Interesting anecdotes in the history of physics?

[pines-demon]

Let us try to promote some physics history in this sub. What are some anecdotes in the history of physics that you want to share? Be it a true story or a popular myth.

I'll start:

I recently tried to check if the story of Schrödinger's equation was true: Schrödinger going out for the holidays with a mistress and coming back with the wave formulation of quantum mechanics. The story was totally confirmed in his biography Schrödinger, Life and Thought by Walter John Moore. It was during Christmas, and he left with wife, and went to a ski resort with an anonymous Viennese girl.

He had tried to get a relativistic wave equation but it did not work, he went to resort to work out on the problem. It seems that he was having trouble with the radial equation. Nevertheless after coming back he worked on the article that lead to the famous equation (without thanking his muse). When his friend asked if he enjoyed holidays, Schrödinger said that he was distracted with work.

The thing that people often do not know is that Schrödinger had multiple partners (he had an open relation, he was a swinger, and that included unusual agreements with his wife). It is a dark story in many ways because some of his partners were underage, that's why some universities are renaming halls and rooms named after Schrödinger to something else. The thing is that the biographer tried to check on the whereabout of all of Schrödinger's girlfriends of that time but he was never able to figure out who traveled with him. We know that he was in the ski resort because he wrote many letters to talk about his results, but when trying to confirm the hotel registry, his name never appears for that specific year (only for the year before with his wife). His notebooks and diary from that time also disappeared. Schrödinger also never said much about it in his autobiographical notes.

It seems that such a mysterious equation deserved such a mysterious origin story.

 

[Frabjous]

Supposedly, the only question Hilbert asked Von Neumann at his Ph.D. defense was

”In all my years I have never seen such beautiful evening clothes: pray, who is the candidate’s tailor?”

(taken from TIL thread)

 

[fresh_42]

Here are a couple of my favorite anecdotes:

Albert Einstein and the Ether

Norbert Wiener and His New Home

Godfrey Hardy and His Insurance Trick

Lise Meitner and Cosmetics

von Neumann and The Integral

Proof by von Neumann

 

[Frabjous]

In March of 1694, L’Hospital wrote to Bernoulli, then back in Basel, offering him an annual pension of 300 livres in exchange for help with mathematical questions and a promise to send to L’Hospital mathematical results which L’Hospital could then publish under his own name. What today we call L’Hospital’s rule was sent by Bernoullli to L’Hospital later that year. In 1696, L’Hospital published the very first book on calculus, Analyse des infiniments petits, pour l’inteligence des lignes courbes, which Fred Rickey has translated as Analysis of the Little-Bitty-Guys for the Study of Curved Lines. Here is the first recorded mention of what today we call L’Hospital’s rule. Bernoulli’s lectures from 1691–92 would be published in 1922, revealing that much of L’Hospital’s book was first discovered by Bernoulli. In fact, after L’Hospital’s death in 1704 with Bernoulli now freed from his contract, he laid claim to L’Hospital’s rule as his own result.

from
Appendix to A Radical Approach to Real Analysis 2nd edition 2006 by David M. Bressoud

(taken from TIL thread)

 

[Nugatory]

In March of 1694, L’Hospital….

Got a stray ‘s’ in there, I think….

 

[Frabjous]

Got a stray ‘s’ in there, I think….

A lot of stray s’s. Corrected.

 

[fresh_42]

A lot of stray s’s. Corrected.

And now the ô.

 

[Frabjous]

I'll now use the actual quote and uncorrect things.

"Not even the historians of mathematics are agreed on how to spell his name. On at least one of his letters, he spelled his name Lhospital (without the apostrophe and with a lower case h), but people did not spell their names consistently back then (think of Shakespeare). On his calculus book, it is spelled l’Hospital (lower case l). The official French national bibliographic entry is L’Hospital, which is what most historians choose. Today, the French word for hospital is spelled “hôpital”. The mark over the o is called a circumflex. It is used denote a missing s. While there is no evidence that L’Hospital ever spelled his name with a circumflex or without the s, many mathematicians prefer this spelling because the s, even if written, would not have been pronounced."

