History Interesting anecdotes in the history of physics?

[pinball1970]

Oops, climate change...

Bet you wish we would have stuck with the fish eh?

 

[pines-demon]

Speaking of global warming eh? Well, let us go back then to the divine judge of thermodynamics: Lord Kelvin.

Kelvin was seriously annoyed when he did not find a piece of chalk for his lectures, specially when he was carrying out a long calculation. After two failed lectures without chalk, he ordered his assistant:

McFarlane, I told you to get plenty of chalk, and you haven't done it. Now have a hundred pieces of chalk on this ledge tomorrow; remember, a hundred pieces; I will count them!

Donald McFarlane, Kelvin's assistant tried to be very careful. He brought several boxes of chalk and set the white sticks on the shelf parallel to each other, separated each by 5 cm. The next day:

Thomson came in, put up his eyeglass, looked at the display, smiled sweetly, and, turning to the applauding students, began his lecture.

Another anecdote, I found is about his method of picking students for examination. Kelvin loved oral examinations, he used to pick up random names from a box and call students for questioning near the end of his lectures. Depending on how they answered, he classified the questioned students of the day into one of three receptacles, depending on how adequate was the answer. Those who had the right answer, had their names added to the receptacle of the "blessed", while the names of those that did very badly were thrown in the receptacle of the "damned". Students referred to the whole thing as the Divina Comedia. For students that were not picked it was a true spectacle (what was he going to ask? would the student survive divine judgment?). The receptacles were relabelled Purgatory, Heaven and Hell respectively to reflect the mood of the show.

McFarlane recorded a story in which a student came to Kelvin office very enthusiastically to discuss a problem of dynamics. At some point, McFarlane went away to look for some notes, he was suspicious coming back as he saw the student very close to the Divina Comedia. After a while, the student left. McFarlane decided to check all the names in the box and could not find the name of the inquiring student. The student must have felt very smart, knowing that he was safe from judgment the next day...
However, McFarlane writes:

I just made a new ticket for him and put it on top of the other tickets, the next day Sir William called him, the very first time.

Source: Lord Kelvin, by Andrew Gray (1908)

 

[pines-demon]

We have told many stories about the wit of von Neumann and Dirac. Here is a quick one about Freeman Dyson.

Jeremy Bernstein was a young student when he joined the the Institute of Advance Studies (Princeton) to work under Marvin (Murph) Goldberger, they were trying to grapple with a problem of electrodynamics, and asked Dyson for help:

It was early in the morning–by Institute standards. Most people worked at night and were not seen until the afternoon. Murph had come-up with a nasty looking integral equation. It doesn't matter much what that is except that it was very nasty. He had divided the terms into two groups; one was labelled $G(x)$, for ‘good of $x$’, and the other was labelled $H(x)$, for ‘horrible of $x$’. We were standing at the blackboard, staring morosely at horrible of $x$, when Dyson came in with his morning cup of coffee. He studied our equation. Murph asked,

Freeman, have you ever seen one like this?

Dyson said 'no', but that he felt particularly strong that morning. He copied down our equation and disappeared. In about twenty minutes he was back with the solution.

It was rediscovered by other people later and bears their names, but I saw what seemed to me, and still seems to me, like an incomprehensible conjuring trick. Over the years I have watched Dyson solve many different kinds of mathematical problems, and I cannot imagine what it must be like to be able to think with that rapidity and clarity in mathematics. Does everyone else appear to be going in slow motion? It is something that surely cannot be taught, at least to me. But I have learned enough mathematics to get pleasure and delight every time I see it happen.

I know now what to call my integrals.

From our previously mentioned ref: Eurekas and euphorias

 

[Swamp Thing]

Mathematician G.H. Hardy had an ongoing feud with God. Once, after spending a summer vacation in Denmark with Harald Bohr, he found he’d have to take a small boat across the tempestuous North Sea to return to England. Before boarding, he sent Bohr a postcard that said “I have proved the Riemann hypothesis. — G.H. Hardy.”

When Bohr excitedly asked about this later, “Oh, that!” Hardy said. “That was just insurance. God would never let me drown if it meant I’d get undue credit.”

 

[pines-demon]

Mathematician G.H. Hardy had an ongoing feud with God. Once, after spending a summer vacation in Denmark with Harald Bohr, he found he’d have to take a small boat across the tempestuous North Sea to return to England. Before boarding, he sent Bohr a postcard that said “I have proved the Riemann hypothesis. — G.H. Hardy.”

When Bohr excitedly asked about this later, “Oh, that!” Hardy said. “That was just insurance. God would never let me drown if it meant I’d get undue credit.”

Going forward (physics not math history)

I love all the math anecdotes, and I sincerely love this one of Hardy. However, it is time that I say here (I have already told others in private) that we should try to keep this thread on topic. It is about anecdotes in the history of physics and not maths. I do not mind if we sometimes we make a reference to a mathematician that worked in physics (like Euler, von Neuman and such), but I would like to have less of the pure mathematicians. I think that if we want to also to have anecdotes about mathematicians, we could create a new thread. I am trying to focus on physics anecdotes because for some reason I find them harder to find with respect to the mathematician anecdotes. I hope everybody is ok with this.

