Idiosyncrasies of Some Great Scientists

Re: # 50

Thank you. -)

# 49

.... of course, much to our loss :)

Re: # 47

Sorry that should read ``did not interact till recently.``

Gill Saheb

Most social science can be argued to be pseudo-science. What special difficulties do you see in scientifically studying religion?

Re: # 46

Memes were analogous to Sheldrake`s morphological receptors, in my opinion. I`m afraid it`s been a long time since I read about these so I could be very wrong. I get very little time to read now.

Religion to me is a private matter. I prefer to keep science away from it. However it`s always good to see somebody else`s perspective on it.

I must go back and read your old articles on chowk. I used to visit this site once in a while but I interacted, till very recently.

Swarrier and Alephnull:

I read a review of Dennett’s book (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) in New Yorker (April 3, 2006) by H. Allen Orr. It should be an interesting book but essentially of speculative kind. Dennett talks of the “science of religion” which to me seems a far-fetched idea. It has become respectable to dress old metaphysical ideas in the scientific garb.

Dennett uses Dawkins’ memes to build his theory (?). A meme is a kind of mental gene. He uses memes more or less the same way that genes are used in the theory of evolution.

According to Orr, “A meme, a term introduced by Richard Dawkins, is any idea or practice – any thought, song, or ritual – that can replicate from one brain to another. When you whistle a jingle from a commercial, it’s because the jingle meme has successfully replicated and now resides in a new brain, yours. According to Dennett, memes let us lift Darwinism from its historical base in biology to the realm of human culture.”

Orr doesn’t place much faith in Dennett’s theory of memes. He says,” Similarly, many evolutionary biologists dismiss memes and memetics as little more than pseudoscientific wordplay. For one thing, the analogy between genes and memes is notoriously weak. Genes mutate rarely; memes mutate rapidly…Nor has memetics produced any persuasive explanations of previously unexplained phenomena.”

I had published a book review of “The Meme Machine” by Susan Blackmore at chowk.com on December 25, 2003, in which some more information on memes can be found. I am personally not persuaded that religion can be ‘scientified’; more or less the same way that science can be Islamized.

Mohammad Gill

Re: # 44

Yes I meant Sacks. Sorry. I have some of his books. Very interesting. my friend who is on the faculty at Mass General Hospital says his books are better than his lectures though.

Actually I mean to purchase Dennett`s latest book (Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon) in which he argues why evolution possibly makes it necessary for man to believe in a God. I shall do so this summer. It will be good reading.

S

swarrier #43

I actually first heard about both Hofstadter and Smullyan through Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Gardner devoted an entire column to GEB when it came out. Hofstadter in fact took over Gardner’s space for a couple of years – renaming it Metamagical Themas - when Gardner retired. The book of the same name was a result.

Smullyan has half a dozen books of logic puzzles – beginning with What is the Name of this Book? and ending with The Riddles of Scheherazade. Typically each book starts with a section of generic ‘lady or tiger/knights and knaves’ style puzzles but then goes on to puzzles that develop some of the ideas behind a specific subfield of logic (Godel’s Theorem, combinatory logic, set theory). Any one of them would be an excellent choice for bright children from 8 to 88. These books are only a fraction of Smullyan’s oeuvre.

Polya wrote several books on mathematical problem solving besides ‘How ToSolve It’.

Daniel Dennett is actually the link, in plain view, between Hofstadter and Dawkins. He shares Dawkins’ interest in explaining religions as natural phenomena.

Recent books on morphogenesis/evolutionary developmental biology that are not scientifically iffy are Goodwin’s How the Leopard Changed its Spots, Coen’s The Art of Genes, and Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful.

Finally, I think you meant Oliver Sacks.

Re: # 38
Dr. Gill
I had forgotten that chapter on Ramanujan. I last read GEB in 1989 so it`s been some time. Digressing a bit from idiosyncracies and physics and mathematics , I have really liked books by Richard Dawkins, ``The selfish gene``, ``The blind watchmaker``, and more recently ``The Ancestors tale``. Morphogenetics by Rupert Sheldrake was interesting, though, scientifically a little iffy.

