Interesting anecdotes in the history of physics?

[fresh_42]

As somebody posted RIP physicist Arno Penzias, 1978 Nobel Laureate in physics, it is nice to remember the white dielectric story of Penzias&Wilson:

Shortened from https://spark.iop.org/white-dielectric-material-pigeons

I know the story with the clue that they have been told: "Either you recorded pigeon poop, or you listened to the big bang."

 

[pines-demon]

I just encountered this anecdote about Gladstone, a UK prime minister, and Faraday:

When Gladstone met Michael Faraday, he asked him whether his work on electricity would be of any use. “Yes, sir”, remarked Faraday with prescience. “One day you will tax it.”

I wish we could say that more often with fundamental discoveries.

 

[pines-demon]

Listening to Murray Gell-Mann's life interview and waiting for a clue about this: https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...otable-massagon-meeting.1059661/#post-7055160

I found this sad anecdote about Einstein's last seminar:


Transcript:

I had missed his last seminar. His last seminar was given about a month before I arrived and everybody was still talking about it. If I had not delayed so long in writing up my dissertation I would have been there and seen and heard his last seminar at the institute. He talked, of course, about his attempts to construct a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. It was an entirely unsuitable theory and of course one knows that it should have been a theory including a lot of other particles and a lot of other forces, and it should have been quantum mechanical and so on and so on. We know that and we even suspected it then of course. And the theory just wasn't... didn't make a lot of sense. It didn't have very sensible interactions between gravity and electromagnetism. But it had nice formal properties which appealed to Einstein. And by the way Schrödinger, at just about the same time, came up with just about the same theory except for using i equals the square root of minus one in his equation, so in other words instead of an unsymmetrical metric he had... or connection... he had a... a complex one, a Hermitian one.

What they were talking about was not the content; what they were talking about was that they weren't able to concentrate on the content because of the presentation. He was dressed in the costume that he conventionally wore after his second wife died, and he neglected himself very much after she died. He had on a pair of baggy trousers unpressed, and shoes with no socks... just to have more time for work I guess, and... and a sweatshirt, an old, grubby, grey sweatshirt. But the particular additional feature when he gave the seminar was that the fly of the trousers was open and the sweatshirt protruded obscenely through the fly, and they were all looking at that and concentrating on that feature, and they were unable to follow what he was saying about the mathematics.

 

[pines-demon]

I just found this beautiful anecdote about the "longitude problem".

In the early 18th century, British parliament passed a Longitude Act to offer a monetary reward for solving the longitude problem, keeping track of longitude while crossing the Atlantic.

The solution came from a carpenter and clockmaker called John Harrison, but was dissmissed as he was not considered a "professional". Even if his solution passed the test required by the act, it was not accepted as it was considered "luck". Harrisson developed his technique for decades, making it even more precise. Due to constant rejection, he appealed to parliament and won the case, awarding him the prize.

 

[Hornbein]

I just found this beautiful anecdote about the "longitude problem".

In the early 18th century, British parliament passed a Longitude Act to offer a monetary reward for solving the longitude problem, keeping track of longitude while crossing the Atlantic.

The solution came from a carpenter and clockmaker called John Harrison, but was dissmissed as he was not considered a "professional". Even if his solution passed the test required by the act, it was not accepted as it was considered "luck". Harrisson developed his technique for decades, making it even more precise. Due to constant rejection, he appealed to parliament and won the case, awarding him the prize.

According to Wikipedia the award from Parliament was stingy and rejected by Harrison. He appealed to King George III who took up the case and got a reward of less than half of what was promised. At the time he was 80 years old. He lived another three years. No one ever got the full award.

Initially, the cost of these chronometers was quite high (roughly 30% of a ship's cost). And ships were expensive. For the next hundred years most ships made due with less accurate clocks.

 

[pines-demon]

According to Wikipedia the award from Parliament was stingy and rejected by Harrison. He appealed to King George III who took up the case and got a reward of less than half of what was promised. At the time he was 80 years old. He lived another three years. No one ever got the full award.

