Interesting anecdotes in the history of physics?

[difalcojr]

That may have been all or part of this. From Eugene Hecht, "Physics", he writes:

"Amalie (Emmy) Noether (1882-1935) was an outstanding mathematician who did most of her work in abstract algebra. After a long struggle she won the right as a woman to lecture, without pay, at Gottingen University in Germany. It was in 1918 that she presented the results of an analysis dealing with symmetry that became a guiding principle for contemporary physics. Noether taught at Gottingen until 1933 when she came to the United States after the Nazis learned that she was Jewish and expelled her from Germany."

 

[pines-demon]

That may have been all or part of this. From Eugene Hecht, "Physics", he writes:

"Amalie (Emmy) Noether (1882-1935) was an outstanding mathematician who did most of her work in abstract algebra. After a long struggle she won the right as a woman to lecture, without pay, at Gottingen University in Germany. It was in 1918 that she presented the results of an analysis dealing with symmetry that became a guiding principle for contemporary physics. Noether taught at Gottingen until 1933 when she came to the United States after the Nazis learned that she was Jewish and expelled her from Germany."

If I remember correctly between his expulsion from university and going to US. She continued to receive and teach students at home.

 

[pines-demon]

When Arthur Compton working in the Manhattan Project found that they have demonstrated chain reaction, he called James B. Conant, chairman of the NDRC saying

– The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.
– How were the natives? (Conant asked.)
– Very friendly.

A play of words between the discovery the New World in 1492 and the date being 1942. The Italian navigator is probably Enrico Fermi.

To celebrate Eugene Wigner brought a bottle of Chianti in a basket, members of the lab signed their name in the basket.

Everything was a secret still. Laura Fermi noticed that his husband Enrico was receiving a lot of congratulations and wanted to know why.
Physicist Leona Woods said to her:

–He has sunk a Japanese admiral!
–You are making fun of me (protested Laura)

When Laura asked her husband:

– Enrico, did you really sink a Japanese admiral?
– Did I? (replied Enrico)
– So you didn't sink a Japanese admiral?
– Didn't I?

He could not say more.

Extra:
Two year laters, after learning about what really happened from an official report Laura adds:

It was not easy reading. I struggled with its technical language and its difficult content until slowly, painfully, I worked my way through it. When I reached the middle of the book, I found the reason for the congratulations Enrico had received at our party. On the afternoon of that day, December 2,1942, the first chain reaction was achieved and the first atomic pile operated successfully, under Enrico’s direction. Young Leona Woods had considered this feat equivalent to the sinking of an admiral’s ship with the admiral inside. The atomic bomb still lay in the womb of the future, and Leona could not foresee Hiroshima.

Source: The First Reactor

 

[Hornbein]

My granddad was head of the machine shop in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He decided to go on a fishing trip in northern Ontario. He went into a rustic bar. There he received a telephone call. He had been followed the whole time.

My uncle Tom served in a submarine. He knew something was up and deduced it was an atomic device.

Richard Nixon scheduled airplane flights in New Guinea. On the ship back to the USA he made a pile playing poker.

After the Hiroshima bomb the Js tortured an American pilot to get more info. He told them that the bomb was based on the electromagnetic force between protons and electrons, and that Tokyo was the next target. They believed him. That may have played a big role in the surrender.

 

[pines-demon]

Feynman's beautiful 1966 letter to his PhD student:

Dear Koichi [Mano],

I was very happy to hear from you, and that you have such a position in the Research Laboratories. Unfortunately your letter made me unhappy for you seem to be truly sad. It seems that the influence of your teacher has been to give you a false idea of what are worthwhile problems. The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.

You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods. But at the same time I had another Ph.D. Student (Albert Hibbs) whose thesis was on how it is that the winds build up waves blowing over water in the sea. I accepted him as a student because he came to me with the problem he wanted to solve. With you I made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important to work on (namely those problems you see you may do something about). I am sorry, excuse me. I hope by this letter to correct it a little.

