On July 29th, 2014, NASA Television broadcasted live the launch of the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV-5) cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. The spacecraft was named "George Lemaitre" by ESA in honor of the 20th century Belgian astronomer, physicist and Catholic priest credited with proposing the theory of the expansion of the universe.
ATV-5 will finally give some credit to the scientist who developed the "Big Bang" theory of an ongoing expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, name giver of the famous telescope. Similarly the law and the constant connected to the Big Bang theory which are known today as "Hubble's Law" and "Hubble's Constant", were indeed developed by George Lemaitre.
All this is not surprising, as already in 1980 the University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler formulated Stigler's Law "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Alzheimer disease was described first by Beljahow, the Kuiper belt of asteroids was discovered by Jewitt and Luu (Kuiper even denying its existence), Gaussian distribution was introduced by Abraham de Moivre etc. Paper, every kid in school learns, is supposed to be the brainchild of Cai Lun, minister at the Han dynasty court. In fact paper has been found in graves which are at least one hundred years older. He simply happened to be the bureaucrat who brought the new stuff to the attention of the emperor. "He who writes, remains" as a German proverb says. At least paper was not named after him.
In China, one of the most famous misattributions is certainly the quote of “crossing the river by feeling for the stones.” Describing China’s economic approach of carefully controlled reform, using a trial-and-error method, it was coined by Chen Yun, the economic mastermind behind China's "Reform and Opening" policy starting in late 1978, but is wrongly credited to Deng Xiaoping most of the time.
In tourism, most tourism industry inspired textbooks will claim that Thomas Cook started modern tourism. Cook, a clergyman like Lemaitre (but Baptist), certainly can be seen as a pioneer of package tour tourism, moving from organising cheap train travels for the English working class to attend Temperance meetings to providing luxury tours to the European upper class of the 19th century. However, with package tours on the wane, this might soon be considered as only one chapter in the long history of traveling, which started thousands of years ago, not the least in China. "The wise man delights in water, the good man delights in mountains" is the most quoted sentence from Confucius' Analects in all the travel diaries of the many Chinese who explored their country over the centuries as an act of self-cultivation rather than facilitating the desire for a more liberated, autonomous existence, as found in Western travel and travel writing.
Update: ATV-5 George Lemaitre successfully docked safely at the