Another excellent writer on medicine is Dr. Roger Sachs. His book on Migraine and ``The man who mistook his wife for a hat`` (on memory and Alzheimers etc) are worth perusing.

Another intersting writer is Daniel Denett who teaches philosophy close by at Tufts University. He co-authored a book with Hofstadter called ``The Mind`s I``. I have a copy of that but I preferred Hofstadters other books. Maybe I was not quite ready for this one.

Alephnull:
It was reading Raymond Smullyan`s ``The Lady or the Tiger and other puzzles`` that led me to Hofstadter. Another book I have really liked is, ``How to Solve it`` by George Polya. You will have read that. In another couple of years I will get my son to try to read ``One two three infinity`` by George Gamow.

Tahmad sahib,

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

You will not believe this but this is apparently true. A 19th century Bengali scholar and social reformer, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar achieved such a feat. However it was not a rainy day but a night.

freethinker: life may be short, but it is not short enough not provide time to read the Scientific American. Subscribe to it, and you will become addicted to it. Guaranteed.

Alephnull:
Thanks for the books that you suggested. I`ll take time to pick and choose but now I know which ones to consider when I am choosing. My interests are very diversified.
I wish I knew more of everything. But one`s life is too short. Thanks for your input.
Mohammad Gill

freethinker #35, #38:

Almost anything by Douglas Hofstadter is worth reading – even his translation of ‘Eugene Onegin’. As far as Godel, Turing and company are concerned, an alternative for intelligent laymen is Martin Davis’ recent The Universal Computer. It traces the development of ideas of mathematical logic and computability from Leibniz through Boole, Frege, Cantor, Russell, Hilbert, Godel, and Turing. It has plenty of discussion of the mathematical ideas interspersed with historical and biographical material. Davis doesn’t display Hofstadter’s breadth of interests or his intellectual versatility, and his book had far fewer beautiful pictures than GEB. On the other hand, it’s a good deal shorter … Davis has also edited a collection of the seminal papers of Godel, Turing, Church, Post, etc, called The Undecidable – in case you’d like to have a single source where you can read them all.

Another well-known (and short) exposition of Godel’s best-known work is Nagel and Newman’s Godel’s Proof. The well-known mathematical logician Raymond Smullyan (another extremely interesting character in his own right) has written several books of logic puzzles that develop and explore the ideas that make the proof work.

For a fictionalised account (but based on real incidents and personalities) of Godel and his peers at Princeton, see John Casti’s The One True Platonic Heaven. Again a very compact book – about the same length as Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. There are many other books at various levels for people who’re interested …

And re #17: really, you didn’t have to apologise. I’m not the sort to take offence, least of all at you.

swarrier:

I borrowed ``Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid`` today from a local library. I haven`t started reading it seriously but I skimmed through it. It also describes Ramanujan and his work. One of the anecdotes about Ramanujan that I had read in Hardy`s book is also described in it. I would like to share it with the readers here.

Hardy wrote,: I remember once going to see him when he (Ramanujan) was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to me rather dull one, and that I hoped it was not sn unfavourable omen. ``No,`` he replied, ``it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.`` I asked him, naturally, whether he knew the answer to the corresponding problem for fourth powers; and he replied, after a moment`s thought, that he could see no obvious example, and thought that the first such numbers must be very large.

It turns out that the answer for fourth powers is:
635318657 = 134^4 + 133^4 = 158^4 + 59^4

The answer to the cubes is:

1729 = 9^3 + 10^3 = 1^3 + 12^3

Mohammad Gill

Re: # 35

If you get the first book by Hofstadter I would also suggest Metamagical Themas. It has some interesting observations on infinity within bounded sets.

In the 1920`s both the universities in Gottingen and Cambridge (U.K.) did much seminal work in physics and mathematics. I think it was in ``Brighter than a thousand suns`` that Robert Jungk talks about a young student in Gottingen who while cycling through the streets, erratically, fell off his bike and lay on the road. When passer-by`s rushed to his aid , he furiously brushed them off snarling,`` Don`t disturb me, can`t you see I`m thinking``.

