famous PhD dissertations and cast a wider net to include followup works (books) that were based largely on the graduate student’s research work. Posters have provided good examples of this. I was just hoping I overlooked an obvious doctoral dissertation that many people knew about.
I still think the answer to the OP is the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, even though it’s kind of cheating.
One of the biggest differences between a diary and a PhD dissertation, is that a diary doesn’t require a PhD to understand. At least in the sciences, 99.99% of the population would be lost in the abstract. Of course it doesn’t literally require a PhD, but they are technically far beyond the reach the average person. A diary written by a twelve year old girl is not.
Ok, the difficulty of finding a cite about this probably disqualifies it but…
Some years back there was a media kerfluffle about a woman student’s thesis? dissertation? I don’t recall. But it was about the sexism she perceived on the street from men looking at her. Basically she walked around in a large city, dressed in somewhat revealing (though not outrageous) cloting, and video taped the responses. Some were just looks from men, sp,e were comments, and some men she chose to interview about the responses they gave.
I believe the term “the male gaze” was associated with her work, but Googling it turns up another researcher who coined the term in reference to cinema. So if there is a connection, I didn’t dig deep enough through all the references to the other person to find it.
Anyway, it got a substantial amount of press at the time. Was it legimate research, what conclusions could be drawn, etc. It was a controversial topic with video readily available. It might be there was a 60 Minutes piece on it, or something by one of the other newsmagazines of the time.
Does anyone else recall this?
True – especially for physics and mathematics work. But I’m including PhDs in humanities. I’ve read some dissertations on topics of history and English and they didn’t seem impossible to understand. Yes, they had their share of fancy ten dollar words. But gee whiz, Stephen Hawking’s non-PhD book “Brief History of Time” was well known by the public. Maybe nobody actually read the thing and just bought it for their coffee table. Nevertheless, the readability of some PhD dissertations would be at the level of Hawking’s book.
Abrahama Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is fairly well known. However, most average folks (high school kids) don’t actually know what it means after they read the words. The incomprehension of the words doesn’t seem to keep it from being famous.
Mine would’ve been, perhaps, except I had a nervous breakdown while writing it.
Look up to my post #57.
I swear, sometimes I think I’m invisible.
I did name a hamster Shannon. His office was across the hall from my lab - but of course he never showed up all the time I was there, alas.
Butbutbut, that’s because Ph.D. research work has a standard vehicle for getting into the public consciousness, other than the dissertation. The trickling process is routine and controlled, rather than haphazard.
A personal diary is just going to sit on a shelf somewhere unless some haphazard combination of unusual circumstances inspires somebody to publish it and draw attention to it. Consequently, if it gets famous, it’s going to be known as “So-and-so’s Diary”. There is no other version or format of that particular diary content to compete with it for public attention.
But a Ph.D. dissertation is going to sit on a shelf and usually also have its contents distilled for publication in another form, such as an article or book. So if the content gets famous (which does frequently happen), it’s going to be known as “So-and-so’s paper on such-and-such”, or “So-and-so’s book on such-and-such”, etc., not as “So-and-so’s dissertation”.
Asking why there aren’t famous Ph.D. dissertations on groundbreaking discoveries is kind of like asking why there aren’t famous dress rehearsals of theatrical masterpieces, or famous trial heats for record-breaking sports performances. The reason is that if the work was really notable, it became famous through the form of it that was deliberately designed for public presentation, not through its “rough-draft” preliminary form.
Right. Totally agree. That’s why I threw out the possibily that some genius met an untimely death right after finishing his PhD thesis. That naked dissertation is all way have which caused it to became famous. No example of this concocted scenario has come to light yet.
Right. Totally agree again. But… I was thinking that the sample size of 200 years was large enough to possibly uncover at least one paper that is thought of as “So-and-so’s Dissertation” (with the help of confluence of unusual events.)
I think Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis shows that it’s possible. More than one source mentions it as being the most important master’s thesis of all time.
We have Virgil’s Aeneid in “rough draft” form.
