Department of Corrections

The other day, I refrained from correcting my professor in class. His lecture notes refer to Raleigh scattering. The phenomenon which he almost surely intended to refer to is Rayleigh scattering, after Lord Raleigh. [I suspect that Durham’s proximity to Raleigh, NC increased the probability of this error.] One may be interested to know that this phenomenon explains why the sky is blue. From wikipedia:

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (12 November 1842 – 30 June 1919) was a British physicist who (with William Ramsay) discovered the element argon, an achievement that earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904. He was the second Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge, following James Clerk Maxwell in this position from 1879 to 1884.

Secondly, this professor also described the Photoelectric effect. He mentioned that Albert Einstein won his 1^st Nobel Prize for its discovery. While not actually wrong, this does suggest that Einstein won more than one Nobel Prize. He did not.

I was praised by a fellow officemate for exercising discretion in not publicly correcting the instructor. This is the more politically correct approach, and I am glad that I took it.