Apparently the cafes in Gottingen had standing orders not to remove tablecloths because students and professors would come in and start solving problems sometimes using the table cloths for their calculations. They would be forced to leave when the cafes closed and would come back the next day to finish their problems, and were very unhappy if the tablecloths had been taken away to be washed.

re:#31 by freethinker
I think Hollywood is making a movie on Ramanujam.
Sridhar

swarrier:

I have read Hodges book but not the other two. I have read another biography of Ramanujan. I first learned of Ramanujan in 1969. I was checking out a paper on ``Perturbation`` theory in a mathematical journal and the author quoted Ramanujan. My curiosity immediately led me to Hardy`s book on Ramanujan.

Incidentally, Einstein had many flings outside his marriage. I had written about it in my article ``Einstein`s Love Life`` at Chowk.com on July 20, 2005. Church Turing Tarski thesis to which you have alluded seems interesting. I`ll see if I can procure the book.

Mohammad Gill

Re: # 32

It was Shockley who was the racist and supported eugenics.

I`m not sure about what you say about Einstein is true. Recently there was a program on PBS called Einstein`s wife (his first wife Mileva Maric) where there were claims that she helped him in his initial papers. However that, in the opinion of a lot of scientists is junk, just wishful theorizing. While it is true that Einstein was a bit vain and liked to be photographed , he may not have been that promiscuous.

However as somebody said , ``Behind every genius lies a flawed human being``.

Re: # 31
Dr. Gill
We were introduced to Ramanujam in school funnily enough through our English textbooks initially. Then again it is difficult to be a South Indian and not have, Ramanujam, Sir C V Raman, Chandrashekhar Subramanyam etc drilled into one`s head.

Have you read ``The Man who knew infinity`` , the biography of Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel? I heard they are thinking of making a movie on it. It`s an interesting book.

Incidentally there is a very good biography of Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges. It`s a sympathetic potrayal of a enigmatic man.

An interesting discussion on the Church Turing Tarski thesis is present in ``Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid`` by Douglas Hofstadter.

I must thank you for writing this article.

Re: # 31
Great scientists were not always angels and could be terrible characters troo.
Newton was very jealous and very suspicious of others and hpossessed very nasty temper.
Roberst Hook was his equal in his nastiness.
One of the inventors either Shockley or Bardeen was a pukkah racist and published articles stating that blacks were inferrior.
Einstein used to visit smelliest prostitutes in Berlin and used to have sex with women visitors when his wife was working in the kitchen. Actually she died heart broken. He is now no more an icon these days because of this his personal characteristics!
Heisburg was pretty anti-semetic.
But they were all brilliant!

swarrier:

When you talk about Hardy, it is inevitable not to think of Ramanujan also. Ramanujan was an associate of Hardy at Cambridge.

According to Jonathan Borwein and Peter Borwein, Ramaswami Aiyar, the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, encouraged Ramanujan to ``communicate his results to three prominent British mathematicians. Two apparently did not respond; the one who did was G.H.Hardy of Cambridge, now regarded as the foremost British mathematician of the period.

Hardy, accustomed to receivibg crank mail, was inclined to disregard Ramanujan`s letter at first glance the day it arrived, January 16, 1913. But after dinner that night Hardy and a close colleague, John E. Littlewood, sat down to puzzle through a list of 120 formulas and theorems Ramanujan had appended to his letter. Some hours later they had reached a verdict: they were seeing the work of a genius and not a crackpot. (According to his own pure-talent scale of mathematicians, Hardy was later to rate Ramanujan a 100, Littlewood a 30 and himself a 25. The German mathematician David Hilbert, the most influential figure of the time, merited only an 80.).``

Hardy also wrote, ``The real crises of my career came ten or twelve years later, in 1911, when I began my collaboration with Littlewood, and in 1913, when I discovered Ramanujan. All my best work since then has been bound up with theirs, and it is obvious that my association with them was the decisive event of my life. I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ``Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.``

Ramanujan was made a Fellow of Royal Society of London and a Fellow of Trinity College in 1917 - the first Indian to be aarded either honor.

Mohammad Gill

The British Mathematician G H Hardy claimed all his life not to believe in God, but he spent a lot of time worrying about it.