I have worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I enjoyed and felt very good about because I sometimes could partially succeed. For example, experiments on the coefficient of friction on highly polished surfaces, to try to learn something about how friction worked (failure). Or, how elastic properties of crystals depend on the forces between the atoms in them, or how to make electroplated metal stick to plastic objects (like radio knobs). Or, how neutrons diffuse out of Uranium. Or, the reflection of electromagnetic waves from films coating glass. The development of shock waves in explosions. The design of a neutron counter. Why some elements capture electrons from the L-orbits, but not the K-orbits. General theory of how to fold paper to make a certain type of child’s toy (called flexagons). The energy levels in the light nuclei. The theory of turbulence (I have spent several years on it without success). Plus all the “grander” problems of quantum theory.

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.

Best of luck and happiness.

Sincerely,

Richard P. Feynman.

 

[pines-demon]

Newton demise in finance, from last Veritasium video:

Just ask Isaac Newton. In 1720 Newton was 77 years old, and he was rich. He had made a lot of money working as a professor at Cambridge for decades, and he had a side hustle as the Master of the Royal Mint. His net worth was £30,000 the equivalent of $6 million today. Now, to grow his fortune, Newton invested in stocks. One of his big bets was on the South Sea Company. Their business was shipping enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Business was booming and the share price grew rapidly. By April of 1720, the value of Newton's shares had doubled. So he sold his stock. But the stock price kept going up and by June, Newton bought back in and he kept buying shares even as the price peaked. When the price started to fall, Newton didn't sell. He bought more shares thinking he was buying the dip. But there was no rebound, and ultimately he lost around a third of his wealth. When asked why he didn't see it coming, Newton responded,

I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

 

[pines-demon]

About Pyotr Kapitsa and the Crocodile.

After graduating, Kapitsa wanted to join the Cavendish lab but Rutherford was not convinced, saying that it would be difficult to accommodate one more scientist between the 30 in the lab. In return Kapitsa, inquired on the accuracy of the experiments carried in the lab. Rutherford responded 2 to 3%. Kapitsa quickly replied that one would "hardly be noticed because [he] would come within the experimental error". Rutherford liked his response and recruited him.

Years later when Kapitsa asked Rutherford why did he accept, Rutherford said ‘I can ’t think why, but I'm very glad that I did.’

During his time with Rutherford, Kapitsa wrote a letter to his mom after his first publishable result:

Today the Crocodile summoned me twice about my manuscript. . . . It will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, which is the greatest honour a piece of research can achieve here. . . . Only now have I really entered the Crocodile’s school . . . which is certainly the most advanced school in the world and Rutherford is the greatest physicist and organiser. It is only now that I have felt my strength . Success gives me wings and I am carried away by my work.

The "Crocodile" was Rutherford, in Kapitsa's words:

In Russia the crocodile is the symbol for the father of the family and is also regarded with awe and admiration because it has a stiff neck and cannot turn back. It just goes straight forward with gaping jaws— like science, like Rutherford

After many years, the artist Eric Gill was commissioned by Kapitsa to add a carving of a crocodile to a wall in the façade of the Mond Laboratory in Cambridge. See picture.

 

[pines-demon]

Lord Kelvin vs Darwinism

I am amazed to find this story about how Lord Kelvin entered the debate on the age of the Earth and almost broke Darwin's theory of evolution.

In the 19th century, after much work from study of rocks, geologist James Hutton showed that Earth had to be at least millions up to even hundred millions years old. This pleased Darwinists as the theory of evolution (from 1859) required an amazing large period of time for species to reach the current state.

Then Lord Kelvin decided to enter the game in 1862. After having set the foundations of thermodynamics, Kelvin calculated the age of Earth based on its approximate temperature and composition. He found that Earth could only be 40 millions years old at best. When biologists and geologists contested, he reduced the number to 20 million.