Initially, the cost of these chronometers was quite high (roughly 30% of a ship's cost). And ships were expensive. For the next hundred years most ships made due with less accurate clocks.

Thanks for clarifying!

To add more to the story a few years before dying he published a book on more ideas. It was very heavily criticized, specially as he provided a way to keep longitude on land. So recent efforts have worked on verifying this last contribution, more here: https://www.theguardian.com/science...n-harrison-vindicated-250-years-absurd-claims

 

[BillTre]

According to Wikipedia the award from Parliament was stingy and rejected by Harrison. He appealed to King George III who took up the case and got a reward of less than half of what was promised. At the time he was 80 years old. He lived another three years. No one ever got the full award.

Initially, the cost of these chronometers was quite high (roughly 30% of a ship's cost). And ships were expensive. For the next hundred years most ships made due with less accurate clocks.

I read a nice well written book on this several years ago: Longitude, ... by Dava Sobel.

 

[Hornbein]

An objection to his clock was that sometimes it ran a little fast and at others a bit slow. This cancellation of errors was considered unacceptable or "luck." The other objection was that the clocks were very hard and slow to manufacture in those pre-industrial days.

 

[difalcojr]

From @pines-demon post above on Murray Gell-Mann on Einstein: "and they were all looking at that and concentrating on that feature, and they were unable to follow what he was saying about the mathematics."
That is what grief will do to you. Sad that someone didn't go up to him, put his/her arm around his shoulder, turned him about-face to the audience, and allowed him to get himself together. Would have gotten a laugh.

From Lewis Feuer, 1974, "Einstein and the Generations of Science", p.62, https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Bo...-naa&msclkid=d0a0e462ad0114bf7df581a01e23aa4c
who quotes from Philipp Frank, "Einstein: His Life and Times, p.206,
https://www.abebooks.com/book-searc...-naa&msclkid=c9359a5a7ef21aac69deff98cc4b0af9

"David Hilbert, regarded by many as the greatest mathematician of his time, once told a mathematicians' meeting: "Do you know why Einstein said the most original and profound things about space and time that have been said in our generation? Because he had learned nothing about all the philosophy and mathematics of time and space.""

 

[pines-demon]

Today I bring you some anecdotes from the Soviet Union: The rivalry between Lev Landau and Yakov Zel'dovich. I know Landau worked a lot with him, and even recommended Zel'dovich to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, but after their work with the Soviet atomic bomb project something happened. I guess it might be this:

Landau served on the bomb project because it shielded him from the authorities. He tried to limit his participation and at one time cursed the physicist Yakov Zeldovich (as “that b***”) for attempting to expand it.

From https://www.jstor.org/stable/24995874

We also have

Lifshitz then recalled that Landau did not want “to offend” the intelligence of colleague physicists. If an issue was very difficult and important he would explain this issue. In other cases he was not going to explain and would ask the person to answer himself. In the specific case of the extreme equation of state $p = \rho$ of Zeldovich he simply told him “wrong!”, and to Zeldovich’s request “why?” he simply answered “you find out.” This was before the tragic Landau car accident. After the accident Landau was no longer in any condition to give a proof of the statement, and Zeldovich was unable to give a proof either. One day at the restaurant of the Academy in Leninsky Prospect, Yakov Borisovich asked Evgeny in my presence “Why you did not insert my equation of state in the Landau and Lifshitz book?” To this Lifshitz replied “Did you solve the problem assigned by Landau?”, and to that Zeldovich said “No.”, and to that Lifshitz’s answer was “Then I do not quote the result in the Landau and Lifshitz book.”

from https://arxiv.org/abs/0911.4825
And finally, from Gell-Mann's interview (55):

But anyway, the story is that after he recovered a bit from the accident and was able to talk and so on, one of the first things he said was ‘I'm afraid my brain is just not the same as it was. I'll never again be able to do physics like Landau. Maybe I could do physics like Zel'dovich.’

