History Interesting anecdotes in the history of physics?

[pines-demon]

Von Neumann, the upskirter

We have discussed the good anecdotes of many physicists here but we also have to discuss the bad ones. John von Neumann was a true genius but what he had in intellect he lacked in social behaviour. Here is a curious anecdote:

His relationship with women remained clumsy through out his life. He was liked by all the women who really knew him, but those who merely encountered him sometimes thought him creepy. When he was preoccupied, he used to stare at women's legs unconsciously and rudely - just as, when driving an automobile, he might stare at but not see the road ahead. At Los Alamos the secretaries had desks that were open at the front. Some of them stuck cardboard there because, they said, Johnny had a habit of leaning forward, muttering, and peering up their skirts

From N. Macrae's biography of von Neumman. This is also confirmed by his pals:

To be sure, [von Neumann] was interested in women, outwardly, in a peculiar way. He would always look at legs and the figure of a woman. Whenever a skirt passed by he would turn and stare – so much so that it was noticed by everyone. Yet this was absentmindedly mechanical and almost automatic. About women in general he once said to me,

They don’t do anything very much.

He meant, of course, nothing much of importance outside of their biological and physiological activities.

From S. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

 

[martinbn]

There are two books by Steven G. Krantz

1. Mathematical Apocrypha
   Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians and the Mathematical
2. Mathematical Apocrypha Redux
   More Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians and the Mathematical

They include physicists too.

 

[martinbn]

Once upon a time, when André Weil was still editor of the Annals of Mathematics, he wandered down to the basement of Fine Hall and found there a stranger with a weird machine. When asked what it was, the stranger replied that it was a time machine. Of course Weil was deeply sceptical, but he nevertheless allowed himself to be given a demonstration... and sure enough, he found himself in Fine Hall ten years in the future. He went to the library and was delighted to discover that the latest issue of the Annals contained an elegant proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Weil returned to the present, and the stranger and his machine vanished, perhaps off to a more pleasant age. As the time approached for the issue of the Annals, Weil waited anxiously for the article, and to discover who the author was, since it had been signed xxx. However, no article came, and the publisher began pressing Weil for the copy for the issue. Eventually, it was not possible to wait any longer, and so Weil sat down and wrote the article himself --- he was able to recall it perfectly --- and he signed it xxx.

 

[pines-demon]

@martinbn I am trying to keep this specific thread focused on physicists or at least mathematicians that contributed directly to physics or interacted with physicists. This requirement has reduced the quantity of posts here but I think there are many books, sites and threads out there on anecdotes of mathematicians.

 

[pines-demon]

Lee–Yang (or Yang–Lee) parity break-up (part 1)

You may know C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee from having proposed that parity is violated in physics, which was later confirmed by the Wu experiment which earned them the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics (unfortunately without Chien-Shiung Wu). Lee died a few years ago, and Yang is 102 years-old, they were very young when they earned the prize and were the first to Chinese-born physicists to earn a Nobel in Physics.

What is less known is that in the 1960s they had a big fight and decided to never talk again. Some people blame physicist and historian Jeremy Bernstein who wrote an article in 1962 called "A Question of Parity". Here is how Bernstein explained the quarrel:

I wrote a dual profile of Lee and Yang, and [magazine editor William] Shawn edited it. [...] I forget exactly how I had done it. When I referred to things, I think I may have called them Lee and Yang… I don't know. Anyway, there was a strange thing, because when the thing came back, Lee and Yang were changed occasionally to Yang and Lee. It was kind of odd. So Shawn called me and said,

You know, they've changed it from Lee and Yang to Yang and Lee in various places. Do you have any idea why?

I said

No, I don't know why.

Well, it turned out that they had a terminal fight and broke up, and some people blamed me but you know, I didn't do anything. I think [Freeman] Dyson blamed me, but I certainly… I just wrote this profile. I didn't do anything.

And then the next summer, I had to talk with T.D. about it. He was very disturbed. But I think what had happened is what happens often in these collaborations, is that when the collaboration started, Lee was younger and the junior person, Yang was older and of a different social class in China. And in the course of things, I think that Lee began getting most of the ideas and Yang was getting most of the credit, and I think that was the source of their tension. And I've seen this before. I saw this with [Murray] Gell-Mann and [Abraham] Pais and it's a canonical thing that happens in these collaboration. So I felt very, very badly about it and I felt that I just really felt very badly that this had happened and I had some responsibility for it. And Lee left the Institute and went back to Columbia, which was good for them. I got a note from Dyson saying,

Once we'll forgive you but twice, we won't.

which was very disturbing.

And then I tried to do a profile of Dirac. I had one day of interview, but I think Oppenheimer got a hold of him and told him not to do it so he… Dirac said no, which was a pity because I could have done a very nice profile of Dirac. But I did New Yorker profiles.

During their years in Brookhaven National Laboratory where they worked, Robert Crease recalls:

Lee and Yang used to shout at each other at the top of their lungs in their Physics office, trying to figure out why $\tau$'s and $\theta$'s seemed the same but decayed differently,

Crease also writes in Lee's obituary

Lee and Yang’s personal relationship did not survive the success of their profession alone. To their colleagues’ distress and incomprehension, their clashes became so fierce that universities and laboratories took care to invite only one at a time for visits

Some Chinese newspapers have this apocryphal story

Lee was disappointed and had to suggest that they should not work together anymore. In November of that year [1962], Lee submitted his resignation letter to Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer felt very sorry about this and pointedly said that Lee should stop doing high-energy physics and Yang should see a psychiatrist.

