Historical Predicted Discoveries
100 Historical Things, Number 27
Well, yesterday we had the wonderful announcement that the Higgs Boson particle has been discovered. Well, it needs confirming, but very probably. The existence of the particle was predicted in 1964, and for me the best part of the reporting on the discovery was the clip of Peter Higgs looking so chuffed that it had taken place in his lifetime (not sure if it is included in the videos here - it's a real tear-jerker if you can find it!)[1].
Anyway, this got me thinking about predicted discoveries, and the way in which they have played a role in the development of scientific knowledge. I think my favourite example has to be the periodic table, which started to come about as scientists from the 18th C onwards recognised different elements with different properties. Then Dmitri Mendeleev did this amazing thing where he put the known elements on a grid with spaces for elements that hadn't been discovered yet. And since then, the spaces have been filled in as we have discovered more and more elements.[3]
Being a linguist, I'm now going to twist this into a post about linguistic discoveries :) Well, just one. Around the 18th C, scholars started to realise that languages were related to each other - in particular most of the languages of Europe and some of those in and around India. Over the course of the 19th C, people studied the ways in which the languages are related and created all sorts of different laws, mapping the ways in which different sounds in different languages correspond to each other, and hypothesising that they are all descended from an early, unattested language usually termed Proto-Indo-European. So, an original PIE [p] comes out as [p] in Latin and Greek, but [f] in English, it disappears in Irish, etc - pater, pater, father, athir.
One of the scholars working on Indo-European, Ferdinand de Saussure, came up with a theory that is in at least some senses similar to what quantum physicists do :) He noticed that in certain sets of related words in different languages, there is sometimes an unexpected lack of correspondence in certain parts of the word. This, he argued, is due to a Proto-Indo-European sound that is not attested in any existing daughter language, which was responsible for a variety of reflexes that would otherwise be unexplained. He called these hypothetical sounds coéfficients sonantiques, but we now call them laryngeals. You can read more about the ins and out of de Saussure's theory at Wikipedia's laryngeal theory page.
Fast forward to the early 20th C, and scholars are working on the decipherment of Hittite. When they realise that Hittite is an Indo-European language (belonging to the Anatolian family), they then start to compare it with the other IE languages, and despite some difficulties of interpretation[4], the language becomes fully incorporated into the study of PIE. And what do they find in Hittite? That's right, they find laryngeals[5].
The repercussions of the partial 'proof'[6] of laryngeal theory are not as far-reaching as those of the discovery of the God particle. But it's still pretty cool.
Now tell me, what is your favourite historical conjecture that turned out to be true?
---
[1] By the way, if this whole business has inspired a curiosity about quantum mechanics (those of you not so familiar with the field, that is), I would recommend having a read of the Wikipedia 'Introduction to quantum mechanics', which is pretty accessible and could have you spending several days glued to the internet[2].
[2] If you weren't going to be glued to the internet anyway...
[3] Simplistic explanation is simplistic.
[4] E.g. texts with bizarre subject matter, the lack of an independent future tense, a weird verbal system, and so on.
[5] Specifically, they find that some of the hypothetical laryngeals are regularly represented in Hittite writing. Now, Hittite is written in a form of cuneiform, and it is fair to say that we still do not know exactly what one of these laryngeal things would have sounded like. But where de Saussure said certain laryngeals should turn up in PIE, they turn up in Hittite.
[6] Note non-scientific use of word!
Well, yesterday we had the wonderful announcement that the Higgs Boson particle has been discovered. Well, it needs confirming, but very probably. The existence of the particle was predicted in 1964, and for me the best part of the reporting on the discovery was the clip of Peter Higgs looking so chuffed that it had taken place in his lifetime (not sure if it is included in the videos here - it's a real tear-jerker if you can find it!)[1].
Anyway, this got me thinking about predicted discoveries, and the way in which they have played a role in the development of scientific knowledge. I think my favourite example has to be the periodic table, which started to come about as scientists from the 18th C onwards recognised different elements with different properties. Then Dmitri Mendeleev did this amazing thing where he put the known elements on a grid with spaces for elements that hadn't been discovered yet. And since then, the spaces have been filled in as we have discovered more and more elements.[3]
Being a linguist, I'm now going to twist this into a post about linguistic discoveries :) Well, just one. Around the 18th C, scholars started to realise that languages were related to each other - in particular most of the languages of Europe and some of those in and around India. Over the course of the 19th C, people studied the ways in which the languages are related and created all sorts of different laws, mapping the ways in which different sounds in different languages correspond to each other, and hypothesising that they are all descended from an early, unattested language usually termed Proto-Indo-European. So, an original PIE [p] comes out as [p] in Latin and Greek, but [f] in English, it disappears in Irish, etc - pater, pater, father, athir.
One of the scholars working on Indo-European, Ferdinand de Saussure, came up with a theory that is in at least some senses similar to what quantum physicists do :) He noticed that in certain sets of related words in different languages, there is sometimes an unexpected lack of correspondence in certain parts of the word. This, he argued, is due to a Proto-Indo-European sound that is not attested in any existing daughter language, which was responsible for a variety of reflexes that would otherwise be unexplained. He called these hypothetical sounds coéfficients sonantiques, but we now call them laryngeals. You can read more about the ins and out of de Saussure's theory at Wikipedia's laryngeal theory page.
Fast forward to the early 20th C, and scholars are working on the decipherment of Hittite. When they realise that Hittite is an Indo-European language (belonging to the Anatolian family), they then start to compare it with the other IE languages, and despite some difficulties of interpretation[4], the language becomes fully incorporated into the study of PIE. And what do they find in Hittite? That's right, they find laryngeals[5].
The repercussions of the partial 'proof'[6] of laryngeal theory are not as far-reaching as those of the discovery of the God particle. But it's still pretty cool.
Now tell me, what is your favourite historical conjecture that turned out to be true?
---
[1] By the way, if this whole business has inspired a curiosity about quantum mechanics (those of you not so familiar with the field, that is), I would recommend having a read of the Wikipedia 'Introduction to quantum mechanics', which is pretty accessible and could have you spending several days glued to the internet[2].
[2] If you weren't going to be glued to the internet anyway...
[3] Simplistic explanation is simplistic.
[4] E.g. texts with bizarre subject matter, the lack of an independent future tense, a weird verbal system, and so on.
[5] Specifically, they find that some of the hypothetical laryngeals are regularly represented in Hittite writing. Now, Hittite is written in a form of cuneiform, and it is fair to say that we still do not know exactly what one of these laryngeal things would have sounded like. But where de Saussure said certain laryngeals should turn up in PIE, they turn up in Hittite.
[6] Note non-scientific use of word!