Idiosyncrasies of Some Great Scientists

good informative read!

[Wolfgang Pauli said of him, “Dirac has a new religion – There is no God and Dirac is the prophet of God.” ]

Would that be something like ``La illahi Dirac rasoolullah`` in Arabic?

Tha should be the motto of al physicists.

Alephnull:

Sorry, I misspelt your nickname in my last post. It was an inadvertent mistake.

Mohammad Gill

re: Tesla`s idiosyncracies.
I read Tesla`s name mentioned by someone and that rang a bell. So i googled and found something interesting.
Tesla was a Serbian-Croat who migrated to US, worked with Edison for a while, split with him and started independently. He made important inventions including AC generators, Tessla coil etc. But this is what i found interesting from that article.
The link
(They were called terrestrial stationary waves, and what that basically means is that you can a) transmit electrical current using the Earth as a conductor, and b) you can cause the Earth to vibrate on a frequency, much like a tuning fork....
In his quest to test the limits of the terrestrial waves, Tesla began a period of extensive experimentation. during which he developed the Tesla Coil, a method for delivering high-voltage current which is still used in many TVs and other applications today.....
Using the coil, Tesla asked himself: If the Earth can conduct electricity, and the electricity vibrates around the world in waves through the planet, just how much electricity can the Earth hold?......He could think of no better way to answer that question than by dumping as much electricity as he could generate into the ground, just to see what would happen.
The area around his experiement became electrified, but not enough to kill anyone, and there were some very impressive bolts of man-made lightning which stopped when he blew up the town`s generator and caused a blackout over several miles.
At almost exactly the same time that this experiment was taking place, a mysterious explosion rocked a remote section of Siberia, to the tune of about a 15-megaton blast (40 years before the first Atomic Bomb test). The explosion has never been satisfactorily explained, although it is commonly dismissed as a meteor or comet impact (a claim which doesn`t quite add up with the measured damage on the scene).Interestingly, Tesla had claimed he was trying to use to wave to send a communication to an Arctic expedition that can supposedly be located along a straight line path between Tesla`s lab and the site of the explosion.)
That is Nikloi Tesla for you!
Sridhar

Alphanull:

I had written in ``A Mathematical Genius`` (John Nash) at Chowk.com on January 15, 2002,

``The great John von Neumann had launched the theory of games with Oskar Morgenstein; their work dealt with what is called the cooperative game theory (zero sum); in other words “one man’s gain is another man’s loss”. Nash accomplished the much more difficult task of formulating a theory of non-cooperative games which allows more than two parties in the game and none of them has to be a loser in the relative sense. The game theory found applications in many practical fields as diverse as economics and the cold war politics.``

This is the contribution for which John Nash was given the Nobel Prize. This was the work which he did before he became a victim of schizophrenia.

Mohammad Gill

zeemax #7

{{John Nash ... invented Game Theory.}}

No he didn`t. Von Neumann and Morgenstern published a whole book on Game Theory while Nash was still a teenager.

For electrical engineers, two outstanding eccentrics who made seminal contributions to the foundations of their field were Nikola Tesla and Oliver Heaviside. There is quite a bit of myth and legend surrounding Tesla. Heaviside, the self-taught discoverer of the Laplace transform among other things, is not as well known, though his ultimate impact might be greater.

The famously neurotic mathematician Norbert Wiener is another person whose combination of scientific output and eccentricity might warrant some attention.

From the article:

{{Turing’s Computable Numbers outshone and eclipsed, in due time, Church’s Lambda Calculus. Even in 1930s, Godel preferred Computable Numbers to Lambda Calculus (Turing never met Godel even when they were contemporary at Princeton), which may have caused some bitterness in Church’s mind.}}

Turing’s formalism (Turing machines, introduced in the ‘Computable Numbers’ paper) and Church’s lambda-calculus are in fact completely equivalent with respect to what they can compute (as are many other programming formalisms, both popular and obscure, to these and to each other). The equivalence is referred to as ‘Turing equivalence’ (aggravated insult to Church, no doubt). Emil Post devised a third (and equivalent) formalism roughly contemporaneously with Turing and Church.

Turing actually used the device of Godel numbering in his paper. It’s not surprising that people might initially have preferred the more concrete and mechanistic formalism of Turing machines to the lambda calculus. The latter is much closer to a usable programming language but it took a couple of decades for that language (LISP) to arrive.

Since this article concentrates on human-interest stuff, one might mention that Turing led quite as eventful a life as the Manhattan Project physicists (such as Feynman) on the other side of the Atlantic. He spent the Second World War engaged in cryptanalysis work – specifically the decoding of ciphered German naval signal traffic produced by the Enigma ciphering device. This work was vital to the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic and thus of the war in Europe. His last major area of scientific interest was mathematical biology - morphogenesis in living organisms. He died tragically young, by his own hand, after his conviction for homosexuality and consequent legally mandated medical ‘treatment’. His suicide note, before taking cyanide, apparently read “Dip the apple in the brew, Let the Sleeping Death seep through...”

