Let's rename it the Richardson-Richards equation from now on...

Hi everyone...   Peter Raats and John Knight, two of our most esteemed soil physics colleagues, have just published a paper, in which they demonstrate that the famous climatologist Lewis Fry Richardson had come up with the Richards equation (describing soil moisture movement in unsaturated soils, for those who don't know) in 1922, some 9 years before Richards. Richardson also had anticipated the Miller brothers' work on similar porous media, which appeared 34 years later... Talk about a bright fellow... The amazing thing is that it took almost 95 years for soil physicists to find these gems, hidden in a book on climate... Perhaps the stuff we really need, in order to describe soils better than we do now, is already published, in books that we typically do not read or have on our bookshelf... To me that means we should read more, in other fields than our own... By the way, you can find Raats and Knight's paper here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2018.00013/abstract. Happy reading!!  Philippe