The anecdote is related by C.P. Snow in his introduction to A Mathematician`s Apology. It is a pleasant May evening some time in the 1930`s and Hardy is in his fifties. He and Snow are walking at Fenner`s cricket ground when the 6 o`clock chimes ring out from the nearby Catholic chapel. ``It is rather unfortunate``, Hardy remarks, ``that some of the happiest hours of my life should have been spent within sound of a Roman Catholic church`

He was also eccentric enough to encompass the God he never believed in. He was also a great cricket fan and loved to watch cricket and hated it to rain during a cricket match . Again from C. P. Snow.

When summer came, it was taken for granted that we should meet at the cricket ground,`` C.P. Snow once recalled. ``[G. H. Hardy] made for his favourite place, opposite the pavilion, where he could catch each ray of sun - he was obsessively heliotropic. In order to deceive the sun into shining, he brought with him, even on a fine May afternoon, what he called his `anti-God battery`. This consisted of three or four sweaters, an umbrella belonging to his sister, and a large envelope containing mathematical manuscripts, such as a Ph.d. dissertation, a paper which he was refereeing for the Royal Society, or some tripos answers. He would explain to an acquaintance that God, believing that Hardy expected the weather to change and give him a chance to work, counter-suggestibly arranged that the sky should remain cloudless, and then he (Hardy) would be able to enjoy the cricket in perfect sunshine.``

This bit from the Andrews Univerity web site.

He also hated being photographed, and hated mirrors so much that he would cover any mirror in a hotel room he entered, with a towel. Another example of him trying to fool God was when on a trip back from Denmark he sent back a telegram claiming he had proved the Reimann hypothesis. He reasoned that God would not allow the boat to sink on the return journey and give him the same fame that Fermat had achieved with his ``last theorem``.

Re: # 27 by tahmed

You are perhaps right. However, there are several `hidden assumptions` in Nash`s construct. For starters, imagine you have to divide three cars of the same make between two identical persons. How will you get symmetry (fairness)?

Dr. Gill, sorry for deviating from the topic. Am off for a week:)

Re: # 27 by tahmed

You are perhaps right. However, there are several `hidden assumptions` in Nash`s construct. For starters, imagine you have to divide three cars of the same make between two identical persons. How will you get symmetry (fairness)?

Dr. Gill, sorry for deviating from the topic. Am off for a week:)

GT #24 Thanks for taking the time to explain, which you have done quite clearly and I get the general idea as a result.

Agreed Outcome 2 in particular is interesting I think since requires both parties to agree on what is fair. Seems to me the popular book ``Getting to Say Yes`` (i.e. the art of negotiating) is on the same lines (and is perhaps inspired by Nash`s work). Thus, that book provides some good pointers towards reaching agreement on any issue - most notable is the pointer that one should separate the respective bargaining positions from the underlying interests . This I think is a good approach to resolving any dispute - namely, for both parties to focus on their own as well as the other parties underlying interest, rather than digging their heels in on the particular position they took at the start of the bargaining session and rejecting solutions that may meet their underlying interests in an equal or even better manner.

I am not sure how much all this is along the lines of Nash`s Bargaining Solution though, although the book seems to be using Agreed Outcome 2 as the take-off point.

Wilhelm Reich was one of the most intelligent students of Sigmund Freud. he was also known for his leftist leanings. He tried to put forward a theory based on Marxist and Freudian principles to solve the problems of the society.......he called it ``Freudo-Marxism``, but he developed Schizophrenia and faded away from the scene very fast.

irfanhamid and other interactors:
I don`t know much about lambda calculus; my interest in computation theories was of historical nature. But I am glad to see that the article has provoked some interesting discussion.
Similarly, I don`t know much about theory of games; I didn`t even mention John Nash in the article. He became sick at the age of 30 years. Many strange things that he believed in and reacted to were due to his illness. So I didn`t want to commingle his strange acts with idiosyncracies.
Mohammad Gill

Re: # 21 by tahmed32

This is quite a challenge for me, but here goes: Imagine a situation where two guys are deciding to split a cake amongst themselves. Suppose instead of demanding pieces of cakes for themselves they decide on the properties that the bargaining outcome should have. Let them decide that: (1) No part of the cake should be wasted (Pareto Optimality); (2) the outcome is `fair` (symmetry); (3) the outcome should not change when the bargainers are given the option of bargaining over something else also (independence of irrelevant alternatives); and (4) a technical condition on the utilities derived from the outcome. Then, Nash shows that, there is a unique outcome that satisfies these four conditions (i.e. the bargainers do not have to go through the act of bargaining). This outcome is called the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS). Actually he shows that NBS is equivalent to the conditions from 1 to 4.

