Letters: Unnamed

Charles Bennett — Fri, 16 Apr 1993 23:00:00 +0000

William Bown’s article ‘Is this teleportation as we know it?’ (This
Week, 3 April), by using my name seven times while not mentioning any of
my coauthors even once, does them a grave injustice and undermines one of
the customs scientists have devised to apportion credit fairly: the alphabetical
listing of authors in scientific publications. My collaborators are Gilles
Brassard and Richard Jozsa of the Universite de Montreal, Asher Peres of
Technion in Israel, Claude Crepeau of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris
and William Wooters of Williams College in Massachusetts. My contribution
was certainly not the greatest. In a joint paper, it is often impossible
and divisive to rank precisely the relative contributions of the several
authors; hence they are listed alphabetically, while other lesser contributors
are acknowledged in the text or in footnotes. This convention is undermined
when popular articles mention only the first author. If New �Ӱ�ԭ�� doesn’t
have room for all our names, you should just say that the work was done
by an international group of six scientists. That would have been far more
accurate and less harmful than using my name alone.

Charles Bennett IBM Research Yorktown Heights, New York

Mapping the cold glow of the big bang: NASA’s firstsatellite dedicated to cosmology is providing new insights into the earlyformation of the Universe with measurements of astonishing precision. Butthe results still give no clues as to how stars and galaxi

Charles Bennett — Fri, 09 Aug 1991 23:00:00 +0000

Charles Bennett, Author at New �Ӱ�ԭ��

Letters: Unnamed

Mapping the cold glow of the big bang: NASA’s firstsatellite dedicated to cosmology is providing new insights into the earlyformation of the Universe with measurements of astonishing precision. Butthe results still give no clues as to how stars and galaxi