Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2023 March 29

= March 29 =

Mani Lal Bhaumik
Bengali newspapers are praising him as great inventer and scientist for 25 years. Now I am having doubt as I read in Bartaman patrika that he invented Lasik surgery for eyes, which is wrong. 42.105.101.220 (talk) 03:27, 29 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Why do you think that is wrong? Our article on him is well referenced. Shantavira|feed me 08:15, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
 * That specific claim is indeed incorrect; LASIK eye surgery was invented by Gholam A. Peyman, who patented this application of excimer lasers in 1989. The idea of excimer lasers goes back to the 1960. Bhaumik is a research scientist rather than an inventor. His contribution in this respect is that he was the first to show experimentally, in 1973, that excimer lasers could actually be made to work, thereby opening the way for applications. --Lambiam 09:22, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Last time I checked, Bhaumik is not even mentioned in the LASIK article. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:27, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
 * from the wikipedia article-At this meeting, Bhaumik presented substantial evidence to demonstrate for the first time that an excimer laser could be efficient and powerful enough for practical utilization. The application of excimer lasers in Lasik eye surgery has resulted in vision correction in many cases. I read Bengali version of this in 2002 in Anandabazar Patrika.

Dr Mani Lal Bhaumik, the first student to get his PhD degree from IIT Kharagpur, gifted the world eye corrective LASIK surgery technique. https://www.midnapore.in/people/mani_lal_bhaumik.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 42.105.101.114 (talk) 14:34, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
 * That name is not in the English wikipedia article about LASIK. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:09, 29 March 2023 (UTC)


 * WP:RS failure. For whatever reason, many sites over-state the contributions of certain ethnicities' contributions or claims of origination of certain fields of study. In fact, that site appears to be uncited plagiarism from our WP article. Stay classy, internet. DMacks (talk) 16:54, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
 * To be fair, it isn't limited to "certain ethnicities". There were deliberate attempts to aggrandize oneself (or ones that look like us) at the expense of those that did the real work, c.f. Rosalind Franklin, whose lack of testicles generally disqualified her from the proper credit vis a vis Watson, Crick, et. al.  -- Jayron 32 14:39, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I think DMacks meant that many sites, maintained by members of whichever imagined community, tend to exaggerate that community’s achievements as opposed to those of outsiders; not that certain communities were more prone to do it than others. A good sample can be found at Talk:Guglielmo Marconi and its archives. Tigraan Click here for my talk page ("private" contact) 15:15, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Fair, but also not to minimize the fact that people's contributions to many fields have been deliberately suppressed as well; there's a wide and fuzzy border between "aggrandizing the contributions of a minor figure in their field" and "correcting the aggrandizement of people in the past who didn't deserve the credit" and while I don't make any claim as to which this example is, it is not something which is so simple as "my history books never mentioned "X" so they mustn't be important". Sometimes, history books didn't mention X because the books were actually wrong.  Sometimes, they didn't mention X because X didn't deserve mentioning.  Could be either.  -- Jayron 32 15:40, 30 March 2023 (UTC)