Mentors: If it is not too much effort, I would love to help split the math anecdotes into another thread.

 

[pines-demon]

Mathematician G.H. Hardy had an ongoing feud with God. Once, after spending a summer vacation in Denmark with Harald Bohr, he found he’d have to take a small boat across the tempestuous North Sea to return to England. Before boarding, he sent Bohr a postcard that said “I have proved the Riemann hypothesis. — G.H. Hardy.”

When Bohr excitedly asked about this later, “Oh, that!” Hardy said. “That was just insurance. God would never let me drown if it meant I’d get undue credit.”

Now going back to business but keeping the topic; here I leave you a couple of anecdotes I could find about sailing.

Shubnikov plantinum travel
Lev Shubnikov (from the Shubnikov-de Haas effect and type-II superconductivity, who died in Stalin Great Purge) joined the yacht club in his university years. During this time, some students from chemistry convinced Shubnikov to be the captain of the university's yacht, for a trip to the bay of Finland (without having the proper permit). After a long time passed, they were not coming back and people started talking about shipwreck.

Shubnikov eventually appeared to tell the story. It turns out that the students stoled platinum from the university in order to escape Russia and live abroad. Finland authorities caught them in the shore, but the chemistry students convinced them to deport them to Germany instead. Shubnikov ended up without money in Germany working in industries and photography until he eventually contacted the consulate to allow him to go back.

Dirac vs Tamm
Shubnikov and his wife (Olga Trapeznikova) eventually became physicists and went to the UK to work under De Haas. During this time they met with a lot of scientific celebrities and also sailed from time to time. One day, Trapeznikova recalls a story about Paul Dirac and Igor Tamm during a boat trip:

..the boat we got was huge and unruly. We didn’t sail too far from the shore. That’s when Dirac opened up. He has a nerd’s look but was a source of much trouble. Tamm was rowing and could not make the boat go straight, no matter how hard he tried. Dirac was teasing him relentlessly. Eventually Tamm got angry and pretended to go to sleep. Then the two of them (I was not participating, obviously) started pouring water on poor Tamm and soaked him completely. Things escalated to a wrestling match, and so it went...

Einstein the sailor

Einstein loved yachthing since he was young. One time, his friends even gave him a yacht as a gift called the Tümmler ('porpoise' in English) when he reached 50. According to Einstein, sailing was apparently one of the things that allowed him to forget about the world (even if he only discussed physics during his trips and performed calculations on relativity on the boat).

However, Einstein had two problems with sailing. First he was not very good sailor and he did not know how to swim, nor liked to wear a lifejacket. Biographist Ronald W. Clark said:

on more than one occasion he had to be towed away after his mast fell.

And Leon Watters, friend of Einstein, said:

while we were engaged in an interesting conversation I suddenly cried out ‘Achtung!’ for we were almost upon another boat. He veered away with excellent control and when I remarked what a close call we had had, he started to laugh and sailed directly toward one boat after another, much to my horror; but he always veered off in time and then laughed like a naughty boy

Photo from AP. Description:

Professor Albert Einstein began an Adirondacks vacation, July 3, 1936, with a nine-hour sailing lark that really wound up as a towing operation with a reporter's speed boat on the pulling end. The mathematician is shown leaning against the mast of his boat at Saranac Lake, New York. (AP Photo)

Sources:

• Reminiscence about Shubnikov by Trapeznikova
• Albert Einstein and yachting by some yachting website

 

[phinds]

we should try to keep this thread on topic.

Trying to keep a thread on topic here on PF is like trying to head cats. Good luck with that.

 

[pines-demon]

On Pauli

For unknown reasons we have avoided Wolfgang Pauli for so long (mentioned once?). Here is a (first) rundown of funny quotes by Pauli:

During a seminar by Eugene Guth, Pauli interrupted:

Guth, whatever you know I know

After a lecture by Albert Einstein, Pauli quipped:

You know, what Einstein says is not so stupid!

He made also a deal with Hendrik Casimir:

I will make a bargain with you: don’t comment on my driving and I won’t comment on your physics.

Victor Weisskopf went to work with Pauli as an assistant. During their first encounter, Weisskopf recalls:

Finally, he lifted his head and said,

Who are you?

I answered,

I am Weisskopf. You asked me to be your assistant.

He replied,

Oh, yes. I really wanted Bethe, but he works on solid state theory, which I don’t like, although I started it.

Solid state physics indeed was later rebranded as condensed matter physics because Pauli started calling it the Schmutzphysik (the dirty physics). When Weisskopf showed him his solution to the problem he gave him, Pauli responded:

I should have taken Bethe after all.

When Niels Bohr, Hendrik Kramers and John Slater proposed a failed theory that energy was not conserved during scattering (BKS theory), Pauli called it the Kopenhagener Putsch (Copenhagen coup). The experiments failed to confirm BKS theory and Pauli mocked it, proposing the Bhor Institute to

fly its flag at half mast on the anniversary of the publication of the work of Bohr, Kramers and Slater.