 

[fresh_42]

It was a sunny morning in late summer 1913. Schrödinger who was 26 at the time and his friend were on the tennis court. All of a sudden, Schrödinger interrupted the match and said: "I have to hurry to the lecture!" and his friend responded: "On a morning like this? Let's forget about the lecture." Schrödinger: "I'm supposed to hold it."

 

[fresh_42]

I'll now use the actual quote and uncorrect things.

"Not even the historians of mathematics are agreed on how to spell his name. On at least one of his
letters, he spelled his name Lhospital (without the apostrophe and with a lower case h), but people
did not spell their names consistently back then (think of Shakespeare). On his calculus book, it
is spelled l’Hospital (lower case l). The official French national bibliographic entry is L’Hospital,
which is what most historians choose. Today, the French word for hospital is spelled “hôpital”.
The mark over the o is called a circumflex. It is used denote a missing s. While there is no evidence
that L’Hospital ever spelled his name with a circumflex or without the s, many mathematicians
prefer this spelling because the s, even if written, would not have been pronounced."

In cases of doubt, I go with the French Wiki page:

 

[Frabjous]

In cases of doubt, I go with the French Wiki page:

Here's a title page

 

[fresh_42]

I think it is a matter of language: french - de L'Hôpital, latin - Marchionis Hospitalii, modern (non french) - de L'Hospital.

Source: https://preserver.beic.it/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE1500248
(February, Solutio problematis physico mathematici, Acta Eruditorum, Leipzig, 1695)

 

[fresh_42]

I have a book about the history of mathematics by Jean Dieudonné basically between Leibniz and Dedekind, and along the great French analysists in the 17th to 19th century. Dieudonné is French, so they all show up: Legendre, Lagrange, Cauchy, Laplace and so on, however, de L'Hôpital does not! (At least I haven't found him in the index or register.)

An interesting side note, me thinks.

 

[Frabjous]

I have a book about the history of mathematics by Jean Dieudonné basically between Leibniz and Dedekind, and along the great French analysists in the 17th to 19th century. Dieudonné is French, so they all show up: Legendre, Lagrange, Cauchy, Laplace and so on, however, de L'Hôpital does not! (At least I haven't found him in the index or register.)

An interesting side note, me thinks.

Stillwell in “Mathematics and Its History” only mentions him twice. One was this incident and the second was for independently finding that a cycloid was a solution of the brachistochrone problem (Newton, Leibniz and Jakob Bernoulli also found the solution).

 

[pines-demon]

On Heisenberg's ping pong:

I healed slowly. In the end I healed and barely able to walk, I did not go back to Munich. I did not like the Herr- Herr Geheimrat. Anyway, he was on a trip around the world. I went where I belonged, to Leipzig where there was a professor only a few years older than I - I don't know, I think maybe six years older than I - by the name of Werner Heisenberg, a very wonderful man. And it was obvious that he liked me. He liked me, perhaps when he asked me what I have read; I told him the various works, including my study in Group Theory, which he appreciated. I am pretty much convinced that in part he liked me because of two somewhat strange circumstances. I hardly could walk and I beat him in ping-pong. In fact, we had the ping-pong evenings on Tuesday, I was the only one who beat him in ping-pong. I might tell you that my glory was great but not permanent. Next year, Heisenberg went around the world in the ship, really practiced up on ping-pong and after that I could not beat him.

– Edward Teller

Then about 9:00 the theoreticians, just the Heisenberg group, came back to the Institute. I don’t think Hund ever took part in the ping pong playing. I don’t remember him in any case, but I think all the younger people did. A matrix was drawn on the blackboard on which all the results of the different pairings were to be written down. One tried to fill the matrix completely in one evening, which was not always possible. There were some particular games played when there were discussions because there were more people there than could play ping pong at one time.