Yang's biographer Chiang Tsai-chien has various interesting claims:

There are many interpretations on the quarrels and discord between Yang and Lee. But the final word on the story has yet to come out.

[...]Neither Yang nor Lee denied that an article that appeared in the New Yorker magazine on May 12, 1962, was one of the major reasons for their breakup.

[...]Yang didn't deny that he cared very much about how Bernstein handled the names in the article.

Such an unfortunate break-up between two giants of physics.

Notes

Yang apparently said something about the conflict it in his Selected Papers. I could not find anything about it, he just says that Bernstein called the discovery of parity breaking "unprecedented" and that it led to press conferences that Yang found "distasteful".

References:

• M. Chen, Biography details discord between two top scientists, Taipei Times (2002)
• J. Gettler, Remembering Nobel Laureate Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee, Broohaven National Lab (2024)
• Robert Crease, Tsung-Dao Lee obituary: boundary-breaking physicist who won Nobel prize at just 30, Nature (2024)
• Lee and Yang: the break-up (53/86), Jeremy Bernstein interview on YouTube
• J. Bernstein, A Question of Parity, The New Yorker (1962)
• StackExchange: Did Oppenheimer comment about the split between Dr. Tsung Dao Lee and Dr. Chen Ning Yang?

 

[Hornbein]

Von Neumann, the upskirter

We have discussed the good anecdotes of many physicists here but we also have to discuss the bad ones. John von Neumann was a true genius but what he had in intellect he lacked in social behaviour. Here is a curious anecdote:

From N. Macrae's biography of von Neumman. This is also confirmed by his pals:

From S. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

According to Who Got Einstein's Office, John von Neumann was quite social. He hosted good parties. "He wasn't human but he could imitate one perfectly" I seem to recall someone said.

That quotation was given as "aside from that, they don't do anything much."

 

[fresh_42]

According to Who Got Einstein's Office, John von Neumann was quite social.

The German Wikipedia notes his nickname: Good Time Johnny. Here is an article completely dedicated to John von Neumann: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2319080

 

[pines-demon]

John von Neumann was quite social.

You can be likeable to your peers and still a be creep around secretaries.

 

[pines-demon]

According to Who Got Einstein's Office,

Parity break-up (part 2)

I did not know about this book! It explains and complements my latest story about Lee and Yang (or was it Yang and Lee?).

The book shows that Yang and Lee had problems before 1957, with the names being changed of order in papers and Yang claiming sole autorship for others.

The Institute’s lack of cooperative spirit is traceable to the prima donna factor, to the me-me-me mental attitude that sometimes affects its great minds, often without their even being aware of it. Toward his sixtieth birthday, some of Frank Yang’s friends offered to put together a festschrift in his honor, a collection of original essays written in tribute to his work in physics. So they put the idea to him.

I thought about it,and concluded that a collection of some of my papers with Commentaries might be more interesting.

Yang says.

So in 1983 publisher WH. Freeman brought out Yang’s Selected Papers 1945-1980 with Commentary. At Columbia University, TD. Lee read Yang’s version of their famous alliance and blanched. It wasn’t as he remembered it at all. Shortly thereafter, Lee wrote up his own version of events and circulated it around privately to his friends, then published it in volume three of T.D. Lee: Selected Papers, which was brought out by Birkhauser in 1986. If their experience is at all characteristic of what happens when two bounteous egos try to pool their talents, it may help to explain why there are not more collaborations at the Institute.

[...]

In 1952, the two physicists, both of them now temporary members at the Institute, wrote a long, two-part paper on gas-liquid phase transitions. Egos were apparently starting to blossom out, for it suddenly became a matter of vital concern which of their names should appear first on the title page. As Lee tells it, Yang wanted it to be “C.N. Yang and T.D. Lee.” Since Lee was four years younger than Yang, he at first acceded to this. Later, he checked some other jointly written physics papers and discovered that age did not necessarily dictate the order in which the names were listed. So Lee wanted it to be “T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang.”

Fortunately, they had written the paper in two parts, and so it turned out that each could have it his own way: it was “C.N. Yang and T.D. Lee” in part one, “T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang” in part two. Both parts were published in the same issue of Physical Review, back to back.

[...]

Yang and Lee did not collaborate again for a while, until 1956, when they wrote up their findings on the nonconservation of parity. Yang’s version is that he wrote the paper himself:

I showed the manuscript to Lee, who made a few minor changes. I then signed our names in alphabetical order. Briefly, I considered putting my name first, but decided against it, both because I disliked name ordering and because I wanted to help Lee along in his career.

Lee’s version:

I remember that the writing was a joint effort; indeed, as usual in our collaborations, we debated almost continuously the wording and nuances of our presentation. There were several versions of the paper, revised over a period of time.