During the Wu experiment proposal to show that parity is not conserved in physics, Pauli tried to bet against Weisskopf:

Mrs. Wu is wasting her time. I would bet you a large sum that parity is conserved.

When the results came in, Pauli said:

I could never let it out that this is possible. I am glad that we did not actually do the bet because I can risk to lose my reputation, but I cannot risk losing my capital.

He also said to this:

I cannot believe God is a weak left-hander.

And who could not forget when Pauli read a paper and said:

This paper isn't right. It is not even wrong!

In 1958, Pauli went sick of cancer and was hospitalized in the well-adequate room 137. It is said that there he said before his death:

Ich weiss viel. Ich weiss zu viel. Ich bin ein Quantengreis. (I know much. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.)

 

[Swamp Thing]

trying to herd cats. Good luck with that.

A quantum control problem?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0910.2350.pdf

 

[pines-demon]

On Pauli (part 2)

I found so much material yesterday that this deserves a part 2 (comment if you want some more).

About Rudolf Peierls, Pauli said:

He talks so fast that by the time you understand what he is saying he is already asserting the opposite.

When he postulated the neutrino, Pauli repented:

I have done a terrible thing: I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.

During a conference, Ehrenfest and Pauli had a small confrontation:

On that occasion Ehrenfest stood a little away from Pauli, looked at him mockingly and said:

Herr Pauli, I like your article better than I like you!

To which Pauli very calmly replied:

That is funny, with me it is just the opposite!

In a letter to George Gamow (see picture) discussing Werner Heisenbergs unification theory, Pauli draws an empty square. The text says:

Comment on Heisenberg's radio advertisement:
"This is to show the world, that I can paint like Titian:"
[Empty square]
Only technical details are missing.
W. Pauli

Alternatively, Pauli sometimes signed as Die Geissel Gottes (the scourge of God).

Pauli suffered from the Pauli effect, a phenomena where experiments stopped working when he was nearby. Otto Stern is said to have barred Pauli from entering his lab. During a visit to the Institute of Advanced Studies, the Princeton cyclotron spontaneously combusted creating a large fire.
Another story by George Gamow, says that:

A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect!

This even worked on practical pranks, according to Peierls:

At one reception this Pauli effect was to be parodied, and a chandelier had been suspended carefully by a rope which was to be released when Pauli entered, causing the chandelier to crash down. But when Pauli came, the rope became wedged on a pulley and nothing happened—a typical example of the Pauli effect

And on more ordinary objects. During the inauguration of the C.G. Jung Institute of psychology, Jung invited Pauli. During the ceremony a vase fell making a lot of noise. Pauli says in a letter to Jung:

When that amusing "Pauli effect" of the overturned vase occurred, on the occasion of the founding of the Jung Institute, I had the immediate and vivid impression that I should "pour out water inside" (— to use the symbolic language that I have acquired from you).

According to Léon Rosenfeld:

There was this famous Pauli effect, you see. After the lecture by [Walter] Heitler, Pauli went to the podium and started criticizing and pacing to and fro; he said,

at large distances we know that it’s not varied because there we have the van der Waals forces; at short distances we know it’s not varied because there we have the constant forces; why should there be a region in which it has any sense?

At that time Pauli was going towards Heitler who was sitting in a chair on one extremity of the podium, and, as Pauli went towards him with that question, the back of the chair collapsed and Heitler fell over backwards.

In another account:

He was now quite near to Heitler. The latter leaned back suddenly, the back of the chair gave way with a great crash, and poor Heitler tumbled backwards (luckily without hurting himself too much).

Casimir adds to the chair story:

Gamow was the first to shout: ‘Pauli effect’. Sometimes I wonder whether Gamow (a noted farceur) had not done something to the chair beforehand.

 

[Hornbein]

That big Chinese vase was full of water, creating a flood. It inspired Pauli to write an article about Fludd, a natural philosopher.

 

[pines-demon]

On Pauli (part 3 the dirty left over crumbles)

Pauli really did not like solid state physics. As said in part 1 he called the Schmutzphysik (dirty physics). In the 1960s many departments changed to condensed matter. In this field Pauli has also more sayings about it.

On semiconductors:

one shouldn't work on semiconductors, that is a filthy mess; who knows whether any semiconductors exist

On the problem of surfaces:

God made the bulk; the surface was invented by the devil.

Pauli commenting on the PhD work of Rudolf Peierls on thermal conduction in solids:

the residual resistivity is caused by dirt and one should not dwell in dirt...
[...] you should find more sensible questions to be answered; I find that you recently have concerned yourself too much with small issues

Wolfgang Paul who invented the ion trap met Pauli, Paul said:

Finally I meet my imaginary part!

Actually, Pauli interest in physics as a student started with the anomalous Zeeman effect:

How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?

which he explained by postulating the spin.

Let us end this series on Pauli with a quote of his:

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level

Picture: Pauli (left), Ehrenfest (right) on a boat (added per recent boat anecdotes).