This produced a lot of controversies in biology and geophysics. It took until 1904, when a proper theory of radioactivity was already available, for Rutherford to enter the stage, in a magnificent lecture on his works on the dating of rocks. He describes the lecture as such:

I came into the room which was half-dark and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience, and realised that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the Earth, where my views conflicted with his.

To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and cock a baleful glance at me.

Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the Earth, provided no new source [of heat] was discovered. That prophetic utterance referred to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold! The old boy beamed upon me.

Accustomed to the British sense of diplomacy, Rutherford cleverly argued that it was not Kelvin's fault, but that he had found a "new source of energy" as if Kelvin had predicted radioactivity. It would take until 1956 for geochemist Clair Patterson to figure out that the age of Earth is 4.5 billion years old, enough time for evolution to take its time.

Extra: After Rutherford lecture, Kelvin found a new argument against such a long age of the Earth by calculating the age of the Sun. But then this was also squashed by "Kelvin's predicted" nuclear fusion.

Source: Rutherford's Timebomb (nzherald)

 

[pinball1970]

Oppenheimer wrote a recommendation to the Chairman of the Physics Department at UC Berkeley suggesting he offer a position to Feynman for after the war, :

"He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects. He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony.

[...]

I feel that he would be a great strength for our department, tending to tie together its teaching, its research and its experimental and theoretical aspects. I may give you two quotations from men with whom he has worked. Bethe has said that he would rather lose any two other men than Feynman from this present job, and Wigner said, "He is a second Dirac, only this time human."

 

[pinball1970]

"CONDITIONS

1.You will make sure:

a.that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;

b.that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;

c.that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

2.You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

a.my sitting at home with you;

b.my going out or travelling with you.

3.You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

a.you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;

b.you will stop talking to me if I request it;

c.you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

4.You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior."

Albert Einstein’s list of demands to his wife of 11 years, Mileva Maric. 1914.

 

[pinball1970]

Last one,. Dirac and Feynman overheard at a conference in 1962.

F: I am Feynman.

D: I am Dirac.

(Silence)

F: It must be wonderful to be the discoverer of that equation.

D: That was a long time ago.

(Pause)

D: What are you working on?

F: Mesons.

D: Are you trying to discover an equation for them?

F: It is very hard.

D: One must try.

 

[pines-demon]

"CONDITIONS

1.You will make sure:

a.that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;

b.that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;

c.that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

2.You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

a.my sitting at home with you;

b.my going out or travelling with you.

3.You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

a.you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;

b.you will stop talking to me if I request it;

c.you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

4.You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior."

Albert Einstein’s list of demands to his wife of 11 years, Mileva Maric. 1914.

I've never read a true historical analysis on this, but in the NatGeo TV miniseries it is depicted as if this was when Einstein wanted to force divorce on Mileva, so he was being extra pricky. Nevertheless not the best way to treat somebody that close.

Extra: he managed to divorce Mileva by promising to transfer her all the monetary reward from the Nobel Prize. Mileva accepted and when the time came, she divorced and went to buy three apartments in Zurich.

 

[Hornbein]

I've never read a true historical analysis on this, but in the NatGeo TV miniseries it is depicted as if this was when Einstein wanted to force divorce on Mileva, so he was being extra pricky. Nevertheless not the best way to treat somebody that close.

Extra: he managed to divorce Mileva by promising to transfer her all the monetary reward from the Nobel Prize. Mileva accepted and when the time came, she divorced and went to buy three apartments in Zurich.

He wrote that letter a few months before their separation. They were divorced five years later. Maybe the law required that period. The Nobel Prize came two years after the divorce.

Subsequently their relations were good. When Einstein visited Zurich he stayed with Mileva, shocking behavior at the time.

 

[Hornbein]

Oppenheimer wrote a recommendation to the Chairman of the Physics Department at UC Berkeley suggesting he offer a position to Feynman for after the war, :

"He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects. He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony.