The break-up is provided in the book to in the following way:

Five years later, in 1962, a profile of Yang and Lee, both of whom were now full professors at the Institute, appeared in New Yorker magazine. The two physicists were sent galley proofs of the article in advance of publication, and each made corrections. But Lee says that Yang now wanted his own name to come first in three places in the article: in the title itself, at the point in the text where the Nobel prize is announced, and in the description of the award ceremony. Yang also wanted his wife’s name to precede the name of Lee’s wife in the text, on account of the fact that Yang’s wife was a year older.

I told him he was being silly,

Lee says.

On April 18th, 1962, according to Lee’s recollection, Yang came into Lee’s office at the Institute and asked for even more name juggling in the New Yorker piece. Appalled, Lee wondered aloud if their collaboration could continue. Yang

then became very emotional and started to cry,

Lee says,

saying he wanted very much to work with me. I felt embarrassed and helpless, and talked to him gently for a long time. In the end we agreed we would stop collaborating at least for a limited time, and then decide.

Yang’s version:

It was an emotion-draining experience, with cathartic senses of liberation.

When the New Yorker article finally came out a month later, Lee’s name came first in the title—“A Question of Parity: TD. Lee and C.N. Yang” —whereas Yang’s name came first at the initial mention of their winning the Nobel Prize. Otherwise their names appeared in a more or less random ordering.

That spring, Lee resigned from the Institute to take up a position at Columbia University in New York. There is a rumor that Oppenheimer went up to Columbia to see if he could persuade Lee to return, but failed. In 1966, Yang also left the Institute to go to the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Twenty years later, in November of 1986, T.D. Lee celebrated his sixtieth birthday with a big party at Columbia University. Many important physicists showed up for the occasion, including I.I. Rabi, Sidney Drell, Bruno Zumino, and Freeman Dyson. For better or for worse, Frank Yang was not there.

Book: E. Regis, Who got Einstein's office? (1987)

 

[Klystron]

George Gamow: Molecule inspector (by Hungarian colleagues),

Perhaps you excluded initials as well as pseudonyms in your post, but several authors including Isaac Asimov refer to George Gamow as G.G.

Asimov also claims that reporters, not realizing Gamow's predilection for skewed humor, took some of G.G's quips about Einstein and others seriously.

 

[pines-demon]

Goudsmit Summer

Spin is definitely of the most mysterious properties about quantum mechanics. Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach discovered hints of it experimentally but did not know what it was. Wolfgang Pauli postulated an extra quantum number to explain electron occupations in atoms. Alfred Landé had come up with the concept of a g-factor, but did not think it was a property of the electron itself. However the physicists that are credited with theoretical tying all together are George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit who were working for Paul Ehrenfest. The way Uhlenbeck describes their discovery is very atypical. Uhlenbeck refers to that period as the "Goudsmit Summer" (who was working past time there) and involves Hendrik Lorentz. It shows how serendipitous the discovery was.

It starts with Goudsmit realization:

When the day came I had to tell Uhlenbeck about the Pauli principle - of course using my own quantum numbers - then he said to me:

But don't you see what this implies? It means that there is a fourth degree of freedom for the electron. It means that the electron has a spin, that it rotates.

Now, I can also exactly tell you the difference between Uhlenbeck and me as physicists. In those days, all through the summer when I told Uhlenbeck about Landé and Heisenberg, for instance, or about [Friedrich] Paschen, then he asked:

Who is that?

He had never heard of them, strange. And when he said:

That means a fourth degree of freedom,

then I asked him:

What is a degree of freedom?

In any case, when he made his remark, it was luck that I knew all these things about the spectra, and I then said:

That fits precisely in our hydrogen scheme which we wrote about four weeks ago. And if one now allows the electron to be magnetic with the appropriate magnetic moment, then one can understand all those complicated Zeeman-effects. They come out naturally, as well as the Landé formulae and everything, it works beautifully.

Ehrenfest followed this to Lorentz (Abraham Pais account):

The discovery note is dated 17 October 1925. One day earlier Ehrenfest had written to Lorentz asking him for an opportunity to have

his judgment and advice on a very witty idea of Uhlenbeck about spectra.

Lorentz listened attentively when George went out to see him soon thereafter, and then raised an objection. The spinning electron should have a magnetic energy on the order of $\mu^2/r^3$, where $\mu$ is its magnetic moment and $r$ its radius. Equate this energy to $mc^2$. Then $r$ would be on the order of $10^{-12}$ cm, too big to make sense. (The weak point in this argument was to be revealed years later by the positron theory.) George, upset, went to Ehrenfest to suggest that the paper be withdrawn.

Ehrenfest replied that he had already sent off their note, and he added that its authors were young enough to be able to afford a stupidity. Some time later Lorentz handed Uhlenbeck a sheaf of papers with calculations of spinning electrons orbiting a nucleus. This work was to become the last paper by the grand master of the classical electron theory. It was presented to the Como conference in September 1927.

Goudsmit says also that they were contacted by Werner Heisenberg:

Directly, the next day, I received a letter from Heisenberg and he refers to our "mutige Note" (courageous note). I did not even know we needed courage to publish that. I wasn't courageous at all. I think I still have Heisenberg's letter. In it he writes a formula ... I did not understand a bit of it. And then he says somewhere:

What have you done with the factor 2?

Which factor? Not the slightest notion, and the formula given without derivation.