 

[Swamp Thing]

"who knows whether any semiconductors exist"

What did he actually mean? Did he think that the explanation for crystal detectors, for example, would turn out to be something uninteresting or trivial? Did he feel that studying the role of "contaminants" in increasing the conductivity of pure materials could never be anything but trial and error, unworthy of real physicists?

 

[pines-demon]

What did he actually mean? Did he think that the explanation for crystal detectors, for example, would turn out to be something uninteresting or trivial? Did he feel that studying the role of "contaminants" in increasing the conductivity of pure materials could never be anything but trial and error, unworthy of real physicists?

Yes I guess it lacked precise predictions. Even with a full band theory of conduction (invented about the same year, the quote is from 1931 in a letter to Peierls) the predictions had to account for a large range of values for conductivities (by several orders of magnitude). Pauli might be joking or being overly theatrical but I guess that at that time anybody was able to make some erroneous theory and still be considered to be in the ballpark, so it was not a worthy pursuit (at least for theoreticians).

As said before Pauli did not like solid state physics for being messy and as shown in the other quotes, he did not like much what Peierls was doing (Pauli was against much of Peierls' PhD thesis). It is good that Peierls did not listen to Pauli, thanks to him we understand much more about holes and doping.


Edit: reading Early history of the physics and chemistry of semiconductors-from doubts to fact in a hundred years by Busch, it seems that it was the general feeling. It also says that a year before Pauli's quote, Bernhard Gudden made a review claiming something along the same lines:

In 1930 Gudden published a new review article on the electrical conduction of semiconductors [39]. In his opinion no chemically pure substance would ever be a semiconductor. The observed properties were believed to be due entirely to impurities, and he came to the conclusion, that

semiconductors in the scientific sense of the word - if they exist at all -are by far scarcer than originally assumed.

[39]: Gudden's paper can be found here (in German)

 

[Swamp Thing]

S. Chandrashekhar's colleagues had a nickname for him: S. Candlestickmaker.

One John Sykes published a spoof article purportedly published by Candlestickmaker in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1972QJRAS..13...63C

On the imperturbability of elevator operators: LVII

S. Candlestickmaker
(a) Institute for Studied Advances
Old Cardigan, Wales
(b) Institute for Physical Theory
Nipomo, CA 93444

Abstract:
In this paper the theory of elevator operators is completed to the extent that is needed in the elementary theory of Field’s. It is shown that the matrix of an elevator operator cannot be inverted, no matter how rapid the elevation. An explicit solution is obtained for the case when the occupation number is zero. In an earlier paper (1) the simultaneous effect of a magnetic field, an electric field, a Marshall field, rotation, revolution, translation, and retranslation on the equanimity of an elevator operator has been considered. However, the discussion in that paper was limited to the case when incivility sets in as a stationary pattern of dejection; the alternative possibility of overcivility was not considered. The latter possibility is known to occur when a Marshall field alone is present; and its occurrence has been experimentally demonstrated by Shopwalker and Salesperson (2) in complete disagreement with the theoretical predictions (3). The possibility of overcivility when no Marshall field is present has also been investigated (2); and it has been shown that with substances such as U and I it cannot occur. It is therefore a matter of some importance that the manner of the onset of incivility be determined. This paper is devoted to this problem.
The research reported in the paper has in part been suppressed by the Office of Naval Research under Contract A1-tum-OU812 with the Institute for Studied Advances.

John Sykes recalled later:

 

[pines-demon]

S. Chandrashekhar's colleagues had a nickname for him: S. Candlestickmaker.

I did not expect this from Chandra, it is very funny.

You inspired me to do the difficult search of looking for nicknames. I could not find another thread with physicists nicknames, and Google is very bad when you type "nicknames". I had to go into many sources, here we go:

• Hans Bethe: the Battleship (I think wartime nickname during Manhattan Project)
• Niels Bohr: Uncle Nick (wartime nickname during Manhattan Project), the Big Oracle (in comparison with professor Fritz Reiche who was called the little oracle)
• Jean Le Rond d'Alembert: Chancellier du Parnasse (Chancellor of Parnassus, by poet Nicolas Gilbert)
• Paul Dirac: Tiny (by his family and wife)
• Paul Ehrenfest: Red Professor (by students, due to his politics), Faust (in analogy to Pauli's Mephistopheles, see below). The neutrino is "Gretchen".
• Albert Einstein: der Depperte (the dopey one, by his family).
• Richard Feynman: Great Explainer, GLY (glycine, by the RNA Tie Club), Mosquito Boat (wartime nickname during Manhattan Project)
• James Franck: Strudelkopf (hothead, by Bohr)
• Galileo Galilei: the Wrangler (during his studies)
• George Gamow: Molecule inspector (by Hungarian colleagues), ALA (alanine, RNA Tie Club), Joe (a joke related to cowboys, by Bohr)
• Maria Goeppert-Meyer: Onion Madonna
• Stephen Hawking: [Little] Einstein (by school)
• Werner Heisenberg: White Jew (mostly by enemies, for having embraced relativity)
• Igor Kurchatov: the General (by Soviet colleagues)
• Lev Landau: YaB (in correspondence with his Soviet colleagues)
• James Clerk Maxwell: Dafty (at school)
• Lise Meitner: German Madame Curie (by Einstein)
• Emmy Noether: Mother Algebra (by the faculty, her students were often referred as the Noether boys)
• Kamerlingh Onnes: the Gentleman of Absolute Zero
• Wolfgang Pauli: Zweistein (Einstein II, by his students at ETH), Conscience of Physics (by Victor Weisskopf), God's whip (by Ehrenfest), the terrible Pauli, and Mephistopheles (by the Bohr Institute). See also his own signature in #130.
• Ruby Payne-Scott: Tinker-bell (because she called her students with a bell)
• Rudolf Peierls: Páinka (Russian for good child, by Landau)
• Ernest Rutherford: the Crocodile (by Kapitsa). See post #77.
• Leo Szilard: Generaldirektor (by colleagues)
• Madame [Chieng-Shiung] Wu: Gee Gee (given at Berkley).
• Thomas Young: Phenomenon Young
• Anton Zeilinger: Mr. Beam
• Field Club: Kurt Symanzik, Harry Lehmann and Wolfhart Zimmermann (authors of LSZ formula, given by Pauli)
• The Martians: for von Neumman, Teller, Wigner and all the other Hungarians in the Manhattan Project
• Princeton String Quartet: David Gross, Jeffrey Harvey, Emil Martinec, and Ryan Rohm
• The three musketeers: Jonny (George Gamow), Dymus (Dmitri Ivanenko), and Dau (Lev Landau) [by the University of Leningrad]. The group latter added the Abbot (Matvei Bronstein) and multiple others becoming the "Jazz Gang".
• Via Panisperna boys
  • Enrico Fermi was the Pope
  • Franco Rasetti "Cardinal Vicario"
  • Orso Mario Corbino was "Padreterno" (God Almighty)
  • Ettore Majorana was "Il Gran Inquisitore" (The Grand Inquisitor)
  • Emilio Segrè was "Basilisco" (Basilisk).
  • Edoardo Amaldi was "Fanciulletto" (young boy)
  • BrunoPontecorvo was "Cucciolo" (puppy dog)

If source not indicated it is probably a name by the press. In the end, I excluded pseudonyms, maybe for another time.

I excluded also evident nicknames like Oppie for Oppenheimer, Dick for Feynman, Jancsi (Johnny) for Von Neumman, or Manya for Marie Curie. I also excluded all the "Father/Mother of [field]" and all the nobility names (Lord Kelvin, Lord Rayleigh, Count Rumford and so on).

 

[Swamp Thing]

That was a more innocent time, when people could poke fun (even very gentle fun) at long, foreign-sounding names.

 

[pines-demon]

I just remembered this video by Leonard Susskind speaking about his friendship with Richard Feynman:


I never found these anecdotes in Feynman's books but are quite joyful and silly. About his father-son relationship:

And one day, we were walking. We were in France, we were in Les Houches. We were up in the mountains, 1976. And Feynman said to me,

Leonardo...

The reason he called me "Leonardo" is because we were in Europe, and he was practicing his French.
And he said,

Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or your father when you were a kid?

I said,

Well, my real hero was my father. He was a working man, had a fifth-grade education. He was a master mechanic, and he taught me how to use tools. He taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things. He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem. He didn't call it the hypotenuse, he called it the "shortcut distance."

And Feynman's eyes just opened up. He went off like a lightbulb. And he said that he had had basically exactly the same relationship with his father. In fact, he had been convinced at one time that to be a good physicist, it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father. I apologize for the sexist conversation here, but this is the way it really happened. He said he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary, a necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist.

Being Dick, he, of course, wanted to check this. He wanted to go out and do an experiment. Well, he did. He went out and did an experiment. He asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists,

Was it your mom or your pop that influenced you?

To a man, they were all men, and to a man, every single one of them said, "My mother." There went that theory, down the trash can of history. But he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with his father as he had with his father. And for some time, he was convinced this was the reason we got along so well. I don't know. Maybe. Who knows?

Maybe it should be Léonard in French, but nevermind...

Also there is the sandwich anecdote :

I remember once he told me a story about a joke the students played on him. I think it was for his birthday. They took him for lunch to a sandwich place in Pasadena. It may still exist; I don't know. Celebrity sandwiches was their thing. You could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich. You could get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich. The students went there in advance, and arranged that they'd all order Feynman sandwiches. One after another, they came in and ordered Feynman sandwiches.

Feynman loved this story. He told me this story, and he was really happy and laughing. When he finished the story, I said to him,

Dick, you know, I wonder what would be the difference between a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich.

And without skipping a beat at all, he said,

Well, they'd be about the same. The only difference is a Susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham.

"Ham" as in bad actor. Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said,

Yeah, but a lot less baloney.

The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney.

There are a couple more anecdotes in the video about discussion between Feynman, Sidney Coleman, Susskind and some philosopher of the mind; and also the anecdotes on how he solved some liquid helium problems and came up with the parton model, using only intuition.