[...]

I feel that he would be a great strength for our department, tending to tie together its teaching, its research and its experimental and theoretical aspects. I may give you two quotations from men with whom he has worked. Bethe has said that he would rather lose any two other men than Feynman from this present job, and Wigner said, "He is a second Dirac, only this time human."

Feynman was in charge of the women manning the adding machines.

 

[pinball1970]

He wrote that letter a few months before their separation. They were divorced five years later. Maybe the law required that period. The Nobel Prize came two years after the divorce.

Subsequently their relations were good. When Einstein visited Zurich he stayed with Mileva, shocking behavior at the time.

In his defense, Einstein was born in 1879, social norms were different.
Also, things always get tetchy at the end of a relationship, even today.

 

[pines-demon]

[Picture Stern holding a cigar on his left hand while performing an experiment, Gerlach holding a cigar on his right hand]

Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach were heavy smokers (see pictures above). When performing their famous Stern-Gerlach experiment that (retrospectively) proved the non-classical nature of the electron spin, they had a bad time at observing the silver atoms that hit the screen, but their addiction saved the day. In the words of Stern:

After venting to release the vacuum, Gerlach removed the detector flange. But he could see no trace of the silver atom beam and handed the flange to me. With Gerlach looking over my shoulder as I peered closely at the plate, we were surprised to see gradually emerge the trace of the beam. . . . Finally we realized what [had happened]. I was then the equivalent of an assistant professor. My salary was too low to afford good cigars, so I smoked bad cigars. These had a lot of sulfur in them, so my breath on the plate turned the silver into silver sulfide, which is jet black, so easily visible. It was like developing a photographic film.

After that they continued to bring cigars to the lab when performing the experiment.

The cigar experiment was reenacted in 2002: Stern and Gerlach: How a Bad Cigar Helped Reorient Atomic Physics

 

[Swamp Thing]

The Discovery of Electron Spin : A Talk By S.A. Goudsmit
https://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/history/spin/goudsmit.html

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!" ...
...
Then I asked him: "What is a degree of freedom?"
...

And that was it: the spin; thus is was discovered, in that manner. Of course we told Ehrenfest about it and then summer was over and I went again to Amsterdam and various episodes followed. ( .... ) The one thing I remember is that Ehrenfest said to me: "Well, that is a nice idea, though it may be wrong. But you don't yet have a reputation, so you have nothing to lose".

 

[pinball1970]

The physicist Robert Oppenheimer was a polymath, fluent in eight languages and interested in a wide range of interests, including poetry, linguistics and philosophy. As a result, Oppenheimer sometimes had trouble understanding other people's limitations. For instance, in 1931 he asked a University of California Berkeley colleague Leo Nedelsky to prepare a lecture for him, noting that it would be easy because everything was in a book that Oppenheimer gave him. Later on, the colleague came back befuddled because the book was entirely in Dutch. Oppenheimer's response? "But it's such easy Dutch!"

 

[pines-demon]

When going to the US, Enrico Fermi had a rough understanding (if any) of English. During the construction of the Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor, many measuring devices had whimsical names like Roo, Piglet and Heffalump, as seen directly from Fermi's handwritten measurements: Fermi and Pooh: A strange mix (Physics Today). It turns out that Fermi was trying to get better at English from elementary books like Winnie-the-Pooh.

 

[pinball1970]

My mathematics teacher told us this story.

"Carl Friedrich Gauss was a special mathematician. The story goes that, in school, at the age of 8, he was able to add up the first 100 numbers extremely quickly. I like to think of the teacher as having used this trick many times to keep the class busy for long periods while he took a snooze. He knew that he was in for a long quiet period as the class slaved away. Even if one of them got an answer, the teacher could ask them to check it to take up more time. But he hadn’t bargained on this precocious 8 year old.

In a flash Gauss came out with 5050. But not only could he calculate the sum of the first 100 numbers that quickly, he could also justify the correctness of his answer."

