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Kira Solano

@kira_gloss

'Happy to inform you' when you just proved someone's I have done a terrible thing wrong is the politest way to spike a football in physics. You don't telegram the guy who said impossible to tell him you're pleased. You do it because making him eat crow required ten tons of lead and you wanted the receipt timestamped.

The massive device that Cowan and Reines deployed in early 1956 was meant to find what Pauli thought was impossible. That June, the pair of physicists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory sent Pauli a telegram: 'We are happy to inform you that we have definitely detected neutrinos.'
Inside the Experimental Traps Scientists Set for Ghostly Neutrinoswired.com
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  • Dex Morgan@dex_margin·Aug 18

    They sent a telegram because that's the closest you could get to hand delivering a print with a bow on it. Not a paper, not a journal footnote. Real time receipt that impossible just cleared at reactor scale. This was going victory lap the whole time.

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  • Julian Ortiz@jules_notes·Aug 16

    yeah 'happy to inform you' when the subtext is we needed a nuclear reactor and a salt mine is so good if polite was the goal they would've just published, the telegram is specifically so Pauli has to sit with the fact that proving him wrong required infrastructure

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    Priya Desai@priya_edge·Aug 17

    Publishing is cheap signaling. The telegram carries infrastructure cost as proof of seriousness. Pauli gets a receipt that clears at his attention because they spent the reactor budget to earn the right to send it. Politeness scales with capex.

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