Who Is Described in the Scientist's Letter?

[Gokul43201]

Look out for the "Connections" trivia quiz, soon to appear under the Quizzes category. Heck, that felt cheap !

Rules :

# no googling
# only one question per person until otherwise announced - now a free-for-all



A reminder : Please read the rules



Q1. The following is from a letter written by a scientist, to his fiancee in New Zealand : "He's very pleasant in coversation, and he's not fossilized at all. As regards appearance, he's a medium sized man, dark and quite youthful still - shaves very badly and wears his hair rather long."

Name the person being described in the letter ?


Q2. Early during WWII, the RAF suffered a large number of inexplicable aircraft and systems malfunctions. The hapless RAF pilots soon conjured up a fictional creature which they blamed for the malfunctions. The stories grew and soon these creatures would be described as "a foot high, wearing pointed shoes."

What were these creatures called ?


Q3. Who, or what, connects the following : Lord Byron, Blaise de Vigenere, Sir Charles Wheatstone, Alfred Lord Tennyson ?


Q4. Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man) is a valley near the Rio Grande river in the US. The name was coined by the Conquistadors in the mid-1600s describing a harsh and rugged territory along the northward route from New Spain (Mexico).

Nearly three centuries later, the name of this valley took on a special meaning. Why ?


Q5. In 1948, George Gamow published a paper on Cosmogenesis with his PhD student, Ralph Alpher - actually this was a synthesis of Alpher's dissertation. For a very strange reason Gamow asked a famous nuclear physicist if he (Gamow) could add his (the other physicist's) name to the paper. Since he had done no work on this paper, the physicist initially refused, but eventually gave in on Gamow's insistence.

Who's the unnamed physicist ?


Q6. This prolific genius used his own peculiar language. Here are some words with their meanings :

Supreme Fascist = God
Epsilon = child, little kid
Joe = USSR (Joseph Stalin)
Sam = USA (Uncle Sam)
Sam & Joe Show = International News
Boss = woman
Slave = man

A tribute to his prolificity is that other researchers in his area get identified through a number named after him indicating degrees of co-authorship separation.

Who ?

 

[DarkEternal]

Q5. In 1948, George Gamow published a paper on Cosmogenesis with his PhD student, Ralph Alpher - actually this was a synthesis of Alpher's dissertation. For a very strange reason Gamow asked a famous nuclear physicist if he (Gamow) could add his (the other physicist's) name to the paper. Since he had done no work on this paper, the physicist initially refused, but eventually gave in on Gamow's insistence.

Who's the unnamed physicist ?

Hans Bethe

Alpher-Bethe-Gamow

 

[The_Professional]

Look out for the "Connections" trivia quiz, soon to appear under the Quizzes category. Heck, that felt cheap !

Rules :

# no googling
# only one question per person until otherwise announced


Q6. This prolific genius used his own peculiar language. Here are some words with their meanings :

Supreme Fascist = God
Epsilon = child, little kid
Joe = USSR (Joseph Stalin)
Sam = USA (Uncle Sam)
Sam & Joe Show = International News
Boss = woman
Slave = man

A tribute to his prolificity is that other researchers in his area get identified through a number named after him indicating degrees of co-authorship separation.

Who ?

Paul Erdos

 

[Math Is Hard]

Q2. Gremlins?

 

[Gokul43201]

Drat ! 3 correct answers within 4 minutes of each other ! Naw fair u folks !

 

[Janitor]

1. I know it was Rutherford who wrote that letter. I remember reading it in one of Pais's books. I believe he was talking about J.J. Thompson.

 

[Gokul43201]

You believe right.

That leaves two toughies...Q3 & Q4 !

 

[Janitor]

The New Mexico question would be a [CENSORED FOR REASONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY] for me to answer, but you have restricted us to one each.

 

[Gokul43201]

Janitor, you're giving hints here...would you mind editing that before others see it ?

y stuid keyoard just went onkers - it won't let me use the letters , , or . Dan ! It's tie I chucked it and ought yself a new one. Till then I'll just have to e very selective with y choice of words. Okay, I can get m, b and p by cutting and pasting - it's too painful

 

[arildno]

Q3 They're all dead? (That's a "what"-connection..)