If you do not know the answer he paired them up to get sums of 101 x 50.

I never once thought this story was not true, why make up a story about Gauss being a mathematical genius?
He was a mathematical genius and was probably pretty good at 8!

The below article uses the word "apocryphal." Perhaps @fresh_42 knows?

https://www.theguardian.com/science...e-it-carl-friedrich-gauss-money-saving-expert

 

[pinball1970]

In his book Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work, G. H. Hardy tells this famous story:

He could remember the idiosyncracies of numbers in an almost uncanny way. It was Littlewood who said every positive integer was one of Ramanujan’s personal friends. I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to be rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

Namely,

103+93=1000+729=1729=1728+1=123+13


https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2022/02/hardy_ramanujan_and_taxicab_no.html

 

[pines-demon]

I never once thought this story was not true, why make up a story about Gauss being a mathematical genius?
He was a mathematical genius and was probably pretty good at 8!

The below article uses the word "apocryphal." Perhaps @fresh_42 knows?

https://www.theguardian.com/science...e-it-carl-friedrich-gauss-money-saving-expert

This a great anecdote, some parts of it are authentic. It was recorded by Sartorius who published Gauss' biography Gauss zum Gedächtnis after Gauss' passing. He writes:

In 1784 after his seventh birthday the little fellow entered the public school where elementary subjects were taught and which was then under a man named Büttner. It was a drab, low school-room with a worn, uneven floor.... Here among some hundred pupils Büttner went back and forth, in his hand the switch which was then accepted by everyone as the final argument of the teacher. As occasion warranted he used it. In this school—which seems to have followed very much the pattern of the Middle Ages—the young Gauss remained two years without special incident. By that time he had reached the arithmetic class in which most boys remained up to their fifteenth year.

Here occurred an incident which he often related in old age with amusement and relish. In this class the pupil who first finished his example in arithmetic was to place his slate in the middle of a large table. On top of this the second placed his slate and so on. The young Gauss had just entered the class when Büttner gave out for a problem [the summing of an arithmetic series]. The problem was barely stated before Gauss threw his slate on the table with the words (in the low Braunschweig dialect): "There it lies." While the other pupils continued [counting, multiplying and adding], Büttner, with conscious dignity, walked back and forth, occasionally throwing an ironical, pitying glance toward this the youngest of the pupils. The boy sat quietly with his task ended, as fully aware as he always was on finishing a task that the problem had been correctly solved and that there could be no other result.

At the end of the hour the slates were turned bottom up. That of the young Gauss with one solitary figure lay on top. When Büttner read out the answer, to the surprise of all present that of young Gauss was found to be correct, whereas many of the others were wrong.

No mention of 100. More analysis on what is or what is not true here: Gauss' day of reckoning (American Scientist)

 

[pines-demon]

Physicist Phil Abelson was working on what he thought were transuranium elements, working for Luis Alvarez. One day Alvarez rushes in with a weird haircut, tells Abelson to sit down and says:

Phil, what you are looking for are not transuranium elements, but they are elements in the middle of the periodic table!

Alvarez just had understood what fission was while he was in the hairdresser, in his words:

I remember exactly how I heard about it. I was sitting in the barber chair in Stevens Union having my hair cut, reading the Chronicle, and in the second section, buried away some place, was an announcement that some German chemists had found that the uranium atom split into pieces when it was bombarded with neutrons—that's all there was to it. So I remember telling the barber to stop cutting my hair and I got right out of the barber chair and ran as fast as I could up to the Radiation Laboratory.

This scene was partially depicted in the movie Oppenheimer (2023).

 

[pines-demon]

Quick one:

When the muon was discovered, Isaac Rabi said (1936):

Who ordered that?

Side note: Hideki Yukawa did predict a "mu particle" a year before, but it was not a lepton, which caused a bit of confusion for several years. Yukawa hadronic particle was found much later and was renamed the pion.