I would think the faked ones would be those that become famous, like Dr. King’s where it was copied from others and he did not earn his degree at all. Otherwise I agree with Kims idea that a real good one comes out in another form.
Good-for-nothing, work-shy hamsters… Nothing but a pack of layabouts, the lot of 'em!
The point is that “rough draft” status isn’t enough of a barrier to prevent it becoming famous.
To emphasize again, I totally agree with all the deliberate intentional procedural reasons you’ve mentioned that prevent the dissertations from being well known. Let’s get past that because that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m saying I was surprised that zero PhD dissertations became famous even from unintentional random confluence of events. See the difference? I’m not exactly sure why this is unclear.
To restate a different way, my surprise is more of a incorrect guess at statistics & probability which has very little to do with the content of the PhD work themselves. For example, I’m guessing millions of computer mice have been manufactured. I also guess that somebody, somewhere, some time in the last 15 years threw a mouse pointing device out the window in frustration. I have no proof that this guess is correct. It just “feels” like it must’ve happened given the billions of human interactions people have had with a computer mouse. But, it turns out my guess is wrong and that seems… odd. Kimstu keeps telling me that manufacturers don’t design computer mouse to be thrown out the window so why would I guess such a situation? I keep saying, “I agree manufacturers don’t design mice to be thrown out the window but that’s irrelevant.”
There have been many good reasons mentioned why doctoral dissertations won’t become famous. I agree with all of them. However, history has shown that unintentional circumstances can override all procedures to keep a work obscure – especially if the work is very good. It has happened across all media across various subjects. So really, the issue is that 200 years of PhD samples is too short of time for one to pop out (by the help of random confluence of events.)
In any case, I believe Shannon’s master’s thesis is close to supporting my point. Master’s theses are also not designed to be famous, but Shannon’s graduate paper has started to gain prominence outside the obscure archives of a university microfiche library. Not quite the public awareness as Euclid’s Elements or Newton’s Principia but more than anyone would have ever anticipated.
Oh. Well, for that to happen you’d pretty much have to have the dissertation be the only accessible, or the most accessible, repository of the brilliant research in question.
And for that to happen, you’d pretty much have to have the dissertation author die with the dissertation complete but none of its content published, which doesn’t happen very often in the case of brilliant research.
One factor that hasn’t been considered yet AFAICT is the comparative youth and health of the average Ph.D. dissertation writer. They’re usually in their 20s or 30s and in good enough shape to withstand the rigors of doctoral study. If somebody’s able to produce a brilliant and groundbreaking dissertation, the odds are that they’ll be able to stick around long enough to produce in a very short time brilliant and groundbreaking publications based on their dissertation research. Consequently, damn few people will ever read or hear of the dissertation itself.
There is no good reason to think that any time period will be long enough for one to “pop out”. Even chaotic systems can be bounded. The fact that dissertations, and particularly the groundbreaking ones, are essentially out of reach for the general public might be the limiting factor.
Yep, this all makes sense and I agree again.
At the same time, I wonder if some more PhD gems were overlooked because this thread seems heavily skewed towards physics and math and underrepresented by humanities. (CalMeacham’s mention of Carlos Castaneda’s Master’s thesis and JWT Kottekoe’s cite of Jane Goodall notwithstanding.)
I realize that this is something of a digression from the OP’s original question, which is about dissertations that are famous as works unto themselves, but I wanted to add another example of very important and famous research that was originally published in a dissertation. Apparently, Louis de Broglie’s hypothesis of wave-particle duality was first published in his doctoral dissertation in 1924. This is, at least, a very famous idea (even among nonscientists) that was first published in a dissertation. And, at the time, the dissertation generated considerable controversy in the physics community. However, I wouldn’t say that the dissertation itself remains famous today – the ideas and the man behind them are still very well known among laypeople, but not too many people (aside from some scientists and historians of science) remember much about the dissertation.
I can certainly see the point made by Ruminator that dissertations in less-collaborative fields – some humanities and theoretical fields, for example – might have more opportunity to contain research not previously published, and so could have a greater chance of becoming famous in their own right. I don’t have any examples to add beyond those already mentioned, though.