Jewish Invention Myths: Holography/The Hologram
According to the jews they invented the hologram with numerous jewish sources listing this as a ‘jewish invention’ (1) and Hungarian-British jewish physicist Dennis Gabor being listed as the inventor. (2)
Given that Gabor was awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery/invention of holography (3) this seems like a solid case: doesn’t it?
The problem comes when we dig into the history of how Gabor came to discover/invent holography which to be fair to Gabor; he went to some pains later on in his career to explain and try and credit the non-jews upon which his work was almost entirely built (4) but his protestations were largely and predictably ignored.
The roots of holography lie in the work of Polish physicist Mieczyslaw Wolfke in his 1917 PhD dissertation ‘Über die Möglichkeit der optischen Abbildung von Molekulargittern’ (‘About a possibility of optical imaging of molecular gratings’) where he proposed the concept of holograms and refined his theory to correctly explain how a hologram might be created in his September 1920 article (5) in the leading German physics journal of the time ‘Physikalische Zeitschrift’ but he never experimentally proved that he was right. (6)
Wolfke went on to work in other areas of physics and wasn’t credited as the man who actually created holography until Gabor did so in his December 1971 Nobel Prize lecture. (7)
Gabor himself claims he was unaware of Wolfke’s work until much later – given that it was published in the leading German physics journal of the day, Gabor could read German and it was one of a few articles in a very limited field I find this somewhat hard to believe although it is possible – but we know Gabor’s work on holography was actually a refinement of British physicist William Lawrence Bragg’s work on x-ray crystallography which led to the creation of the Bragg electron microscope between 1939 and 1942. (8)
Bragg was also apparently unaware of Wolfke’s 1920 paper – again rather inexplicably given German physics was one of the leaders (if not the leader) in the field till 1945 – (9) but it was his work upon which Gabor was working to refine when he ‘discovered’ holography ‘by accident’ in 1947. (10)
To be specific Gabor was seeking to refine Bragg’s electron microscope and correct the spherical aberration of magnetic electron lenses. (11) There is a significant difference between Bragg and Gabor’s work however and this was sufficient for the successful British patent from Gabor’s employers ‘British Thomson-Houston’ that was granted as #685,286 in 1948. (12)
However, despite Gabor working with and improving upon Bragg’s ideas and invention to make them more practical and despite the successful patent and being reproducible: Gabor’s method was not practical at all. (13)
Indeed, the implication from the literature was that Bragg successfully produced a hologram in 1939 but didn’t recognize it as a distinct phenomenon where-as Gabor’s narrower focus compared to Bragg’s wider focus enabled Gabor to identify the hologram as a distinct phenomenon more easily than Bragg. (14)
Gabor himself clear identified Bragg’s work as being key to his own and also referred to the work of Dutch Nobel Prize winning physicist Frits Zernike as also been of significant importance. (15)
Clearly, we can thus see that while Gabor first recognized the hologram for what it was, but certainly wasn’t first to correctly theorise it and also likely wasn’t the first to create it.
Therefore, while we can credit Gabor as being one of the discovers/inventors of holography: it must be a shared priority with both Wolfke and Bragg as well as potentially Zernike.
All of whom were not jewish.
References
(1) For example: https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/ and https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/when-is-a-jew-not-a-jew/
(2) https://christianislamicforum.wordpress.com/dedicated-to-our-jewish-brethren/
(3) https://www.imperial.ac.uk/electrical-engineering/news-and-events/dennis-gabor-lecture/
(4) See: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/gabor-lecture.pdf (especially pp. 13-15)
(5) P. Hariharan, 1996, ‘Optical Holography: Principles, techniques, and applications’, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 4-5
(6) https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/gabor-lecture.pdf (p. 13, n. 1)
(7) Ibid., p. 13
(8) Hariharan, Op. Cit., pp. 4-5
(9) https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/gabor-lecture.pdf (p. 13)
(10) Hariharan, Op. Cit., pp. 5-6
(11) Ibid., p. 5
(12) https://ethw.org/Milestones:Invention_of_Holography,_1947
(13) Hariharan, Op. Cit., pp. 5-6
(14) Ibid.
(15) https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/gabor-lecture.pdf (pp. 13-15)