Cohn Institute Seminar 08.12.2025 - Anastasiia Lazutkina & Guy Hetzroni: What are discovery and invention?

Links to the videos on Youtube:

Elkana Forum Workshop: What are discovery and invention? part 1 

Elkana Forum Workshop: What are discovery and invention? part 2

Under the “Elkana forum Workshop”:

What are discovery and invention? Lessons drawn from multiple discoveries and inventions in 20th Century physics

Anastasiia Lazutkina, University of Wuppertal

Seeing the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Without Discovering It: Parallel Measurements before 1965

When does a measurement become a discovery? In this talk I reconstruct how multiple researchers in the 1950s and early 1960s registered a cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), yet did not interpret it as such, despite theoretical expectations of relic radiation already in circulation by the late 1940s. I argue that what changed in 1965, when the CMB was officially discovered, was not the appearance of a better signal, but the companion paper by Dicke et al., which supplied what Stein (1994) and Curiel (forthcoming) call "schematizing the observer". 

Guy Hetzroni, The Open University of Israel

Excluded fields and Missed Potentials: Discoveries and Oversights in the Aharonov–Bohm Effect

The talk contrasts Aharonov and Bohm's 1959 discovery of the AB effect with Ehrenberg and Siday's 1949 ignored proposal of the same experimental setup,  and situates both alongside earlier theoretical works that might be viewed as missed opportunities to discover the Aharonov-Bohm effect. It explores whether specific prejudices or misconceptions delayed the effect’s discovery and recognition, and what ultimately allowed those obstacles to be surmounted. 

Gathering for coffee and refreshments at 17:45

Chair: Shaul Katzir

The public is invited