 

[The_Professional]

they all did research on bounded harmonic functions...well, not really

 

[plover]

Q3. Who, or what, connects the following : Lord Byron, Blaise de Vigenere, Sir Charles Wheatstone, Alfred Lord Tennyson ?

Ada Lovelace?

My second guess, which I'm a good deal more sure of is: None of them have appeared on Wheaties boxes...

 

[Gokul43201]

arildno, they're also all male...how did u miss that ?

Q3. Okay there's been one really good/lucky guess for this question...well you know which one it is !

The idea with this type of question is that there need not be only one correct answer. If you find a 'who/what' that is related to the given people and you can explain the relationships to my satisfaction...you get a score.

For instance, arildno found one such 'what' and explained the relationship - only, I wasn't satisfied.

So, for the others that have had a go at Q3...if you can explain all the relationships, let's see it !

 

[Gokul43201]

arildno, I'll call your guess a 'clarification'. So you still have a shot to take...if you want it.

 

[arildno]

Oh, I clarified something, did I?
I remain thoroughly mystified, unless Q4 has something to do with area 51 or Roswell

 

[Gokul43201]

Okay, not a 'clarification', but a 'request for one'.

I have clarified that the connection must be non-trivial (also read non-obvious) - if not, I'm doing it now.

And no, it's not Area-51.

 

[jcsd]

I'll take a pot-shot:3. they were all members of the romantic movement?

 

[Gokul43201]

No jcsd,

Vigenere is from the 16th century.

And even if they were, I'd be looking for something a lot more specific. For instance, arildno's 'dead' includes most people we've heard of. My counter of 'male' covers about half the people we know. Even 'members of the Romantic Movement', I consider to be too large a group of people - too many famous Europeans from the early 1800s were associated with the Romantic Movement.

As an example, if I asked for the connection between Avon, Julius Caesar, Globe and Francis Bacon, the answer would be ...
.
.
.
-->Shakespeare.

If I asked for the connection between J.D Salinger, Francis Ford Coppola, and The Rock, the answer would be...
.
.
.
.
yes, --->Nicholas Cage.

 

[arildno]

Aargh, it's difficult, but not too difficult, it's just me not being able to solve them.

Nor can I complain about anything else than that the unknown "Erdos" was accepted rather than the genius Erdös..

 

[selfAdjoint]

The answer to Q4 is, it was the site of the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb.

 

[Gokul43201]

Right you are, sA !


LAST Q STANDING : Q3 - Free for all, starting now ! But take only one guess.

Here's an additional hint. Somebody came incredibly close . . .

 

[arildno]

"Cherchez le femme"??

 

[meteor]

q3: poetry?

 

[Gokul43201]

Not 'poetry', unless you have an explanation.

Quelle femme ? Je ne sais pas.

Am i going to actually have to give you the answer ? I'll wait another day...

 

[Gokul43201]

Okay, I think people have given up on this or just gone to sleep, or decided to bungee jump, or whatever...so I'm releasing the final answer.

Actually, here's the complete set of solutions :

Q1. The following is from a letter written by a scientist, to his fiancee in New Zealand : "He's very pleasant in coversation, and he's not fossilized at all. As regards appearance, he's a medium sized man, dark and quite youthful still - shaves very badly and wears his hair rather long."

Name the person being described in the letter ?

J. J. Thompson - letter written by Rutherford - 'New Zealand' was the give away


Q2. Early during WWII, the RAF suffered a large number of inexplicable aircraft and systems malfunctions. The hapless RAF pilots soon conjured up a fictional creature which they blamed for the malfunctions. The stories grew and soon these creatures would be described as "a foot high, wearing pointed shoes."

What were these creatures called ?

Gremlins - the creatures on which the 1984 John Dante/Chris Columbus Horror/Comedy flick was based


Q3. Who, or what, connects the following : Lord Byron, Blaise de Vigenere, Sir Charles Wheatstone, Alfred Lord Tennyson ?

It's Charles Babbage - Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace was Babbage's assistant;

Babbage was the first to crack the Vigenere Cipher;

Wheatstone & Babbage were close buddies, often spending weekeds together decrypting private messages in the 'personals' columns of local newspapers...along with Lyon Playfair, the 3 created the Playfair Cipher;

Babbage once sent Tennyson a letter complaining about lines in a poem that went "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born". Babbage wrote "...if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill...I would suggest in the next edition of your poem, you have it read 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment one and one-sixteenth is born'."