Heisenberg was referring to the fine structure, the problem of 2 would be later be solved by Llewellyn Thomas (Thomas precession).

Goudsmit also adds this dark joke (it is worse if you know Ehrenfest story):

In passing I have to mention a typical Ehrenfest anecdote, not such a nice one, perhaps. Lorentz lived in Haarlem and all these celebrities, [Ernst] Rutherford, Madame Curie, [Niels] Bohr, [Albert] Einstein and very many others travelled by train, a special train, from Leiden to Haarlem. And the week before one of those rare fatal train accidents had occurred and I said to Ehrenfest:

Wouldn't it be dreadful if that train had an accident?

And Ehrenfest replied:

Yes, that would be dreadful, but think of all the young physicists who then could get jobs...

I end with this nice words from Goudsmit about the history of physics and his word for young scientists:

What the historians forget - and also the physicists - is that in the discoveries in physics chance, luck plays a very, very great role. Of course, we do not always recognize this. If someone is rich then he says "Yes, I have been clever, that is why I am rich"! And the same is being said of some one who does something in physics "yes, a really clever guy...". Admittedly, there are cases like Heisenberg, Dirac and Einstein, there are some exceptions. But for most of us luck plays a very important role and that should not be forgotten.

[...]


That is the way the history looks and it is a somewhat curious history. Who, precisely, should get credit for it? Such things are not possible without also giving credit to all other people who have contributed. But one aspect stands out which is of particular importance for young people. First: you need not be a genius to make an important contribution to physics because, I do admit, the electron spin is an important contribution. That I know now, then we did not know, but now I do. They all told me so.

Then I want to say one more thing: even if you make a minor contribution, if it is not important, then this gives an enormous satisfaction. Therefore I do believe that one should not always aspire to tackle what is most important, but try to have fun working in physics and obtain results.

References:

The credit here goes Angela Collier, who brought my attention to this story in recent video about Bose-Einstein statistics:


Also:

• S. A. Goudsmit, "The discovery of the electron spin" (1971) (lecture translated to English)
• Abraham Pais, "George Uhlenbeck and the discovery of electron spin" (1989), Physics Today

 

[pines-demon]

A humble reward for a bonus problem

In quantum optics, there is was a historic problem of constructing a phase operator. Technically, the conjugate variable of the number of photons operator $\hat{n}$ has a conjugate operator that would be related to the phase of the wave $\hat{\phi}$ (it can be constructed by thinking the anhilation operator as $\hat{a}=e^{i\hat{\phi}}\sqrt{\hat{n}}$). Dirac noticed however that if this is true, the uncertainty principle reads $$\Delta n \Delta \phi\geq \frac12,$$ which is not possible, as the uncertainty of $\hat{n}$ decreases, $\hat{\phi}$ increases but is limited to go from 0 to $2\pi$ (there are other problems as $\hat{\phi}$ is not defined for certain states).

Dirac discussed this in his famous textbook The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, but dropped it from the book in later editions.

During the fall of 1962, Peter A. Carruthers was lecturing on quantum mechanics in Cornell University, he decided to include the problem of the definition of the phase operator as a homework wihout telling the students that it was an open problem. He added at the bottom of the problem that

A bonus will be given for an answer to this question.

Three students took the problem seriously: Jonathan Glogower, Jack Sarfatt and Leonard Susskind. Sarfartt published in 1963. He writes in a note at the end of the paper:

Reference has been made to the difficulty in the definition of the phase operator in quantum mechanics. Recent work by L. Susskind, J. Glogower and J. Sarfatt shows that it is impossible to define a phase operator because of the existence of a lowest state for the number operator of the oscillator. Thus, the uncertainty relation $\Delta n \Delta \phi \geq 1$ is meaningless...

One year later, Susskind and Glogower published their solution which is considered the final solution. The solution consist on writing operators $\hat{C}$ and $\hat{S}$ that represent the operators related to the cosine and sine of the phase which are well behaved.

It is not clear on how much contribution there was between Sarfatt and Susskind & Glogower. Carruthers and Michael Martin Nieto wrote a review about the problem and solution, but got a correction from Sarfatt:

In turn I ran across the fact that a Hermitian phase operator could not be defined in informal discussions with the late Dr. David Falcoff and some of his students at Brandeis during 1961-1962. Glogower was responsible for the ingenious mathematical solution of certain recursion relations, and Susskind did the bulk of the work on the proper form of the commutation relations for the $\hat{C}$ and $\hat{S}$ operators as well as the appropriate eigenfunctions. There is no question that Susskind completed the greater part of the final work on his own, but there is equally no question that the paper never would have been written were it not for my participation inthe crucial initial stages when we were not even clear about the qualitative nature of the problem.

Susskind kind of repented of not includding Sarfatt:

...Any way I feel bad about forgetting to acknowledge you. Glo and myself debated whether to put you as an author or Acknowledgement and in the scuffle I forgot...
–Lenny

Carruthers was kind of bothered that he was not included either, writing to Sarfatt:

They (SG) did not acknowledge my aid either, although I spent alot of time encouraging them and in reading the final MS!... I’d like tore mind you that in the fall of 1962 I gave a homework problem in which I asked for a discussion of the existence of $\phi$. My curiosity on this point arose independently of your own, as I recall.