 

[pines-demon]

In the passing of Peter Higgs (1929-2024), here I share Higgs's Nobel interview where we said he was unaware that he had gotten the prize until later that day:


It is worth also looking back to the day the Higgs boson was confirmed, check Pinbal1970's post in the Higgs thread. Surely we will get more and more Higgs-related anecdotes in the coming days.

 

[Swamp Thing]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Hevesy#World_War_II_and_beyond

Prior to the onset of World War II, Max von Laue and James Franck had sent their gold Nobel Prize medals to Denmark to keep them from being confiscated by the Nazis. After the Nazi invasion of Denmark this placed them in danger; it was illegal at the time to send gold out of Germany, and were it discovered that Laue and Franck had done so, they could have faced prosecution. To prevent this, de Hevesy concealed the medals by dissolving them in aqua regia and placing the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then recast the medals using the recovered gold and returned them to the two laureates.

 

[pines-demon]

Heisenberg's mom

In the 1935's Arnold Sommerfeld was reaching emeritus status and Werner Heisenberg (already famous) wanted to take his position in Munich. However the application was rejected. At that time Nazism was already on the rise. The Deutsche Physik (movement of nationalist physicist) disliked Heisenberg because he sympathized with Einstein's relativity. The position was eventually taken by Wilhelm Müller a scientist that was less well known than all the other candidates and that was not even part of the DPG (German Physical Society).

The problems increased, Heisenberg tried to invite Nazi Students League to convince them that he was apolitical. Heisenberg was even called by the Gestapo to make declarations in three occasions. And spies were sent to his house and during his lectures to see if he was teaching the ideas of Einstein. Das Schwarze Korps, the newspaper of the SS, started saying that Heisenberg was a "White Jew" who should be made to "disappear".

Fortunately, during school years, Heisenberg had attended the same school as Heinrich Himmler, who controlled the Gestapo. Heisenberg's mother (Annie) knew Himmler's mother (Anna Maria) from those days. So Annie decided to call Anna to please tell the SS to give her son a break. After the call, Himmler forbade any futher repercussions on Heisenberg. Thanks mom.

 

[pines-demon]

George Gamow stories on Dirac:

Dirac's best close-up theory:

Once, at a party in Copenhagen, he proposed a theory according to which there must be a certain distance at which a woman's face looks its best. He argued that at $d\to\infty$ one cannot see anything anyway, while at $d = 0$ the oval of the face is deformed because of the small aperture of the human eye, and many other imperfections (such as small wrinkles) become exaggerated. Thus there is a certain optimum distance at which the face looks its best.

Tell me, Paul, how close have you ever seen a woman’s face?

[asked Gamow]

Oh, about that close.

replied Dirac, holding his palms about two feet apart.

On Wigner's sister:

Several years later Dirac married "Wigner's sister," so known among the physicists because she was the sister of the noted Hungarian theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner. When one of Dirac’s old friends, who had not yet heard of the marriage, dropped into his home he found with Dirac an attractive woman who served tea and then sat down comfortably on a sofa.

How do you do!

said the friend, wondering who the woman might be. Dirac exclaimed,

Oh! I am sorry. I forgot to introduce you. This is... this is Wigner’s sister.

Dirac's review on Russian literature:

Another example of Dirac’s acute observation has a literary flavor. His friend Peter Kapitza, the Russian physicist, 'gave him an English translation of Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment.

Well, how do you like it?

asked Kapitza when Dirac returned the book.

It is nice, but in one of the chapters the author made a mistake. He describes the Sun as rising twice on the same day.

This was his one and only comment on Dostoevski's novel.

Gamow adds that he did not bother to check when that happens in the book.

On the topological completeness of knitting:

Another time, visiting Kapitza’s home, Dirac was watching Anya Kapitza knitting while he was talking physics to Peter. A couple of hours after he left, Dirac rushed back, very excited.

You know, Anya, watching the way you were making this sweater I got interested in the topological aspect of the problem. I found that there is another way of doing it and that there are only two possible ways. One is the one you were using; another is like that...

And he demonstrated the other way, using his long thin fingers. His newly discovered "other way," Anya informed him, is well known to women and is none other than “purling."

From Gamow, Thirty Years that Shook Physics.

 

[pines-demon]

On the via Panisperna boys:

During the 1920-1930, in Sapienza University (Rome, Italy) there was this group of young physics researchers called the via Panisperna boys, composed of all the famous Italian nuclear physicists of the time: Enrico Fermi, Edoardo Amaldi, Oscar D'Agostino, Ettore Majorana, Bruno Pontecorvo, Franco Rasetti and Emilio Segrè (7 years difference between the oldest and the youngest).

Physics was their passion, but they also loved tennis and hiking. A student, Laura (who ended up marrying Fermi) said that she was lucky, one day she had to pass an oral exam with Fermi and Rasetti, the toughest teachers in the university, but they were delayed because they were locked in a tennis match, so Laura got an examination with a more soft-hearted teacher.

The boys also loved to give each other challenges. Another student, Ginestra (who ended up marrying Amaldi) started to join the boys' informal lectures because she said that she learned more with them. Fermi noticed that she was becoming part of the group and Fermi explained that she had to pass a test:

Don't be scared, all we do here is to play a game. We call it the game of the two lire. Any body can ask a question to anybody else. The person who does not give the right answer pays one lira. But if the one who asked the question cannot provide a satisfactory answer, then he pays two lire. As you can see, it's all very simple. Now let's start. Who
has a question for Miss Giovene?

