In two of his recent essays, David Mermin underscores the unreliability of human memory. In the February 2004 issue of Physics Today, (page 10), he discusses a position that Aage Peterson attributed to Niels Bohr and the conflicting views from Viktor Weisskopf and Rudolf Peierls of whether that was really Bohr’s position. A Google search attributes it to Bohr directly in over 90% of the citations. In the May issue, Mermin attributes a particular admonition to Richard Feynman, although the statement may actually have been Mermin’s own.
Memory is often—perhaps usually—unreliable. Eyewitness testimony, as Elizabeth Loftus and others have shown, 1–4 is notoriously unreliable. Misidentifications appear to arise through a process called confabulation: When we remember only part of an incident we unconsciously look for the most likely candidate to fill the gap and provide a logically complete story. Historians are aware of the problem. Their investigations also suffer from a similar phenomenon, the Rashomon effect (from the movie), in which any incident is seen differently by the different participants. The controversy of Werner Heisenberg’s role in the German atomic program is a good example of that effect.
Perhaps the best known example of attributing statements and positions where they best fit and to the most logical people is that of Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, explaining his methodology, says: “As to the speeches which were made either before or during the war, it was hard for me, and for others who reported them to me, to recollect the exact words. I have therefore put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to express them, while at the same time I endeavoured, as nearly as I could, to give the general purport of what was actually said.” This is what Michael Frayn did in his play Copenhagen. Both writers did deliberately what is normally done unconsciously.
As to the Matthew effect, I first ran across the citation, “even from him that hath not shall be taken away,” in graduate school some 50-odd years ago in the textbook Organic Chemistry by Louis F. Fieser and Mary Fieser (D. C. Heath, 1944). It is, however, a comment with many applications, and I have remembered it ever since. Although I usually attribute it to Fieser and Fieser, I add the caveat that it came from the New Testament (Matthew 13:12, 25:29; Luke 19:26).