Carruthers was not very wealthy at that time, so the prize ended up being a single Budweiser beer!

References

• M.M. Nieto "Quantum Phase and Quantum Phase Operators: Some Physics and Some History", arXiv:hep-th/9304036 (1993)

Interestingly enough, Sarfatt changed his name to Sarfatti, left physics, and went to work on the problem of consciousness.

 

[Hornbein]

Sarfatti was one of the creatures of the swamp that was (is?) Usenet's sci.physics. Once he responded to a critic by letterbombing him, saturating his email with junk.

 

[pines-demon]

Sarfatti was one of the creatures of the swamp that was (is?) Usenet's sci.physics. Once he responded to a critic by letterbombing him, saturating his email with junk.

Fundamental Fysiks Group, Stargate project, flying saucers... quite a wacky character

 

[pines-demon]

Mysticism in 20th century physics

It seems that in the early 20th century, the writings of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and others introduced various intellectuals (including physicists) to concepts of Bhuddishm and Hinduism.

Schrödinger's dog
Erwin Schrödinger was influenced by Schopenhauer writings, so much that he named his dog Atman, the Hindu concept of personal reality/soul, and yes Schrödinger had a dog not a cat, he hated cats apparently. In his famous book What is Life?, he writes things like

The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition

ATHMAN = BRAHMAN

(the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.

How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body. (Consider the changes of mind during the development of the body, as puberty, ageing, dotage, etc., or consider the effects of fever, intoxication, narcosis, lesion of the brain and so on.) Now, there is a great plurality of similar bodies. Hence the pluralization of consciousnesses or minds seems a very suggestive hypothesis. Probably all simple ingenuous people, as well as the great majority of western philosophers, have accepted it.

Ying-yang duality

Similar to Schrödinger, Niels Bohr once said:

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions

Bohr was involved in some mysticism. So much in fact that many of his contributions (complementarity principle, correspondence principle) read like esoteric passages now-a-days. At some point, Albert Einstein called out Bohr for this and Bohr tried to dismiss the idea

Utterances of this kind would naturally in many minds evoke the impression of an underlying mysticism foreign to the spirit of science; at the above mentioned [Copenhagen] Congress [for the Unity of Science] in 1936 I therefore tried to clear up such misunderstandings... I am afraid that I had in this respect little success in convincing my listeners, for whom the dissent among the physicists themselves was naturally a cause of skepticism.

However, it did not stop Bohr to embrace some mysticism in his identity. When he was knighted in Denmark, he did not have a family coat of arms, so he made one and added a ying-yang simbol.

The avatar of Vishnu
J. Robert Oppenheimer was so invested in Hinduism that he learned Sanskrit. Philosopher David Hawkins that discussed with him said:

Oppenheimer had been a student of Sanskrit and Hindu scripture. This interest may have begun from his earlier association with Bohr, the philosopher-physicist. Once, before the war, Oppenheimer and I discussed those ancient writings. I mentioned something in my reading of Plato, and he said,

I have read the Greeks; I find the Hindus deeper.

But it wasn't a put-down of a younger friend, just something strongly felt.

During the death of Roosevelt, Oppenheimer said:

Faith is the substance of things hoped for; what a man's faith is, he is.

a passage from the Bhagavad Ghita.

Perhaps the most iconic line of Oppenheimer is the one that he recorded after Trinity, the first test of a nuclear bomb.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says,

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Sources:

• E. Schrödinger, What is Life?, 1944
• Letters (1994), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 50:5, 3-60, doi:10.1080/00963402.1994.11456544
• J.M. Marin, 'Mysticism' in quantum mechanics: the forgotten controversy, European Journal of Physics, Volume 30, Number 4 (2009), doi:10.1088/0143-0807/30/4/014
• V. Kulkarni, What Erwin Schrödinger Said About the Upanishads, The Wire Science (2000)

 

[pines-demon]

When Bardeen was wrong

John Bardeen was one of the giants of solid state physics, up to this day the only person with two Nobel Prizes in Physics (1956 for the transistor and 1972 for BCS theory of superconductivity). However, when a 23 young man predicted of a superconducting tunneling current across a gap between two superconductors, Bardeen was very skeptical.

The young man was Brian Josephson, 23 years old at the time working under supervision of Brian Pippard. Phillip W. Anderson had suggested the problem to Josephson. He submitted his prediction to Physical Letters in 1962. Bardeen wrote that Cooper pair tunneling was "impossible" as these quasiparticles only existed in the superconductors. Ten days later Bardeen wrote a commentary to Physical Review Letters:

In a recent note, Josephson uses a somewhat similar formulation to discuss the possibility of superfluid flow across the tunneling region, in which no quasi-particles are created. However, as pointed out by the author (reference 3), pairing does not extend into the barrier, so that there can be no such superfluid flow.

Two months later, during the 1962 International Conference on Low Temperature Physics, Josephson and Bardeen were invited to publicly debate the issue. When they met Josephson tried to explain his theory to Bardeen, but the latter quickly replied:

I don't think so.

Bardeen left after that, Josephson was upset.

During the debate, many people gathered. The discussion was civil but none of the two wanted to give in. Every time that Bardeen said that Josephson's idea was

Quite impossible.