There were two tables in two separate rooms, but there might have been at least eight people, perhaps even sixteen, so the majority couldn’t play ping pong. Again tea was made, chess was played at times, and discussions were going on. The discussions were finally decided by a game of ping pong if they couldn’t be decided otherwise. This was very good for Heisenberg because he was not only the best physicist, but he was also the best ping pong player. So there was never any hope of getting the better of Heisenberg! And this is typical of Heisenberg — this is something I had not seen myself but it had happened when I arrived in Leipzig. Before 1929 Heisenberg was not the best ping pong player. Then he went on his trip around the world and he returned being the best player in the seminar, because during the time he spent on boats across the Atlantic and the Pacific he had tried very hard to learn ping pong very well. I think Heisenberg never could stand to do anything which people near to him knew better than he, so he somehow liked to be the best ping pong player.

- Carl Weizsäcker

I guess opponents couldn't observe the position and momentum of the ball at the same time.

Heisenberg AIP Archives

 

[fresh_42]

Here is one of the many anecdotes that are out there about chess players. I know, a bit off-topic, but funny:

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/random-thoughts-part-6.875108/page-104#post-5983165

 

[pines-demon]

From https://spark.iop.org/collections/stories-physics-quantum-nuclear-and-particle-physics

In 2013, a group of physicists from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) met at a local bar to celebrate their determination of Planck’s constant to an unprecedented degree of accuracy using a Watt balance. During happy hour, each member of the group wrote, on a paper napkin, a prediction to ten decimal places for the future measured value of Planck’s constant. They placed the napkin in a plastic bottle and buried it in a cavity in the foundation of an NIST building that was then under construction. Four years later, a new measurement of Planck’s constant allowed the winner to be declared: Shisong Li from China’s National Institute of Metrology. He was awarded the prize of an Italian rum cake with the newly measured value for Planck’s constant written in icing on top.

 

[pines-demon]

Yesterday I discovered Floy Agnes Lee. A biologist who worked in the Manhattan project.
She played tennis during his free time with an anonymous player, that "she beated" every time until she learned who he was.
It turns out it was an important physicist from the project:

I only knew him as a number, because they wouldn’t give names out. So we would play tennis. This was before the bomb was dropped, and then afterwards also. He was a short man, and he had a funny little hat." After the atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Lee was told that she had been playing tennis with a Nobel-Prize winner for months. She was shocked. Lee said that her response was: "'Oh, I can’t believe that.' Because I was beating him in tennis every time. So when we went out to play tennis later, I didn’t beat him. I tried not to. We became very, very good friends.

His playing partner was Enrico Fermi.

 

[pines-demon]

His playing partner was Enrico Fermi.

Her...

 

[berkeman]

Her...

In some cultures, his/her is not well distinguished in their spoken language. I don't know if that's the case in this instance, but I usually just slide right over such things. I've worked with great folks who regularly misspoke when it came to his/her...

 

[difalcojr]

Owen Chamberlain won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959 as co-discoverer of the antiproton. He also taught a large undergraduate class in 1976, a classical EM class for scientists and engineers. He was a good teacher, tall, steady, good blackboard diagrams and explanations, and, looking back, I was very fortunate to have had such a scholar as a teacher which I did not realize at the time. Don't think Nobel Prize winners teach undergraduate classes anymore.

He himself was the volunteer one day in class, when he demonstrated the Van de Graaff electrostatic generator. What I remember now is what looked to be about a foot-thick block of glass or plastic, the insulator he used to stand on! He was balding with stringy, kinda long hair, put both palms flat down on the sphere, said he felt his skin tingling, and his hair all stood up on end! Remember also thinking that I would not volunteer for that experiment. It was quite impressive. He was very excited with it all too.

