Laws That Aren't Laws: Stigler's Law - Episode 5

Stephen M. Stigler's Law of Eponymy states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

Professor Stigler, a statistician at Chicago University, defined his own law in a tributary paper to his friend, the sociologist Robert Merton, in 1980.

Merton had been famous in sociology for writing about the "self-fulfilling prophecy", amongst other things, and also for a long treatise about how often the same law or principle in science has been discovered multiple times by different people.

Merton also wrote about how Isaac Newton's famous phrase "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" was not itself even his own metaphor.

Stigler's amusing and humble paper was thus, despite including some new statistical insights into the phenomenon (and even a reasoned suggestion as to its cause), more of a jovial tribute to his friend's earlier insights than an aggressive assertion of nominative priority.

It self-fulfilled its own eponymous point.

But the joke, and the law, stuck. And it continues to ask important questions about the nature of knowledge, the sociology - and the popular history - of science itself.

Presenter: Robin Ince

Produced by Alex Mansfield-Sella. First broadcast on Thursday 3 September 2020.