Josephson replied:

Did you calculate it? No? I did

At the end of the debate physicist Wolfgang Klose felt that Josephson had won the debate. He recall that at the end:

Bardeen put his arm around Josephson, like a father to his son. In this attitude they left the lecture-room.

Josephson's effect was confirmed in 1963 by Anderson and John Rowell at Bell Labs. Bardeen apologized publicly, offered a postdoc to Josephson and even nominated Josephson to the Nobel Prize in Physics, which Josephson received in 1973.

Source:

• Daitch & Hoddeson (2002). True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen

 

[fresh_42]

I'm not sure if we already had this anecdote, but I think it should be mentioned. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

The question asked the student to "show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer."

According to Snopes.com, more recent (1999 and 1988) versions identify the problem as a question in "a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen" and the student was Niels Bohr, and includes the following answers:

• Tying a piece of string to the barometer, lowering the barometer from the roof to the ground, and measuring the length of the string and barometer.
• Dropping the barometer off the roof, measuring the time it takes to hit the ground, and calculating the building's height assuming constant acceleration under gravity.
• When the sun is shining, standing the barometer up, measuring the height of the barometer and the lengths of the shadows of both barometer and building, and finding the building's height using similar triangles.
• Tying a piece of string to the barometer, and swinging it like a pendulum both on the ground and on the roof, and from the known pendulum length and swing period, calculate the gravitational field for the two cases. Use Newton's law of gravitation to calculate the radial altitude of both the ground and the roof. The difference will be the height of the building.
• Tying a piece of string to the barometer, which is as long as the height of the building, and swinging it like a pendulum, and from the swing period, calculate the pendulum length.
• Marking off the number of barometer lengths vertically along the emergency staircase, and multiplying this with the length of the barometer.
• Trading the barometer for the correct information with the building's janitor or superintendent.
• Measuring the pressure difference between ground and roof and calculating the height difference (the expected answer).

 

[pines-demon]

I'm not sure if we already had this anecdote, but I think it should be mentioned. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

I think it was already mentioned by you in post #161

 

[pines-demon]

Inspired by Solitaire

During the Manhattan Project, Stanisław Ulam was set in charge of a problem related to nuclear reactions. He needed to estimate fission criticality from neutron multiplication rates. The idea of how to solve it came to Ulam while bored in a hospital:

The first thoughts and attempts I made to practice were suggested by a question which occurred to me in 1946 as I was convalescing from an illness and playing solitaires. The question was what are the chances that a Canfield solitaire laid out with 52 cards will come out successfully? After spending a lot of time trying to estimate them by pure combinatorial calculations, I wondered whether a more practical method than "abstract thinking" might not be to lay it out say one hundred times and simply observe and count the number of successful plays. This was already possible to envisage with the beginning of the new era of fast computers, and I immediately thought of problems of neutron diffusion and other questions of mathematical physics, and more generally how to change processes described by certain differential equations into an equivalent form interpretable as a succession of random operations. Later [in 1946], I described the idea to John von Neumann, and we began to plan actual calculations

Von Neumann and Nicholas Metropolis implemented the algorithm in the ENIAC machine. As they needed a codename, Metropolis suggested the name "Monte Carlo simulation" based on Monte Carlo Casino, he writes:

I suggested an obvious name for the statistical method-a suggestion not unrelated to the fact that Stan had an uncle who would borrow money from relatives because he "just had to go to MonteCarlo." The name seems to have endured.

Sources:

• R. Eckhardt (1987). "Stan Ulam, John von Neumann, and the Monte Carlo method". Los Alamos Science 131–137.
• N. Metropolis (1987). "The beginning of the Monte Carlo method". Los Alamos Science: 125–130.

 

[sbrothy]

Yeah, it's easy to loose the big picture in these long threads. I do it myself now and then.

 

[Hornbein]

"The first thoughts and attempts I made to practice were suggested by a question which occurred to me in 1946"

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Manhattan Project was over in 1945.

 

[Frabjous]

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Manhattan Project was over in 1945.

The program was under military control until the AEC took over on Jan 1, 1947.

 

[pines-demon]

The physicist who (almost) rejected the Nobel Prize, and his mother

As we are reaching 2025 Nobel week this anecdote fits the season.

In 1933, the Nobel Committee was trying to give an award to quantum mechanics, the obvious candidate was Erwin Schrödinger but it was unclear if he should receive it alone (Werner Heisenberg got the prize the year before). Other laureate candidates included Paul Dirac, Arnold Sommerfeld and Friedrich Paschen. The Dirac equation was very notable, and the discovery of antimatter the year leaned the choice on Dirac.

Now, one would imagine that Dirac was happy for the announcement, he was one of the youngest persons to be earned the Nobel Prize in Physics. But Dirac, being quirky as he is (check other stories in this thread), wanted to turn down the prize! He did not want the attention, however Ernest Rutherford convinced him to accept the prize:

a refusal will get you more publicity!

Dirac had no choice but to accept the prize.

A London paper, Sundary Dispatch, covering the story described Dirac as

as shy as a gazelle and modest as a Victorian maid

and stated also that Dirac was

The genius who fears women

Schrödinger decided to bring his wife to the ceremony. Dirac brought his mother. Dirac was invited to bring his father but he did not want to go with him due to childhood traumas. When Dirac arrived to Malmö, the journalists tried to asked the Diracs question while they were taking their breakfast. They asked Dirac:

did the Nobel Prize come as a surprise?

