Who invented it or sound the mort to redefine history
Success has many fathers, failure none.
The race is open to redefine history... Everyone has its own story to tell who was at the origin of the extrasolar planet hunt. Here only some examples.
The negative side of Wikipedia shows up here, that everyone can define its own history. Wikipedia in whole is used extensively in this case to produce false tracks and false historic facts. Another example. There are so many and everyday a new one is added so that it seems not necesary to care about.
But the web in whole is used to redefine history. Only some excerpts out of this "redefinition bussiness" :
Another article (Nature! Incredibly. They take part in this game. The links are rather dead) The referenced article is from 1992, not 1991, confirmed 1994. A naiv question: Is a pulsar a normal star like our sun ?
Another (click on more info..)
Another (Compare this with this description!)
Seems everyone has some other dates to tell.
Besides articles everyone produces these days graphs (seems these folks think that it looks impressively scientific) with exoplanet discoveries in 1988 or even as early as the fiftheeths or lists in which suddenly exoplanets apear which you don't find in any other list and so on... The bending of historic facts has many aspects.
In the list Compiled by California and Carnegie Planet Search you can find one single entry predating my letters and postings: HD 114762b, which is till today (Dec of 2009) not confirmed as an exoplanet (it seems to be a brown dwarf):
"If it turns out to be an exoplanet, it will be the first one ever detected...." . (eg Wikipedia HD 114762b ) Strange kind of science, why not list some other, even earlier found as "exoplanet, to be confirmed". And as you can read on this whole site, all stars will get confirmed as having exoplanets! Tip: use any star ever detected.
Afterwards there will come very intelligent people and ask: " why haven't you pubished in a scientific magazine?". Very simple. None would have accepted it. A breakdown of a whole part of a science building is unprecedented and simply not conceivable for most of us, editors of science magazines included. And if you don't believe me: there are many serious scientists in the net who tell that Einstein would have had no chance to publish his ideas today!