 

[fresh_42]

An anecdote I like very much is about chess and Anderssen (IIRC 1851 on his way home from London) who made fun of a coachman on an overnight stop: Anderssen first pretended not to know the rules, but he learned them surprisingly fast. The coachman won a couple of matches, in the end even with a Queen less, so the coachman lost interest and wanted to finish the competition. Anderssen told him, that he only lost because he had to take care of two important figures, the Queen and the King, whereas the coachman only had to care for the king. Next, he convinced the coachman to have a try without the Queen and the full set for the coachman. The coachman was amused but finally accepted. Needless to say, Anderssen swept him off the board.

 

[fresh_42]

A similar one:

After Alekhine had taken the championship title from Capablanca, Capa spent quite a bit of his spare time hanging out in a specific cafe in Paris. Friends, acquaintances, and others would often drop by, participating in games and libations with the former, charismatic, champion. One day, while Capa was having coffee and reading a newspaper, a stranger stopped at his table, motioned at the chess set, and indicated he would like to play if Capa was interested. Capa's face lit up, he folded the newspaper away, reached for the board, and proceeded to pocket his own queen. The opponent (who apparently had no idea who Capablanca was) reacted with slight anger. "Hey! You don't know me! I might beat you!", he said.
Capablanca, smiling gently, said quietly, "Sir, if you could beat me, I would know you."

 

[Hornbein]

There's a record of a chess match between Einstein and Oppenheimer. E won.

Oppenheimer had the habit of saying "nimnimnim" instead of "uh" or "but um".

In his young manhood Albert was good enough on the violin to have turned pro. In his older year he didn't keep it up so he resorted to the piano.

The only credit he gave in the famed special relativity paper was to a fellow violinist named Besso whom E had used as a sounding board.

Albert wrote from Berlin that World War One was all about Germans hoping to gain economically from it, as their fathers had. Of this he wrote "this idiot race that believes it has free will."

Max Plank lost several sons in that war. Max Born is an ancestor of Olivia Newton-John.

Albert's upstairs neighbor assassinated the dictator of Austria. This was generally considered a good thing so after a year in a mental hospital he got off.

Albert once wrote to his first wife that she could cook and clean but aside from that he wanted nothing to do with her. They divorced shortly afterward. Their relations improved later. He would stay with her while visiting Zurich, at the time shocking behavior.

Albert never learned to drive an automobile. In New Jersey often walked to work with Kurt Godel, who cheered Albert up with optimistic philosophy.

 

[pines-demon]

As chess keeps popping up here, here a physics-chess related story from Bill Wall, chess historian:

Paul Dirac (1902-1984) was a chess player, probably taught by his father, who gave him a chess set for Christmas. In his biography, The Strangest Man – The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, by Graham Farmelo, it stated that Dirac worked all day long and took time off only for his Sunday walk and to play chess.

He beat most students in the college chess club, sometimes several at the same time. He served for many years as president of the chess club of St. John’s College, Cambridge. With his stepson, he would go over chess problems that they found in newspapers. He played chess with friends such as Peter Kapitza (1894-1984), a Russian physicist, who taught Dirac how to play tennis. When he lectured, he sometime linked subatomic particles to chess.

In 1929, Dirac discussed chess problems with Heisenberg on their tour to Japan. After his return to Leipzig, Heisenberg wrote to Dirac: “You are wrong…in the question of mating a King and a Knight with a King and Rook; this is not possible according to the edition of 1926 of Dufresne’s handbook of chess (the best book about theory of chess).”

 

[difalcojr]

A propos two types! My mentor told me that he once said in a conversation while walking along the aisle:

"There are two types of physicists: one are mathematicians and the others locksmiths!"​

He said this exactly when Walter Greiner passed them.

Who was your mentor? Why do you think he said that?

 

[fresh_42]

Who was your mentor? Why do you think he said that?

Because it was small talk not meant to be heard by others. It was a rhetorical exaggeration of his opinion: physicists are either theoretical physicists who are bad at experiments or experimental physicists who are bad at math. Btw., we made fun of Greiner's book where the definition of a complete space was just wrong. To his excuse, he didn't write a single word in that book.