Before, he could respond, Dirac's mother intervened:

Oh no, not particularly, I have been waiting for him to receive the prize as hard as he has been working.

The press later described them as:

a very shy and timid boy [...] [and] a lively and talkative lady.

The day of the ceremony, Dirac and his mother where nowhere to be seen. Dirac's mother had fallen sleep in the train. The guard in the train ejected her of the train and throw out all of Dirac's mother belongings out. They arrived late and everybody was wondering what was going on [Dirac's mother and Dirac himself are shown in the photo].

The final issue with the Nobel trip happened when they arrived at the hotel. The manager thought that he was doing the Diracs a favor by giving them the large bridal suit of the Grand Hotel. Ms. Dirac displeased asked for separate room which Paul had to pay from his own pocket.

References:

• G. Farmelo, The Strangest Man, Faber&Faber
• H. Kraugh, Dirac, Cambridge UPress
• A. Pais, Paul Dirac, Cambridge UPress

 

[BWV]

There was that time Stephen Hawking appeared at the 1998 X Games

 

[robphy]

There was that time Stephen Hawking appeared at the 1998 X Games

Sora to see it happen that way?

 

[robphy]

Lee–Yang (or Yang–Lee) parity break-up (part 1)
...
Notes

Yang apparently said something about the conflict it in his Selected Papers. I could not find anything about it, he just says that Bernstein called the discovery of parity breaking "unprecedented" and that it led to press conferences that Yang found "distasteful".

Here's a passage that might be of interest:

p.52-53 (Selected papers, 1945-1980, with commentary, C.N. Yang, Freeman, 1983)
Commentary on
[62i]
Theory of Charged Vector Mesons Interacting with the Electromagnetic Field
The Physical Review 128, 885 (1962)
T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang

[62i] was the last paper coauthored by Lee and me.

Our relationship had started in 1946. It had been close and warm. it had been
based on mutual respect, trust, and consideration. Then came 1957 and our success.
Our fame, unfortunately, introduced new elements into our relationship that were
not there in earlier years. Our collaboration remained fruitful, however, for f‌ive more
years, but amidst slowly increasing strains. On April 18, 1962, Lee and I had a long
talk in his office, in which we reviewed what had happened since 1946: our early
relationship, the early 1950s, the events of 1956 that led to the parity paper, and
subsequent developments. We found that we had, except for minor points, the same
memory of all crucial events. Like reconciliations in family conflicts, it was an
emotion-draining experience, with cathartic senses of liberation. The reconciliation,
however, did nor last. A few months later we parted company for good.

In the sixteen years during which Lee and I were friends, I was like an older brother
to him. I was already well known in the early 1950s both in elementary particle
physics and in statistical mechanics, and was the senior partner in our collaboration.

Keenly aware that he had to get out of my shadow, I bent over backward to attempt
to help him in his career while maintaining strict public silence about the nature of
our partnership. To the outside world, our collaboration was an extraordinarily
close one. It was also extraordinarily productive for physics. It was admired and
envied. And, according to Lee’s own assessment, it was of determining influence on
his formative years and on his career.

All in all, it was a worthwhile episode in my life. Yes, there was agony, but few
things human and meaningful are entirely without pain.

 

[robphy]

Here's a passage that might be of interest:

p.52-53 (Selected papers, 1945-1980, with commentary, C.N. Yang, Freeman, 1983)
Commentary on
[62i]
Theory of Charged Vector Mesons Interacting with the Electromagnetic Field
The Physical Review 128, 885 (1962)
T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang

Here's another passage that might be of interest:

Thirty Years Since Parity Non-Conservation: A SYMPOSIUM FOR T. D. Lee (Birkhauser,1988)
REMINISCENCES * (p. 153-165)
T. D. Lee

... p.154
In those early Chicago days, Frank (C.N.) Yang and I became close friends. Yang was extremely bright. Both of us were very young, and had an enormous curiosity towards
practically all subjects rational. Often we would have different ideas and opinions and occasionally our discussions would become quite animated. That added a great
deal of life to our student days.
...

...p. 160
During that period, I had several discussions with Steinberger. One day around the beginning of May he came to see me and said that he had just given a seminar at Brookhaven on his experiment. Yang had been in the audience and had strongly objected to my idea that there could be asymmetry in Steinberger's hyperon experiment due to parity violation. I then called Yang and told him that since we last saw each other, at the Rochester Conference, there had been a theoretical breakthrough. I asked him not to express his objections further in public until he could talk it over with me.

...p.161
The next morning Yang drove from Brookhaven to Columbia and we had a very intensive session. I told him my idea and analysis in detail. He was quickly convinced of its importance and wanted to work on it with me.

Yang is endowed with a highly critical mind. It always made me feel more confident if I could overcome his objections with substantive arguments. Furthermore, he is an excellent physicist. The implications of parity nonconservation extended over all facets of physics. I thought Yang's participation would undoubtedly enrich the final product. Therefore I expressed my welcome.