One other teacher, Paul Witherspoon, also very well known in mineral engineering and geophysics, taught "Fluid Flow in Porous Media". He also drew good blackboard diagrams with full, clear explanations. He told us a story that, when he was young, in Oklahoma or some midwest state, I forget now, he was in a geologic area that had natural methane venting from the ground. I forget whether he said he flicked a cigarette or a match, something flammable, into a recess, and he ignited a whole lot of methane that in there or was then actively venting. Said it was like a blasthole explosion straight up. Right next to him! I remember his scary anecdote.

 

[robphy]

From my post https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/chen-ning-yang-is-almost-100-years-old.1045788/

* http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/951012/chandra.shtml
"One story in particular illustrates Chandrasekhar's devotion to his science and his students. In the 1940s, while he was based at the University's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., he drove more than 100 miles round-trip each week to teach a class of just two registered students. Any concern about the cost-effectiveness of such a commitment was erased in 1957, when the entire class -- T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang -- won the Nobel Prize in physics."

From "A Scientific Autobiography: S. Chandrasekhar" (edited by K. Wali), p.22

After Radiative Transfer was finished in September 1948, we left for a short vacation in Bayfield; and while there, I decided that Fall 1948 I would embark on turbulence: since turbulence is a phenomenon of the large scale and the essence of astrophysical and, indeed, also of geophysical phenomena is the scale.

And so, on our return from Bayfield, I started my Monday evening seminars. The first audience included: Munch, Osterbrock, Edmonds, Huang, Brown and Code. At the same time, I lectured on Radiative Transfer on the campus. My class of two consisted only of Lee and Yang. The whole of my class of 1948 was to receive the Nobel Prize!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subrahmanyan_Chandrasekhar won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics
and passed away in 1995.

By the way, as of today,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsung-Dao_Lee is 97
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chen-Ning is 101.
They won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics when they were in their thirties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Physics
The laureates from the 1960s and all others from the 1950s have all passed.
Thus, there are still laureates from the 1970s and later, and Lee and Yang from 1957.On a personal note,
I got my undergrad degree from Stony Brook... but I never met Yang... although I saw him when he gave talks.
I got my master's degree from Chicago... but I never met Chandrasehkar.. although I saw him when he gave talks... and I found his wallet on the floor in the stacks at the Eckhart Math Library and turned it in to the library staff.

 

[phinds]

I recall a story which unfortunately I cannot confirm but it goes like this:

After the WWII and in the early days of computers, some military brass and one scientist came to von Neumann and explained to him that they had a problem that seemed intractable to a straight mathematical solution but that their scientists had assured them that a big enough computer would be able to solve it numerically and they wanted him to lead the effort because it was quite important. He looked at the problem for a few minutes and then wrote down the equation that gave an exact solution.

 

[phinds]

Another anecdote that I cannot confirm is that David Friedman (an economist like his father Milton) once said that of all the best mathematicians of the 1900's there were really only two types; von Neumann and all the rest of us.

 

[pines-demon]

I recall a story which unfortunately I cannot confirm but it goes like this:

After the WWII and in the early days of computers, some military brass and one scientist came to von Neumann and explained to him that they had a problem that seemed intractable to a straight mathematical solution but that their scientists had assured them that a big enough computer would be able to solve it numerically and they wanted him to lead the effort because it was quite important. He looked at the problem for a few minutes and then wrote down the equation that gave an exact solution.

Seems like a variation of this (from Wikipedia's John von Neummann):

When George Dantzig brought von Neumann an unsolved problem in linear programming "as I would to an ordinary mortal", on which there had been no published literature, he was astonished when von Neumann said "Oh, that!", before offhandedly giving a lecture of over an hour, explaining how to solve the problem using the hitherto unconceived theory of duality.

 

[fresh_42]

Another anecdote that I cannot confirm is that David Friedman (an economist like his father Milton) once said that of all the best mathematicians of the 1900's there were really only two types; von Neumann and all the rest of us.

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. From the German Wiki:

The son [W. Greiner] of a shoemaker moved from the Thuringian Forest to the west to live with his grandparents when he was eleven. His first attempt to graduate from high school failed in Frankfurt-Höchst. He then completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith at Hoechst AG in Frankfurt am Main and completed his Abitur at evening high school.