 

[pines-demon]

Because it was small talk not meant to be heard by others. It was a rhetorical exaggeration of his opinion: physicists are either theoretical physicists who are bad at experiments or experimental physicists who are bad at math. Btw., we made fun of Greiner's book where the definition of a complete space was just wrong. To his excuse, he didn't write a single word in that book.

This reminds me of Rutherford's

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

 

[difalcojr]

Because it was small talk not meant to be heard by others. It was a rhetorical exaggeration of his opinion: physicists are either theoretical physicists who are bad at experiments or experimental physicists who are bad at math. Btw., we made fun of Greiner's book where the definition of a complete space was just wrong. To his excuse, he didn't write a single word in that book.

Yes, I don't understand. You made it sound like he said it for the sole purpose of Greiner hearing it. So, were Greiner's results and all the books he wrote, incomplete or invalid? I don't know myself. Or was it just his physics? Or math? Should I read any of Greiner's books as valuable? Thanks.

 

[fresh_42]

Yes, I don't understand. You made it sound like he said it for the sole purpose of Greiner hearing it. So, were Greiner's results and all the books he wrote, incomplete or invalid? I don't know myself. Or was it just his physics? Or math? Should I read any of Greiner's books as valuable? Thanks.

I cannot say anything about the quality of his books. The paperback series I know was presumably written by his assistants and not really without errors. His son and I once attended the same tutorial, but that is where commonness ends. I didn't even attend a lecture of him.

 

[Hornbein]

Albert Einstein was the most effective fundraiser for the Zionist cause. So much so that after 1948 he was invited to become head of state of Israel. He declined because he couldn't support the injustices meted out to the natives. He declared it would lead to endless trouble.

 

[marcusl]

Frank, a pediatrician friend who once lived in Palo Alto, told me this story. He and his wife went early to services on the Jewish high holidays because the synagogue would fill up and seats became scarce. One year, he got up to use the restroom shortly before the service started. While he was away, Felix Bloch came down the aisle with an usher, looking for a seat. The usher spied the empty seat and motioned for Bloch to take it. Frank's wife said,
"I'm sorry, this seat is taken,"
to which the usher replied
"Madame, do you know who this is? This is the famous Stanford physics professor and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Felix Bloch."
She replied,
"Well, my husband is Dr. Frank H____. He's in the restroom, but this is his seat and, furthermore, he's a real doctor."

 

[pinball1970]

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

Paul Dirac.

"“Well, our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is: ‘There is no God and Dirac is His prophet.’”

{A remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac, as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by Werner Heisenberg, p. 119; it is an ironic play on the Muslim statement of faith, the Shahada, often translated: 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.'}”
― Wolfgang Pauli

 

[pines-demon]

Apparently Max Planck loved to play tag with friends and students. According to Lise Meitner:

The more advanced students… were regularly invited to [his home on] Wangenheimstrasse… we played tag in the garden… Planck participated with almost childish ambition and great agility. It was almost impossible not to be caught by him.

Source: https://kathylovesphysics.com/max-planck-biography-with-depth-humor/#_edn11

 

[fresh_42]

Apparently Max Planck loved to play tag with friends and students. According to Lise Meitner:

Source: https://kathylovesphysics.com/max-planck-biography-with-depth-humor/#_edn11

We were luckier. We played Doppelkopf with our professor.

 

[BillTre]

We played string instruments.

 

[Frabjous]

Some play darts.

According to John Ellis:

"Mary K. [Gaillard], Dimitri [Nanopoulos] and I first got interested in what are now called penguin diagrams while we were studying CP violation in the Standard Model in 1976... The penguin name came in 1977, as follows.
In the spring of 1977, Mike Chanowitz, Mary K and I wrote a paper on GUTs predicting the b quark mass before it was found. When it was found a few weeks later, Mary K, Dimitri, Serge Rudaz and I immediately started working on its phenomenology. That summer, there was a student at CERN, Melissa Franklin who is now an experimentalist at Harvard. One evening, she, I, and Serge went to a pub, and she and I started a game of darts. We made a bet that if I lost I had to put the word penguin into my next paper. She actually left the darts game before the end, and was replaced by Serge, who beat me. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to carry out the conditions of the bet.
For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time. Then, one evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin where I smoked some illegal substance. Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_diagram

 

[Swamp Thing]

From "Rutherford: Recollections of the Cambridge Days" by Mark Oliphant...