Was this too tough ? Quite Google-unfriendly too, I'd imagine : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=byron+tennyson+vigenere+wheatstone&btnG=Search


Q4. Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man) is a valley near the Rio Grande river in the US. The name was coined by the Conquistadors in the mid-1600s describing a harsh and rugged territory along the northward route from New Spain (Mexico).

Nearly three centuries later, the name of this valley took on a special meaning. Why ?

This was the site of the Trinity Test - the culmination of the Manhattan Project - where the first atom bomb was detonated.


Q5. In 1948, George Gamow published a paper on Cosmogenesis with his PhD student, Ralph Alpher - actually this was a synthesis of Alpher's dissertation. For a very strange reason Gamow asked a famous nuclear physicist if he (Gamow) could add his (the other physicist's) name to the paper. Since he had done no work on this paper, the physicist initially refused, but eventually gave in on Gamow's insistence.

Who's the unnamed physicist ?

Hans Bethe - So, the author list reads Alpher, Bethe, Gamow - a pun on alpha, beta, gamma. Just another example of Gamow's humor.


Q6. This prolific genius used his own peculiar language. Here are some words with their meanings :

Supreme Fascist = God
Epsilon = child, little kid
Joe = USSR (Joseph Stalin)
Sam = USA (Uncle Sam)
Sam & Joe Show = International News
Boss = woman
Slave = man

A tribute to his prolificity is that other researchers in his area get identified through a number named after him indicating degrees of co-authorship separation.

Who ?

Paul Erdös - If you have co-authored a paper with Erdös, you get an Erdös Number of 1. If you have co-authored with someone who's co-authored with Erdös, your Number is 2...and so on... Nobody, save Euler, has published as many papers in the field.

 

[humanino]

I had no hope of finding Q3, so I googled it
I never intended to cheat, because I did not want to post the answer. The thing is : google could not find the answer :surprise: :surprise:

Gokul knows more than Google
Congratulations Gokul, your trivia are excellent Thanks again !

 

[arildno]

They are superb!
(Just a sin of omission: If you have Erdös number 0, you're a renowned, but dead mathematician with the name..)

 

[Gokul43201]

Well, if you put all 4 names in you would not get the result (though you would get a hit for this thread )

However, "Byron" + "Wheatstone" OR "Byron" + "Vigenere" would have worked.

humanino, thanks for the praise (not flattery, I hope)

I've just submitted a short Quiz, based on the format of this very troublesome Q3. It should be up today or tomorrow. I believe it's giving Chroot a few headaches (making him have to change the script to accommodate some unusualness) right now ! I really never considered myself a trouble-maker, you know !

 

[Gokul43201]

They are superb!
(Just a sin of omission: If you have Erdös number 0, you're a renowned, but dead mathematician with the name..)

Thanks arildno ! (what was that about the woman, by the way?)

I wasn't aware of the trivial case - but seems like a fitting extension to the system; like the need for making 0! = 1)

 

[arildno]

Well, to be honest, I thought like this:
"Ok, he said someone was incredibly close; that's probably the Ada Lovelace answer.
Now, it would defy all odds that the answer is Babbage (besides, I didn't manage to hook Babbage up to any of the mentioned persons), so it's probably some woman.."
(It's true I DID think of Babbage, but dismissed him )

 

[Gokul43201]

Hmm, I thought, by 'la femme', you were referring to Ada herself, and telling folks to think from there.

Well...the odds have been defied - and it's not the first time, I'm sure.

 

[arildno]

You thought I would let others bask in the glory which rightfully should be lavished on me?
Nope. I'm far too selfish for such acts of altruism.

 

[Janitor]

This was the site of the Trinity Test - the culmination of the Manhattan Project - where the first atom bomb was detonated.

In the 1990s I was on a vacation trip by car through Texas. I was making good time on the way back, and so at El Paso I decided to take a jaunt to the north, because I knew the test site was somewhere around Alamagordo. As I was in the desert a few miles shy of the town, I could see ahead of me the mountain range that is east of Alamagordo, up on top of which Alan Hale discovered the comet Hale-Bopp. I came to a road block. The man approached my car and asked through my open window where I was going. I told him, "I want to take a look at the Trinity site."

"What?" he asked.

"The nuclear bomb test site."

When I said that, he had this look on his face that told me he had no idea of the history of his part of the country.

"Uh, would you mind turning off the engine and stepping out of your car? Open the trunk. Leave your door open."

So I did. (What choice did I have? He had a handgun in a holster.) He made me walk about 50 feet away from the car, and another uniformed man walked a dog over to my car and let it sniff in and around my car. I guess they were looking for drugs. Well, it was not their lucky day, because I am not a drug smuggler.

I drove on to Alamagordo and stayed overnight. They have a narrow-gauge railroad there, and also a display of missiles next to the main road. The next day I stopped at White Sands visitors center and asked about the Trinity site. The ranger there said it is only open to the public one day a year, and naturally that was not the day, so I never did get to see it.

 

[Gokul43201]

Interesting story Janitor - I was met with similar behavior from a cop when I tried to explain to him that I was driving about a hundred miles from home, looking for the nearest IHOP. It was a phase...what can I say ?

 

[Gokul43201]

This Quiz is up - hope you enjoy it ! https://www.physicsforums.com/quiz.php?

 

[plover]

Well, to be honest, I thought like this:
"Ok, he said someone was incredibly close; that's probably the Ada Lovelace answer.
Now, it would defy all odds that the answer is Babbage (besides, I didn't manage to hook Babbage up to any of the mentioned persons), so it's probably some woman.."
(It's true I DID think of Babbage, but dismissed him )

After Gokul's response I assumed the answer almost had to be Babbage. I would have guessed him, but I thought I was barred from guessing again.

The first guess was pretty much luck. While the names Vigenere and Wheatstone looked familiar, I couldn't remember any associations for them. The other two were poets, but given that this was a science quiz, I figured I needed someone associated with science, and Ada was the scientific personage most closely associated with either of them that I could think of.

But I still defy anyone to find a Wheaties box (or even some kind of Victorian proto-Weetabix box) with Byron on it (let alone Vigenere) ...

 

[selfAdjoint]

Vignere and Wheatstone have ciphers named after them, there has to be a clue there somehow!

 

[Gokul43201]

Wow, sA - you've resurrected an oldie (although I imagine you were lead here by my link in the other thread)!

Yes, that is where the connection lies. The answer I was looking for is Charles Babbage (a cryptanalyst of no modest ability himself) - see post #25.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Is that true, that Babbage was the first to solve a vignere (polyalphabetic) cipher? Who says?

 

[Gokul43201]

Is that true, that Babbage was the first to solve a vignere (polyalphabetic) cipher? Who says?

Google gives me these (among other hits):

Friedrich Kasiski published the first successful attack on the Vigenère cipher in 1863, but Charles Babbage had already developed the same test in 1854. Babbage was goaded into breaking the Vigenère cipher when John Hall Brock Thwaites submitted a "new" cipher to the Journal of the Society of the Arts: when Babbage showed that Thwaites' cipher was essentially just another recreation of the Vigenère cipher Thwaites grew irritated and challenged Babbage to break his cipher. Babbage tried to get out of it, but eventually gave in and succeded in decrypting a sample, which turned out to be the poem "The Vision of Sin," by Alfred Tennyson, encrypted according to the keyword "Emily," the first name of Tennyson's wife[5].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigenere_cipherMy original source, however, was likely Simon Singh.

 

[neutrino]

Babbage was the first to crack the Vigenere Cipher;

Wheatstone & Babbage were close buddies, often spending weekeds together decrypting private messages in the 'personals' columns of local newspapers...along with Lyon Playfair, the 3 created the Playfair Cipher;

Babbage once sent Tennyson a letter complaining about lines in a poem that went "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born". Babbage wrote "...if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill...I would suggest in the next edition of your poem, you have it read 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment one and one-sixteenth is born'."

Arrgghh! Now I remember reading about all that in Simon Singh's The Code Book. Anyway, I look at these trivia threads long after most of the questions have been answered.

Thanks for all that trivia, Gokul.