 

[berkeman]

I think most of you know this one, but I've always liked the "He fixes radios by thinking!" anecdote in the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pattis/misc/feynman.pdf

(starts bottom of page 18...)

 

[fresh_42]

I remember a guest lecture from Konrad Zuse in the late 80's. The whole auditorium was packed and everybody wanted to hear some of those wartime stories from the past.

Zuse was noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. In 1941, he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer.

It wasn't a military-driven project as one might think and Zuse had serious difficulties accessing the parts that he needed.

Instead, he spoke about his current scientific work which was, sad to say this, neither interesting nor relevant. The entire event was quite embarrassing in the end.

 

[Hornbein]

Otto Stern banned Wolfgang Pauli from his laboratory because something broke every time he came by. He was serious about this.

 

[pines-demon]

I just recently watched this video of Angela Collier (PhD but got off academia):


It discusses the Faraday effect with many side comments on French pioneers in optics dying young. If you do not care much about death or spoilers, here are the very tragic historical facts:

Spoiler

• Malus' law was discovered by French physicist Étienne-Louis Malus in 1810 winning the Rumford Medal, he died two years after catching bubonic plague and tuberculosis at the age of 36. Bef
• Fresnel equations were derived by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel in 1823, obtaining the Rumford Medal, as well as many other concepts in optics named after him. He died 4 years later of a "worsening cough" at the age of 39.
• Verdet constant, postulated by Émile Verdet, from his work about 1854. He died 12 years laters at the age of 42 (I think of a cough).

Why were 19th century French physicists in optics dying young? (Compared to their UK equivalents, also according to the video, the mortality rate was mostly the same all over Europe at that time, nothing wrong with France)

 

[walkeraj]

Crossed with today I learned, but the path integral is the thought and mind of Norbert Weiner, originally. Fully worked out by Dr. Feynman.

Edit: Norbert Weiner wrote the book "Ex-Prodigy: My Youth and Childhood". Some of the editions (maybe all) are nice collectibles.

 

[pines-demon]

Crossed with today I learned, but the path integral is the thought and mind of Norbert Weiner, originally. Fully worked out by Dr. Feynman.

I did not know this! Wiener should definitely get more credit in physics circles. That reminds me of this anecdote:

Wiener was in fact very absent minded. The following story is told about him:
When they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying, “Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I’m Norbert Weiner and we’ve just moved. Would you know where we’ve moved to?” To which the young girl replied, “Yes daddy, mommy thought you would forget.”

–By computer scientist Richard Harter
Edit: my bad this was already posted in #3 by @fresh_42!

 

[phinds]

@pines-demon see post #3 Norbert Wiener and His New Home

 

[Hornbein]

Crossed with today I learned, but the path integral is the thought and mind of Norbert Weiner, originally. Fully worked out by Dr. Feynman.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.11168.pdf says the Feynman path integral is mathematically shocking and only made mostly rigorous later.

 

[pines-demon]

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

Robert Penzias and Arno Wilson were interested in measuring the intensity of radiation from a supernova remnant. Having set up a horn antenna with a device to filter out noise by comparing the collected signal against a cold load, a Dewar of liquid helium at 4.2K, they were surprised to detect a microwave signal across all areas of the sky. In looking for sources of the noise they evicted some pigeons from the telescope and cleaned off from the instrument what Penzias described as a white dielectric material left by the birds. The cleaning, however, failed to eliminate the noise from the signal.

Less than 30 miles away, a team led by Robert Dicke at Princeton had predicted that the Big Bang would result in microwave background radiation and had built a radiometer to detect the radiation. In 1965, Penzias mentioned the signal he had observed with Wilson to a colleague who had read a paper by a member of Dicke’s team. After the conversation, Penzias rang Dicke, who took the call whilst he was having lunch with colleagues in his office and, on completing the call, Dicke turned to his team and said: “Well boys, we’ve been scooped.”

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