 

[pinball1970]

Plenty of stories about the brilliant, prolific and eccentric Paul Erdos, Hungarian Mathematician, I like this one.

"On one occasion, Erdős met a mathematician and asked him where he was
from. "Vancouver," the mathematician replied. "Oh, then you must know my
good friend Elliot Mendelson," Erdos said."

The reply was "I AM your good friend Elliot Mendelson."

 

[pinball1970]

Ernst Eduard Kummer (1810-1893), a German algebraist, was rather poor at
arithmetic. Whenever he had occasion to do simple arithmetic in class, he
would get his students to help him. Once he had to find 7 x 9. "Seven
times nine," he began, "Seven times nine is er -- ah --- ah -- seven times
nine is. . . ." "Sixty-one," a student suggested.
Kummer wrote 61 on the
board. "Sir," said another student, "it should be sixty-nine."
"Come,
come, gentlemen, it can't be both," Kummer exclaimed. "It must be one or
the other."

 

[pinball1970]

The maths ones are some of the best actually. Last one for today.

John von Neumann (1903-1957) [Hungarian/US mathematician and scientist] The
following problem can be solved either the easy way or the hard way.

Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is going
at a speed of 50 miles per hour. A fly starting on the front of one of
them flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per hour. It
does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death. What is the
total distance the fly has flown?

The fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it gets
crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil and paper
by summing an infinite series of distances. The easy way is as follows:
Since the trains are 200 miles apart and each train is going 50 miles an
hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide. Therefore the fly was
flying for two hours. Since the fly was flying at a rate of 75 miles per
hour, the fly must have flown 150 miles. That's all there is to it.

When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately replied,
"150 miles."

"It is very strange," said the poser, "but nearly everyone tries to sum the
infinite series."

"What do you mean, strange?" asked Von Neumann. "That's how I did it!"

It would be nice if all of these are accurate but I am sure the stories evolve over time like the Gauss 101 story.
The source of the last three is below which does give a few references.

https://jcdverha.home.xs4all.nl/scijokes/10.html

 

[pines-demon]

This is recorded by Louis Geoffroy:

Andrè-Marie Ampère was very absent minded.

Once while Ampère was giving a lecture in the French Academy of Sciences, a person entered the room, causing a lot of murmuration in the public. The "newcomer" was condecorated with the highest medals from the French Legion of Honor, and with a hand sign he stopped the murmuration in room and took sit in the first empty chair that he found. Ampère did not notice much, but after finishing his talk, he found that his chair was taken by the newcomer. Ampère tried to move around and cough to indicate the newcomer to stand up, but he did not flinch. Ampère angry, went to investigate who was this person.

In the same room, he said to famous French biologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (president of the Academy) :

— Mr President, I have to tell you that there is a stranger among us, occupying one of our seats (said Ampère)

– You are wrong sir. This person that you are alluding to is indeed a member of the Science Academy (said Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire)

– Since when? (questioned Ampère)

– Since the 5 Nivôse, year VI (answered the newcomer, using the French Republican calendar)

– Please, what is your section sir? (said Ampère with irony)

– Mechanics, my dear colleague (said the newcomer in joyful manner)

– That's a bit odd (said Ampère who was digging deep into the academy records)

Ampère had just found that at the date announced by the newcomer, the records listed the name "Napoléon Bonaparte". The newcomer was the Emperor. Bonaparte added:

You see, Sir, how inconvenient it is not to see one’s colleagues frequently. I never see you at the Tuileries, either, but I know how to force you to come, at least to say good-day to me!

Ampère apologized and went to find a new chair.

George Gamow adds in The great physicists from Galileo to Einstein, that after that exchange, Napoléon formally invited Ampère to dinner at the Palace of Fontainebleau the next day. Ampère accepted. But the next day, one seat in the palace was vacant, Ampère had forgotten that we has invited to dinner with the Emperor!