Hope this helps. Sorry for not being able to do a better job. Plus, do keep in mind that assumption (3) as defined by Nash is actually much more subtle than my verbal description.

#16 Tesla was as imaginative an inventor as Edison. But Edison had more street smarts. Tesla developed the AC (which requires smaller copper wire and is otherwise more economical, and Edison`s DC) to which Westinghouse bought patent rights.

So, to scare people away from the competition, Edison promoted the scare that AC was a killer - and to do that he used AC to fry the neighborhood cats and dogs. He then pushed for development of the Electric Chair using AC, thus burning the idea that AC was associated with death while DC was associated with the light bulb. Edison got his money out of it, Tesla moved on to other inventions, and the whole world paid a price by the confusion caused by Edison - until, as it always does, the truth came out.

Excellent article Gill sahib. The lives of top-echelon scientists are often very interesting, so are their personalities. As for your contention about Turing Machines outshining the Lambda calculus, it is true only from a pedagogic point of view. As mentioned by an interactor they are both equivalent. But whereas Turing machines haven`t given birth to much more ``usable`` techniques, so it remains a rather simple and interesting theoretical tool to play with in sophomore year classes on CS theory. The Lambda calculus, on the other hand, has spawned the whole branch of programming language semantics and to some extent, proof theory.

@AlephNull,
The Laplace transform was ``invented`` by Leonhard Euler, popularized by Laplace (hence the name) and used for solving differential equations by Heaviside.

Some interesting quotes by Einstein:

1. An hour can seem like a minute when talking to a pretty girl, a minute can seem like an hour while sitting on a hot stove. THAT`S the theory of relativity.
2. Marilyn Monroe once proposed to Einstein to have his baby ``imagine if he has my looks and your brain``. Einstein is reputed to have said ``madam, I fear that it be the reverse``.

Regards,
Irfan.

GT: Could you describe the Nash Bargaining Solution for Dummies? (i.e. in plain english, for dummies like me).

``Nash accomplished the much more difficult task of formulating a theory of non-cooperative games which allows more than two parties in the game and none of them has to be a loser in the relative sense.``

You mean Nash defined, and proved the existence, of a solution concept for non zero-sum games. That such games existed, was known to V-N and M. The solution concept provided by Nash, called the Nash equilibrium, is a fixed point in `best response correspondences`. Nash`s contemporaries did not think very highly of this concept, neither did V-N. A very nice, but dated, text on game-theory by Luce and Raiffa barely mentions Nash. Today, cutting edge theorists are also wary of the Nash equilibrium. Nash is also responsible for discovering the Nash Bargaining Solution.

good informative read!

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

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

Tha should be the motto of al physicists.

Alephnull:

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

Mohammad Gill

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

Alphanull:

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

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

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

Mohammad Gill

zeemax #7

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

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

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

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

From the article:

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

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

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

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

Interactors:

nasah:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mohammad Gill

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

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


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

Thanks!
Sahara

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LoL ... And he invented Game Theory.

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

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

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

delightful piece Dr. Gill -- thanks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Dirac`s paucity of words, somebody once said about him , `` It took him a light year to complete a sentence.`` That was bad physics but a good statement.

Neils Bohr apparently had a horseshoe nailed above his office door. When teased about it he said, `` I believe it works whether you believe in it or not``.

This was a fun read. Thank you, Gill sahib.

Speaking of idiosyncratic, Prof. Rota wasn`t exactly a picture of normalcy himself :)

Perhaps that look was part of his ``stud`` image!

(Confession: I only read the teaser. I hope you wrote it yourself.)