Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence: C.H. Payne H.N. Russell and Standards of Evidence in Early Quantitative Spectroscopy

摘要

Abstract: The ionization equilibrium theory of Meghnad Saha was hardly four years old, and still far from general acceptance, when a graduate student at Harvard University, Cecilia H. Payne, applied it to calibrate the Harvard spectral sequence as a temperature sequence. Payne indeed utilized Saha's relation not in its original form, but in its more acceptable form based upon a statistical mechanical re-derivation by E.A. Milne and R.H. Fowler. Her temperature calibration was, therefore, not at.