Amaldi raised his hand, he had a question for her:

As you know, the boiling point of oil is higher than the melting point of tin. How can you explain it is possible to fry in olive oil inside a tinned skillet?

Most Italian skillets of the time were made of tin-lined copper.

After not-so-long time Ginestra came up with the answer! Can you physics-trained users guess? Take your time. Answer behind the spoiler tag:

Spoiler: Solution to Amaldi challenge

Ginestra said:

Oil does not boil when frying! It's the water in the food that boils!

From Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family.

 

[pinball1970]

from https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-quark/

According to Gell-Mann’s book, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, the tail was wagging the dog. “When I assigned the name “quark” to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon,” he writes, “I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been ‘kwork.’”

Luckily, Gell-Mann had a bit of a literary bent: “In one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word ‘quark.’” The line was:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

But quark didn’t sound quite like the kwork that was ringing in Gell-Mann’s head. The physicist took a little creative license, and reimagined the line as a call for drinks at the bar:

Three quarts for Muster Mark!

With this adjustment, writes Gell-Mann, pronouncing the word like kwork “would not be totally unjustified.” The reference to the number three was fitting as well, since “the recipe for making a neutron or proton out of quarks is, roughly speaking, ‘Take three quarks.’”

So, should we be saying quark or kwork? The dispute over the nature of matter that began with Aristotle may be settled, but this is one debate that hasn’t yet been put to bed—in a survey, 76 percent of Science Diction readers who voted said they’re sticking with quark, and 24 percent are with Gell-Mann, and say kwork.

 

[pinball1970]

Paul Dirac was well known for his strange personality, this included rarely speaking unless he was asked a direct question and then giving the concise precise answer.

His colleagues at Cambridge coined a term called the "Dirac" which was one word per hour, "the smallest imaginable number of words that someone with the power of speech could utter in company." (Quote Graham Farmelo - author of "The Strangest Man - The hidden life of Paul Dirac.")

 

[Swamp Thing]

Henry Cavendish was also like that, only more so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cavendish#Personality_and_legacy

The contemporary accounts of his personality have led some modern commentators, such as Oliver Sacks, to speculate that he was autistic.

 

[pines-demon]

from https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-quark/

According to Gell-Mann’s book, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, the tail was wagging the dog. “When I assigned the name “quark” to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon,” he writes, “I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been ‘kwork.’”

Luckily, Gell-Mann had a bit of a literary bent: “In one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word ‘quark.’” The line was:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

But quark didn’t sound quite like the kwork that was ringing in Gell-Mann’s head. The physicist took a little creative license, and reimagined the line as a call for drinks at the bar:

Three quarts for Muster Mark!

With this adjustment, writes Gell-Mann, pronouncing the word like kwork “would not be totally unjustified.” The reference to the number three was fitting as well, since “the recipe for making a neutron or proton out of quarks is, roughly speaking, ‘Take three quarks.’”

So, should we be saying quark or kwork? The dispute over the nature of matter that began with Aristotle may be settled, but this is one debate that hasn’t yet been put to bed—in a survey, 76 percent of Science Diction readers who voted said they’re sticking with quark, and 24 percent are with Gell-Mann, and say kwork.

I knew about the origin but I did not knew there was a debate about its pronunciation!

Also something that most people do not know is that Finnegans Wake is (at least to first order approximation) total nonsense. Any phrase in that book could have been chosen for the name of a new particle. It's like getting inspiration from the Jabberwocky poem of Alice in Wonderland.

 

[pines-demon]

Henry Cavendish was also like that, only more so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cavendish#Personality_and_legacy

I would really love some statistics on this. Speculating that a scientist was autistic is almost as good as predicting that he was right handed.

 

[pinball1970]

Also something that most people do not know is that Finnegans Wake is (at least to first order approximation) total nonsense. Any phrase in that book could have been chosen for the name of a new particle. It's like getting inspiration from the Jabberwocky poem of Alice in Wonderland.

Jabberwocky is the only Monty python film I did not like.

Yes we can speculate about the spectrum with certain scientists but once they are gone it is impossible to pin that down.

Dirac probably suffered mental abuse from his father in terms of how we would describe it now.
I recommend 'the strangest man' mentioned previously.

 

[pines-demon]

Peter Pans of the human race

Jeremy Bernstein's Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos has a collection of anecdotes on child prodigies who became physicists. According to him, Isidor Rabi said

I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity.

Hans Bethe's childhood:

I was interested in numbers from a very early age. When I was five, I said to my mother on a walk one day,

Isn’t it strange that if a zero comes at the end of a number it means a lot but if it is at the beginning of a number it doesn’t mean anything?

And one day when I was about four, Richard Ewald, a professor of physiology, who was my father’s boss, asked me on the street,

What is .5 divided by 2?