 

[pines-demon]

Some play darts.

Some play football (soccer):

Before Niels Bohr became a physicist and in fact during his early career, he was also an avid football player, along with his brother Harald. Both Harald and Niels played for the university club Akademik Boldklub in Copenhagen while they were students at the university. At the time Akademik Boldklub was one of the best clubs in Denmark. Niels Bohr played goalkeeper while Harald was a striker. Harald was the more famous as a footballer, joining the club at 16 in 1903 and playing through his time at the university. Niels only played for Akademik Boldklub in the 1905 season, after which he further pursued his interest in physics. During one match against German club Mittweda, Niels did not react to a long shot and missed an easy save. Later he admitted that he was distracted by thoughts about a math problem and lost focus on the match.

Source: Charlie Wilcox

Note that Harald was also a professional mathematician, and went to the olympics to win a silver medal with the national team.

 

[pinball1970]

A famous one.

(Rudolf Peierls documents)

“A friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong'



Peter Woit used the phrase for one of his books.

 

[pinball1970]

This was very prophetic.

“Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.”

Richard P. Feynman

 

[Hornbein]

This was very prophetic.

“Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.”

Richard P. Feynman

Feynman invented the concept of quantum computing.

And yes, I am very impressed with ChatGPT's ability to understand natural English. It all comes from billions spent on spy software, I expect.

 

[pinball1970]

Feynman invented the concept of quantum computing.

And yes, I am very impressed with ChatGPT's ability to understand natural English. It all comes from billions spent on spy software, I expect.

My point was things like GTPchat can churn out garbage and frame it as correct.
On the science stuff.
At least for now.

 

[pines-demon]

@Frabjous just shared an interesting anecdote of Schwinger about the joyful activities he was carrying in his teen years: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-were-you-doing-at-16.1060202/

 

[pines-demon]

I just found out that Max Planck confronted Hitler circa 1933: Max Planck and Adolf Hitler James C. O'Flaherty

Early in the discussion, however, Planck began his intercession on behalf of [Fritz] Haber, even going so far as to say that without the latter's chemical process for obtaining ammonia from the nitrogen of the air "the previous war would have been lost from the beginning." To this remark Hitler retorted: "I have nothing at all against the Jews themselves. But the Jews are all Communists, and these are my enemies - is against these that I am fighting." Planck replied with the observation that, nevertheless, there were different kinds of Jews, some valuable to humanity, some not, but that among the first group were old families "of the best German culture." He then added that, after all, one had to
make distinctions. "That is not correct," fumed Hitler; "Jew is Jew; all Jews stick together like burrs. Where there is one Jew, immediately other Jews of all kinds collect. It was up to the Jews themselves to draw a dividing-line between the different kinds. But they have not done that, and therefore I must proceed uniformly against all Jews." Planck replied that it would be frankly a "self-mutilation" for the Germans to force valuable Jews to emigrate, thus losing their much needed scientific services to other countries.


But Hitler was no longer interested in even a semblance of rational discussion, for at this point he broke out into a torrent of generalities, and finally concluded with the revealing remarks : "People say that I am neurotic at times. That is a slander. I have nerves like steel." With that, says Planck, Hitler slapped himself vigorously on the knee, began to talk faster and faster, and finally worked himself up into such a rage that there was nothing left for Planck to do but to be silent and to withdraw.

 

[pinball1970]

Planck replied that it would be frankly a "self-mutilation" for the Germans to force valuable Jews to emigrate, thus losing their much needed scientific services to other countries.

Reminded me of this.

In 1934, David Hilbert, by then a grand old man of German mathematics, was dining with Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister of education. Rust asked, “How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?” Hilbert replied, “There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore."