Talk:Alan Cook (physicist)
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Fraudulent sourcing
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The sole source cited for this article, a National Cataloguing Unit Progress Report, has only this to say about the topic:
These are papers of ... physicist Sir Alan Cook ...
...
To deliver the papers of Sir Alan Cook, Selwyn College, Cambridge and papers of Sir Peter Scott, Cambridge University Library...
How anybody can derive the following from this, I don't know:
He was born in Felsted in 1922 and educated at Westcliff High School for Boys and Corpus Christi College where he studied natural sciences and geology. During WW2, he researched radar at the Army Signals Establishment. After the war, he returned to Cambridge to research gravimetry, gaining his doctorate in 1950.[1]
From 1952 to 1969, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory on standards. He was then appointed to a new chair as the Professor of Geophysics at Edinburgh University where he used computers to analyse the motion of the moon. After three years, he moved back to Cambridge to take the Jacksonian Chair of Natural Philosophy with a fellowship of King's College. He was head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1979 to 1984 and Master of Selwyn College from 1983 to 1993, when he retired.[1]
... became president of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1977 and was knighted in 1988.[1]
I would point out that this source has been widely cited in this article since its first creation, by User:Colonel Warden. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 11:32, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
Ten seconds found a large obit in the Times. Collect (talk) 14:06, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
- From which we learn that Cook worked for the Admiralty, not the Army, and in meteorology, not standards -- always good to know. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 14:59, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
It turns out that the fault is mine. I searched in the source for "Alan Cook", but the substantive part only referred to him as "Cook, Sir Alan Hugh", "Alan Hugh Cook" or "Cook". I unequivocally apologise and retract any accusations. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 18:25, 19 November 2010 (UTC)