My father did a lot of writing in his life. Mostly non-fiction. Two things he said about writing in general have stuck with me. Number One is “Don’t get it right, get it written.” For someone who strove to write what he thought was true, and then defend it, this is a remarkable quote. But Number Two is an arresting counterpart. “You don’t know what you think, until you write it down.” 

I wrote a few days ago about Japanese scientists who changed the study of meteorites. It was only after I hit the publish button that I realized several more reasons why I wanted to write about them.

I’ve been writing about Catholic scientists (which as far as I know, they aren’t) for more than twenty years now..

In the process of reading short bios about all sorts of scientists and mathematicians I began to see clearly that, for every sentence about how the world works, there were a bunch of people who spent years thinking and working on just that bit of knowledge. But mostly, we don’t learn their names. 

I realized that I just wanted to know the names of those Japanese guys who found thousands and thousands of meteorites. I wanted to know something of their stories. Initially, I didn’t find much about that even though there clearly IS a story about Keiko Yonai falling into a crevasse. 

I was also curious about why it’s so hard to find their names. Of course, as I worked on these questions, I found more words to try on Google, and discovered that I had misrepresented the story to some extent. I found a story from one of the early Japanese guys, who wrote because he said that no-one really understood what had happened. 

Keiko Yonai was not the first guy to discuss how the ice sheets would affect meteorite hunting. He certainly discussed the matter but the story actually starts with Masao Gorai to whom Renji Naruse took the original nine meteorites. Naruse was looking for them, deliberately, as a gift to Gorai who had asked if some could be found. Gorai later said that he was just joking a bit when he said that he had enough of the other rocks that could be acquired in Antarctica and would love a meteorite. 

However, Naruse took this very seriously and really wanted the meteorites as an honorable gift. He wrote about finding the first rock, saying that if he had found it in a moraine somewhere else he would have tossed it out as completely unremarkable. And as the story goes, he and his crew picked up eight more rocks, sort of lying out on the ice, and handed them to Gorai. Not thinking that they were important, Gorai didn’t even look at them for a few months and then, Holy Cow! Nine meteorites, and of such different types that they couldn’t possibly be the same fall. Gorai and Shima and some others immediately worked out what this meant in terms of ice movement in Antarctica. The constant glacial movement would consolidate rocks from different areas,  and would produce new meteorites at some glacial terminus from time to time as the ice melted. 

Polar Science Volume 3, Issue 4, January 2010, Pages 272-284

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873965209000589#bib18

When I started I found Keizo Yonai first because he has an obituary in Meteoritics magazine. Eventually, I discovered that Masao Gorai was known as an important meteoritics person, but he never joined that particular society, so no obituary in its proceedings. He wrote mostly in Japanese. 

I also found a history of the Meteoritical Society and it was not particularly edifying reading, though it was funny, if unintentionally. The early history mentions some serious personal grudges being held against people. It features a man who believed that meteorites exploded because they were made of anti-matter, but he was a high-up official in the society, and was able to snub a lot of other people and sneer at their ideas. 

Well, the point really is that scientists are people and have all sorts of reasons for doing what they do. AND getting a story straight is incredibly difficult. 
I don’t fault the Americans for constantly talking about the guy who pushed the United States into arranging to fund trips to Antarctica for the last fifty years. A lot of the Catholic scientists I’ve looked up over the years have been people who learned a scientific fact or idea from someone with a different nationality. They bring this thought to their own nationality and then take the next step of understanding. But I do fault everyone involved for so completely losing sight of the original Japanese researchers as human beings who deserve some personal credit.