Interactors:

nasah:

Thanks for metioning Schrodinger and the romantic inspiration that went into the devlopment of his quantum mechanics. I think I had mentioned this anecdote in one of my earlier articles also.

Fine Structure Constant:
There are some interesting stories attached with this constant. This constant is generally denoted by Greek alpha and its numerical value is approximately 1/137. Previously, it was estimated at 1/136.

Sir ArthurEddington was `possessed` by alpha and other universal constants. He was a great astronomer and had the distinction of launching the expedition for measuring the bending of light rays that emanated from a distant star, in the proximity of Sun, during the 1919 solar eclipse. (He is also infamous for his undeserved criticism of Subramanyam Chandrasekhar/his student (associate), for his theory of black holes. This theory was vindicated later on and Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize).

Toward the end of his career, Eddington took to mysticism. He believed that the seeds of a comprehensive theory of the universe were hidden in the universal constants. He gave a formula for alpha in terms of whole numbers 16 and 2 as follows: alpha = 16 +(16^2-16)/2= 136. Later on when alpha was found to be equal to 1/137, he added 1 to his formula to obtain 137. The Punch magazine dubbed him ``Sir Arthur Adding-One`` for that.

The value of 1/137 intrigued many scientists. Why is it reciprocal of 137, why not any other round number? Feynman remarked about this `oddity` saying, ``physicists ought to put a special sign in their offices to remind themselves of how much they don`t know. The message on the sign would be very simple. It would consist entirely of one word, or one number: 137.``

Wolfgang Pauli was intrigued by alpha and he died (arranged to die?) in room 137 of the Zurich Hospital.

Mohammad Gill

At Bell Labs Claude Shannon used to cycle around the halls on a Unicycle juggling four balls , while thinking out problems. He also invented a mechanical mouse with copper whiskers that could negotiate through a maze.

My blessings and prayers go to the writer for writing this piece at a time when I need solace to deal with the feeling of inadequacy that I have as a result of the realization of my own little idiosyncrasies- I wish this would have come out earlier so that I wouldn`t have spent the weekend being embarrassed about `em!


``Feynman was also known for his sloppy composition.``
Could you please elaborate a bit more on this statement?

Thanks!
Sahara

an interesting topic you have picked, gill sahib. here are some more:

einstein turned down an offer to become the first president of israel. He also made a bookmark using a $1,000 bill...and then misplaced the book. (btw they had $1,000 bills back then, before they were discarded for fear of facilitating cash payments for illegal activities).

you dont mention the sad circumstances of turing`s death - suicide, after being hounded by british police on account of his homosexuality.

then there was Philosopher Nasah who was so absent minded that after coming home on a rainy day, he put his umbrella in his bed, and himself went to the umbrella stand and stood there all night. (this one is a joke).

John Nash, spoke out against allegations that the movie glosses over aspects of his life - namely that he might be bisexual, antisemitic and a bad father.

Nash was interviewed for CBS`s 60 Minutes and denied being anti-Semitic, but claimed he could have said things that might sound that way whilst in the grip of his schizophrenia. Nash and his wife, Alicia, also said that he was not a homosexual.

She said it was ``just not true. I should know``.

LoL ... And he invented Game Theory.

Einstein had many idiosyncracies .....he never wore an ironed trousers and in place of belt, he would tie a piece of rope.

Who can forget Edisson`s idiosyncracies. Looks like the number of idiosyncracies are directly proportional to level of creativity.

re: this article
A nice article
Is there a book that details such idiosyncracies of great scientists?
I have read somewhere that Albert Einstein did not wear socks because his great toe was ``so big`` that it always made a hole in the socks!
And, he always dressed shabbily for all occasions, his reason being: ``the person either knows me or does not know me; in either case, it does not matter``!
Hope to hear more anecdotes from interactors.
Sridhar

delightful piece Dr. Gill -- thanks

one of the craziest stories about scientist`s idiosyncrasies and the mysterious ways creativity manifests itself -- comes from Erwin Shrodinger of Schrodinger`s Cat fame --

it is about the birth of his celebrated Schrodinger Equation -- on wave mechanics.

the idea of this Equation was tormenting Scrodinger`s head for months but it would not gel -- so the scientist tried another method -- one weekend Schrodinger a married man -- asked his newly found mistress to go with him to a resort in Swiss Alps -- rented a cabin -- closeted himself with the girl -- and made love in a marathon session that lasted all day and late at night -- while the snow was falling outside....

next day early morning, her girl friend still deep asleep, Schrodinger got up and wrote the whole equation in one session -- while the girl was still asleep.

that EQUATION shook the quantum world as one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century, and created a revolution not only in quantum mechanics, in physics and chemistry as well -- and earned Schrodinger the Nobel Prize...

.....ah the power of crazy illicit indoor love making in a warm cabin....in a raging snow storm outside......

now what kind of a Scientist a person would be -- whose creative juice wouldn`t flow like a Niagara Fall under the circumstances........ Schrodinger`s cat or no Schrodinger`s cat.......:)