I answered,

Dear Uncle Ewald, that I don’t know.

but the next time I saw him I ran to him and said,

Uncle Ewald, it’s .25

I knew about decimals then. When I was seven I learned about powers, and filled a whole book with the powers of two or three.

Stanislaw Ulam childhood:

I had mathematical curiosity very early. My father had in his library a wonderful series of German paperback books —Reklam, they were called. One was Euler’s Algebra. I looked at it when I was perhaps ten or eleven, and it gave me a mysterious feeling. The symbols looked like magic signs. I wondered whether one day I would understand them. This probably contributed to the development of my mathematical curiosity. I discovered by myself how to solve quadratic equations. I remember that I did this by an incredible concentration and almost painful and not-quite conscious effort. What I did amounted to completing the square in my head without paper or pencil.

Bernstein also retells how Ulam tried to teach himself special relativity when he was ten.

Emilio Sègre on Enrico Fermi's:

Fermi told me that one of his great intellectual efforts was his attempt to understand — at the age of ten — what was meant by the statement that the equation $x^2 + y^2 = r^2$ represents a circle. Someone must have stated the fact to him, but he had to discover its meaning by himself.

Ernst Mach mechanical epiphany:

There was a turning point in my fifth year. Up to that time I represented to myself everything I did not understand — a pianoforte, for instance — as simply a motley assemblage of the most wonderful things, to which I ascribed the sound of the notes. That the pressed key struck the chord with the hammer did not occur to me. Then one day I saw a windmill.

We [Ernst and his sister Octavia] had to bring a message to the miller. Upon our arrival the mill had just begun to work. The terrible noise frightened me, but did not hinder me from watching the teeth of the shaft which meshed with the gear of the grinding mechanism and moved on one tooth after another. This sight remained until I reached a more mature level, and in my opinion, raised my childlike thinking from the level of the wonder-believing savage to causal thinking; from now on, in order to understand the unintelligible, I no longer imagined magic things in the background but traced in a broken toy the cord or lever which had caused the effect.

Richard Feynman's dominoes:

When I was just a little kid, very small in a high chair, [my father] brought home a lot of tiles, little bathroom tiles — seconds of different colors... We played with them, setting them out like dominoes, I mean vertically, on my high chair ... so they tell me this anyway... and when we’d got them all set up I would push one end so that they would all go down. Then after a while I’d help to set them up in a more complicated way... two white tiles and a blue tile, two white tiles and a blue tile... and when my mother complained,

Leave the poor child alone, if he wants to put a blue tile, let him put a blue tile,

he said,

No, I want to show him what patterns are like and how interesting they are as it’s a kind of mathematics.

William Stukeley on Isaac Newton:

Every one that knew Sir Isaac, or have heard of him, recount the pregnancy of his parts when a boy, his strange inventions, and extraordinary inclination for mechanics. That instead of playing among the other boys, when from school, he always busied himself in making knick-knacks and models of wood in many kinds. For which purposes he had got little saws, hatchets, hammers, and a whole shop of tools, which he would use with great dexterity. In particular they speak of his making a wooden clock. About this time a new windmill [shades of Mach!] was set up near Grantham, in the way to Gunnerby, which is now demolished, this country chiefly using water mills. Our lad’s imitating spirit was soon excited, and by frequently prying into the fabric of it, as they were making it, he became master enough to make a very perfect model thereof, and it was said to be as clean and curious a piece of workmanship as the original. This sometimes he would set upon the house-top where he lodged, and clothing it with sail-cloth, the wind would really take it; but what was most extraordinary in its composition was, that he put a mouse into it, which he called the miller, and that mouse made the mill turn round when he pleased.

Albert Einstein talking about when he was 4-5 about a compass:

That this needle behaved in such a determined way did not at all fit into the nature of events, which could find a place in the unconscious world of concepts (effect connected with direct ‘touch’). I can still remember — or at least I believe I can remember — that this experience made a deep and lasting impression upon me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.

Bernstein also says that Einstein came up with a proof of the Pythagorean theorem when he was twelve.

Bernstein on Freeman Dyson:

I once asked Freeman Dyson if he could recall his earliest mathematical memories. He told me that, among them, was a time when he was still being put down for naps in the afternoon — he was not exactly sure of the age, but less than ten — and he began adding up numbers like $1 + \tfrac{1}{2}+ \tfrac{1}{4}+ \tfrac{1}{8}+ \cdots$ and realized that this series was adding up to 2. In other words, he had discovered for himself the notion of the convergent infinite series.

Bernstein on Isidor Rabi:

Here is what Rabi told me when I asked him if some childhood experience turned him toward science:

Yes, a very profound one. One time, I was walking down the street — looked right down the street, which faced east. The moon was just rising. And it scared the hell out of me! Absolutely scared the hell out of me.

Not long afterward Rabi began reading through — in alphabetical order — all of the books in the children’s section of the Brooklyn Public Library branch near his home. First he began with fiction, reading from Alcott through Trowbridge. Then he came to the science shelf and began with astronomy — a little book on astronomy — which changed his life. Of this, his first encounter with scientific explanation, he told me,

When you have the astronomical explanation, the rising of the moon becomes a sort of non-event.