Promiscuous chasers by profession

[Guest guest]

A pal sent this - interesting.

 

(I used to draw with Feynman -- he was really neat. And a gentleman....)

 

Helen

 

> http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/03/getting_physical.php

>

> Late last year, researchers in England published a study purporting to

> establish a link between creative output and number of sexual

> partners. As

> the lead author (under)stated, “Creative people are often considered

> to be

> very attractive and get lots of attention as a result.”

>

> The theoretical physicists of the 20th century were no exception.

> Promiscuous chasers by profession, physicists ever-pursue objects that

> lie

> partially hidden to the immediate senses, but are evidently there

> behind

> nature’s many layers. The best physicists are able to tease a peek

> beneath

> all that partially-covered exterior, as any pickup artist would: with

> a mix

> of cleverness and straightforward arrogance. This is hardly just simple

> metaphor; for many of the greatest physicists, this libertine modus

> operandi

> also fueled their private lives.

>

> Schrödinger, Curie, Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer…the finest names of

> pre-Cold War 20th-century physics, some of whom gave us the most

> concise

> theories ever posited, form a roster of lamentable philanderers. Albert

> Einstein was completely “given to flirtation” and had legions of

> affairs.

> Caltech professor and bestselling raconteur Richard Feynman was

> probably the

> only Nobel Prize winner to befriend porn stars, claim a foolproof

> manner for

> bedding women and do his calculations on napkins in strip clubs. And

> it wasn

> ’t just the guys: Marie Curie was relentlessly hounded by the press for

> seducing away her late-husband’s former student from his wife and kids.

>

> “Libertines, both male and female, have always been around in math and

> physics,” says Jennifer Ouellette, who writes on physics history and is

> associate editor of the American Physical Society’s newsletter. Yet

> today,

> while physicists still spend day and night chasing nature, the era of

> chasing skirts — or knickers—seems to have passed. Where have all the

> physics playb—er, sociable persons gone?

>

> Between the world wars, physicists hunted the big ideas and had the big

> personalities—and sex drives—to match. They worked and played under a

> unique

> confluence of circumstance. The sexual norms of the time, their

> status, the

> sexiness of their projects and achievements all conspired to make the

> top

> physicists supremely desirable.

>

> The most shameless cad of the group was Richard Feynman. When he once

> nearly

> crashed his car while eyeing a passing beauty, his only excuse was, “I

> only

> see the women, the rest is all a blur.” He even kept a picture in his

> office

> of one acquaintance, buxom adult film star Candi Samples, signed, “To

> Big

> Dick, Love from Candi.”

>

> Remarkably, some physicists’ trysts seem to have actually led to

> physical

> insight: While once floundering on a problem, Erwin Schrödinger

> shacked up

> in an alpine villa for an extended holiday with “an old girlfriend”

> and, in

> the “late erotic outburst” that followed, produced the eponymous

> equation

> that would net him the Nobel.

>

> At the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, the assembled brain trust

> was as

> hard-partying as a troop of college kids on spring break. Weekends

> with the

> physicists were “big and brassy,” replete with poker and booze. They

> played

> so hard that the program tried to quarantine the women’s dorms; as one

> boss

> euphemized, “The girls had been doing a flourishing business of

> requiting

> the needs of our young men.” So many babies resulted that Robert

> Oppenheimer

> (or his boss, nobody’s really sure), himself having tried to run off

> with

> the wife of Linus Pauling and bed the wife of another colleague, was

> told to

> halt the extracurricular activities. (Oppenheimer didn’t.)

>

> So what’s happened since? Not to bemoan the loss of machismo, but

> today’s

> physicists seem to lack that same rat-pack panache that old-school

> physicists brought to the blackboard. Considering the unparalleled

> prestige

> that the Atomic Era physicists enjoyed, it’s hardly astonishing that

> sexual

> power plays —like those that often transpire between an executive and

> assistant, or even a president and an intern —could have resulted. And

> though modern theoreticians still pursue big ideas, their intellectual

> forebears revealed so many of nature’s broad physical features that,

> now,

> only the finer areas are left to explore.

>

> Ouellette points to another possible explanation: “This stuff still

> goes on,

> we just don’t hear about it. The history books on the great physics

> personalities of the late 20th century have yet to be written.” She

> points

> to a famous professor whom “everyone knows ditched” one woman for

> another:

> “it’s gossiped about, but you never read about it [because] the

> science is

> what really matters.” There’s also Stephen Hawking, whose affair was

> detailed in the British tabloid. Perhaps there are others.

>

> And perhaps, with the new Large Hadron Collider ready to go online next

> year—if physics is now “just another discipline,” as Nature recently

> editorialized—its time will come again. In the meantime, it might help

> to

> remember Richard Feynman’s truth-laden maxim, “Physics is like sex:

> Sure, it

> may give some practical results but that’s not why we do it.”

>

>

>

>