 

[pinball1970]

The OP is physics not maths my bad. Fun thread absolutely though.

 

[pines-demon]

I forgot yesterday was $\pi$ day. There is this famous story misattributed to Feynman (which is possibly originally from Douglas Hofstadter) where he humorously proposed memorizing the first 752 digits of $\pi$:

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001133053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738193261179310511854807446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639522473719070217986094370277053921717629317675238467481846766940513200056812714526356082778577134275778960917363717872146844090122495343014654958537105079227968925892354201995611212902196086403441815981362977477130996051870721134999...[9998372...]

so that one could end the counting with "and so on" as if $\pi$ was rational.
This section with six consecutive nines in the digits $\pi$ is now called the Feynman point.

 

[pinball1970]

Napoleon and Laplace regarding his latest works on celestial Mechanics.

Napoleon: 'M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.'

Laplace: 'Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. (I had no need of that hypothesis.)”

 

[pinball1970]

In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.

Frank Wilczek

 

[Swamp Thing]

TBH, I'm not very sure if this one even belongs in this thread, because it doesn't seem as intriguing a mystery as the author considers it to be. But FWIW, here goes...

From: Quirky Sides of Scientists: True Tales of Ingenuity and Error from Physics
By David R Topper

On Google Books

----------

----------------
If we treat the mystery sentence as rhetorical, maybe there is no mystery? As in, "For how can we ever see the sun rising in the west?"

Anyway, others reading this thread will either find it as intriguing as the author does, or not. What about you?

 

[pines-demon]

If we treat the mystery sentence as rhetorical, maybe there is no mystery? As in, "For how can we ever see the sun rising in the west?"

Anyway, others reading this thread will either find it as intriguing as the author does, or not. What about you?

I do not catch the oddity but I appreciate when somebody digs down to the original drafts and notes to check if something is right. Hopefully there will be more anecdotes in that book?

 

[pines-demon]

I just read this nice text about Poincaré inspecting mines: Poincaré Inspector of mines (Mactutor).

Here is the summarized version. Poincaré studied at the École Polytechnique, a military-engineering school and one of the oldest ones. For historical reasons, it is divided in "corps" (boats, bridges and so on), Poincaré was in the "Mining corp" so he had to supervise mines and check their safety, in order to keep his job.

On 1879, there was an explosion in one of the mines where he worked. At least, nine miners died. Poincaré helped in the rescue. Later he tried to figure out what happened by examining all the miners lamps. There were also two possible exits, so he had to figure out from which side the explosion happened. Here is the puzzle, as provided from source:

Lamp number 476, however, had a slit in it which was consistent with having been caused by a miner's pick. But there was a puzzle. Lamp 476 was recorded as being given to Auguste Pautot but was not found close to his body. Rather it was hanging from a support 15 centimetres above the ground and close to the corpse of Emile Perroz. Now Perroz was loading coal onto trucks and had no pick, while Pautot had been working with a pick. Poincaré deduced that Pautot had hit his lamp with his pick but had not noticed that he had damaged it. At this time there was no problem as no gas was present in the mine. Pautot went, for some unknown reason, to talk to Perroz and when he returned to where he had been working he took Perroz's lamp by mistake. When there was a release of firedamp from a seam an initial explosion occurred when it came in contact with the damaged lamp. The gas, partially burnt and still alight, reached the main tunnel where the flow of air was strong and a second explosion occurred. Poincaré wrote:-

The Company had done all that was humanly possible to prevent the accident. The catastrophe was caused by the awkwardness of Pautot, who paid with his life for one moment of carelessness. This man was not a bad workman and nobody ever complained about him; but similar mistakes are often made by the best miners.

Poincaré report was very praised but he was probably traumatized from the experience. He was later promoted and he never visited more mines. However, some months before his death, Poincaré wrote an article about mines, that starts with the following warning of caution :

A spark is enough to ignite an explosive mixture of air and firedamp, and then I refuse to describe the horrors which follow ...