Interesting anecdotes in the history of physics?

[pines-demon]

Heisenberg's pair production
Here is a short one:

Heisenberg met his future wife in a musical evenings in a publisher’s home. They marry in the next 3 months, later the couple went to the Austrian mountains for their honeymoon. Exactly nine months later, Heisenberg's wife gives birth to fraternal twins in 1938. They name their sons Anna Maria and Wolfgang, the latter after Wolfgang Pauli. When Pauli gets to visit them he congratulates Heisenberg for his:

pair creation

Main source: D.C. Cassidy, Uncertainty : the life and science of Werner Heisenberg, WH Freeman and Company (see also I. Tovordov, Heisenberg, https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0503235)

 

[pines-demon]

Another of Lord Kelvin's bad predictions
Lord Kelvin (real name William Thomson) is one, if not the most brilliant scientist of the pre-1900 era. Everybody that studies thermodynamics, wave mechanics and fluid dynamics knows of his work. Yet, even if his discoveries were key for the understanding of the properties of wind and aerodynamics (see for example Kelvin's circulation theorem) he seems to be against the possibility of airplanes.

In an interview ("KELVIN ON SCIENCE: British Lord Tells His Hopes For Wireless Telegraphy DELIGHTED WITH MARCONIGRAMS" reprinted in The Newark Advocate, April 26, 1902, p. 4., ) Kelvin claims that human-powered aircraft are impossible, check it out:

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There is no man of science now living whose pronouncement on almost any scientific question would have equal weight with that of Lord Kelvin, says Garrett P. Serviss in the New York Journal. Consequently his opinion on scientific matters now prominently before the public mind possess special interest and importance. The first question that I asked him the other evening related to the navigation of the air. Lord Kelvin naturally does not wish to appear as criticizing Mr. Santos personally, and his reply is to be taken in a general sense as bearing only upon the subject of aerial navigation without particular reference to the Brazilian inventor. He was very emphatic in the declaration that there is northing practical about dirigible airships.

Do you think it possible for an airship to be guided across the Atlantic ocean?

I asked [Lord Kelvin].

Not possible at all

he replied

On what ground do you think that the airship is impracticable?

Because no motive power can drive a balloon through the air.

Your objection, as I understand it, rests upon the unwieldiness of the balloon, but how about the aeroplane? Do you think that that is practicable?

No; no more than the other.

Then we cannot navigate the air at all in a commercial way?

No; I think it cannot be done. No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.

But, Lord Kelvin, you remember the experiments of the German, Lindenthal, who used a gliding machine, starting from an elevation and riding down the slope of the air?

Yes, but Lindenthal simply threw away his life. He was killed during his experiments, and later on another gentleman who had undertaken the same sort of flying also sacrificed his life. They both threw away their lives without any possibility of success in what they were undertaking to do.

Then it would appear that, in your opinion, we have no hope of solving the problem of aerial navigation in any way?

No; I do not think there is any hope. Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success. The balloon is the best of all.

But you think that the principal of the balloon cannot be applied to make a successful airship?

No; I do not.

This very decided opinion of Lord Kelvin on the impracticability of any of the present methods of solving the problem of aerial navigation certainly seems to throw a wet blanket on the whole matter.

But on the next subject that we approached Lord Kelvin had a very different kind of an opinion to express. This was wireless telegraphy. In regard to that his opinion was not only favorable, but almost enthusiastically so. He thoroughly believes in the success of the Marconi system.

The interview mentions Mr. Santos referring to Alberto Santos-Dumont who made one of the first successful dirigible flights in 1901. It also mentions Lindenthal(?) who might be Otto Lilienthal who died in 1896 in one of his tragic experiments with gliders.

This interview takes place a year before the Wright brothers made their first flight! This is yet another bad prediction by Kelvin check also post #78: Kelvin vs Darwinism.

The full interview can be found here: https://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/interview_aeronautics_and_wireless.html

Special thanks to Angela Collier who's recent video 'physicists don't know how planes work' video revealed the existence of this interview to me.

 

[sbrothy]

Hardcore. I'm unsure if I have anything to add at al!

 

[pines-demon]

The man who saw the first atomic bomb

@sbrothy mentioned this story in another thread so expand on the details here.

Richard Feynman worked in the Manhattan Project and he is probably one of the only scientist who saw the bomb of the Trinity test with his own eyes from 20 miles away. In his lecture titled Los Alamos From Below he writes:

We had a radio, and they were supposed to tell us when the thing was going to go off and so forth, but the radio wouldn't work, so we never knew what was happening. But just a few minutes before it was supposed to go off the radio started to work, and they told us there was 20 seconds or something to go, for people who were far away like we were. Others were closer, 6 miles away.

They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes - bright light can never hurt your eyes - is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing. OK.

Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said,

That ain't it. That's an after-image.

So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. The clouds form and then they disappear again; the compression and the expansion forms and makes clouds disappear. Then finally a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat.

All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark, and I had seen it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn't see it because they were all told to lie on the floor. I'm probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.

Finally, after about a minute and a half, there's suddenly a tremendous noise - BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder — and that's what convinced me. Nobody had said a word during this whole thing. We were all just watching quietly. But this sound released everybody — released me particularly because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that it had really worked.

The man standing next to me said,

What's that?

I said,

That was the bomb.

From: ed. L. Badesh, Reminiscences of Los Alamos 1943–1945, D. Reidel Publishing (1980). Apparently the lecture took place in UC Santa Barbara in 1975. An adaptation of this story appears in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Also this scene made it into the film Oppenheimer (2023)!