On that day, we covered an enormous variety of physical processes, arguing, debating, sometimes even shouting; occasionally we would switch our points of view, just to make sure. The tremendous intensity of our working together in opposition and in harmony, the immense open feeling that the whole world was lying in front of us, the fearlessness of youth, these are what made life meaningful!

p.162
Both of us, of course, knew there existed very good experimental evidence for parity conservation in the strong reaction. But how solid was it? By the end of the day, we were convinced that for strong interactions it was indeed very good (even for strange particles). In addition, there was also excellent proof for parity conservation in the electromagnetic interaction.

My original idea, that all weak decays of strange particles could be parity violating, stood firm. However, for the weak interaction of non-strange particles further investigation was needed, and both of us agreed we should look into that.

Before Yang joined me on that day, I had been thinking of writing up the work I had already done on parity nonconservation in strange particle decays. However, Yang convinced me to hold off on this since it was a better idea to enlarge the scope to encompass the whole weak interaction. We separated and each of us continued the examination of parity questions in beta decay.

Beta decay is a field with a long history. A very large body of knowledge was available at that time. Since parity conservation had been an implicit assumption in all analyses, and the notion of parity was commonly used, it required a very careful examination of all the available experimental facts to see whether parity nonconservation could also be extended to beta decay. One of the world's great experts on beta decay is C.S. Wu, whose office was a few floors above mine at Columbia. I visited her and told her of these ideas. She was extremely interested in them and kindly lent me the authoritative book on beta decay edited by K. Siegbahn.

At that time, because of parity conservation, beta decay was described by an interaction consisting of five coupling constants, C_i (i = S, P, V, A, T). For our purpose, we introduced five additional parity-violating constants C_i'. Yang and I started a systematic investigation of all known beta decay phenomena by using the general parity nonconserving interaction. We raced through the Siegbahn book and kept in touch often by telephone. It took us about two weeks to finish the entire beta-decay analysis. (In computational skill, Yang and I were evenly matched. This race was extremely intense, but in the best spirit of collaboration and competition, with both of us as Winners. Any attempt to try to place which one was ahead in such intensive and extensive calculations is meaningless.)

...p.163
From then on, the theoretical analysis could be made independently of any detailed calculations. We then expanded our scope to other processes, such as \pi-\mu decay. It took another month of intensive work for us to complete the analysis and to write the theoretical paper. The next scene of the parity drama was set, with many more participants.

There remained the experimental question of how to detect possible parity violation in beta decay. Again I discussed with C.S. Wu the best way to measure asymmetry in spin-momentum correlation in beta decay. She suggested the possible use of a strongly polarized {}^{60}Co \beta-source, for which however a low-temperature set-up was needed. Subsequently, she approached the Bureau of Standards in Washington. This led to the decisive experiment by Wu, Ambler, Hayward, Hoppes and Hudson, which was followed within a few days by the detection of parity violation in \pi-\mu decay, by Garwin, Lederman and Weinrich, and by Friedman and Telegdi. Because of the practical difficulty in accumulating data on strange particles, parity violation in $\Lambda$-decay was established half a year later by the Steinberger group.

p.163
Reflections on a Collaboration

In recounting these happy days of thirty and forty years ago, I re-read the account given by Yang in 1983. Once again, I was distressed and amazed by what he wrote.

p.164
For instance, take his version of the breakthrough on parity violation. According to Yang, one day in late April or early May of 1956 he came from Brookhaven to visit me at Columbia, and during our conversation in a restaurant he suddenly had the idea of detecting parity nonconservation in $\Lambda$-decay. He further said that when he told that idea to me, I resisted.

It is a matter of record that, weeks before Yang visited me on that day, I already had the idea. I explained it to Jack Steinberger shortly after the Rochester Conference which took place in early April. In fact, the first experimental attempt to detect parity violation in $\beta$-decay had already been carried out at Columbia by Budde, Chrétien, Leitner, Samios, Schwartz and Steinberger before Yang joined me on that day. Their result was published in Physical Review (with an acknowledgment to me), before the theoretical paper by Yang and myself.

In his version of our collaboration, Yang has made a systematic effort to paint a picture of himself as leader, from beginning to end, with me as subordinate. Any physicist who knew us in those days would know this to be untrue. Our collaboration had always been one of equal partnership. Our talents were different, but complementary. That is why the collaboration was successful.

Yang's effort to present such an image extends even to our early days in Chicago. According to his account, although I was Fermi's student, Yang was in effect my teacher. This is indeed extremely strange, considering that Fermi was one of the great teachers of all time. At Chicago, Yang and I were both graduate students. We had many discussions, with lots of give and take, and we enlarged each other's horizons. But how could Yang ever mistake these exchanges between novices for the quality of guidance and instruction that I received from Fermi?

From May 1948 to December 1949, Fermi directed my research over a wide range of subjects, which included, besides particle and nuclear physics, heat conductivity of dense matter, white dwarfs, stellar stability, hydrodynamics and magneto-hydrodynamics. These led to several papers which, except for the Lee-Rosenbluth-Yang article, had nothing to do with Yang.

The collaboration between Yang and myself ended about twenty-five years ago. Its merit, as represented by our joint papers, has withstood the test of time. Both of us have made many other independent contributions to physics. The world has rewarded us with recognition and success. Shouldn't that be sufficient?