/sci/entist anecdotes and fun facts

[Anonymous No.16171744]

Landau believed in "free love" rather than monogamy and encouraged his wife and his students to practise "free love". However, his wife was not enthusiastic.

[Anonymous No.16172263]

>>16171744

Landau was a commie kike who contributed practically nothing except superconductivity to physics. His beliefs don't matter at all.

Compare him to John von Neumann (a chad conservative kike) who not only contributed to physics but also math, computer science, engineering, economics, ect. John was pretty clear on what he thought of commies:

>"If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today. If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" - John von Neumann

So his beliefs matter a lot more to anyone with an above room temperature IQ.

[Anonymous No.16172305]

>>16172263
His ideas were catastrophic. von Neumann architecture makes computer dramatically slower to this day. He also calculated that atomic bombs make more damage when detonated high up, which, I'm pretty sure is nonsense, from the very fact that they detonate into a half-sphere way down.

[Anonymous No.16172352]

>>16172305
>He also calculated that atomic bombs make more damage when detonated high up
How high are we talking?

[Anonymous No.16172365]

>>16171744
Pauli believed in magic and the mystical significance of dreams. He was an alcoholic and connoisseur of hookers while teaching physics in Hamburg. In his famous letters to Carl Jung, he at one point says that he has a thuggish side to his character and might even have become a murderer if not for the career in science.
In the last years of his life he obsessed over the fine-structure constant (~1/137); when his cancer was suddenly discovered and he was transferred to a hospital, they put him in room 137. He was convinced he was going to die in that room - and he did.

[Anonymous No.16172375]

>>16172263
Von Neumann's ideas of quantum physics were so silly and nonsensical that they should never have been published.

[Anonymous No.16172388]

>>16171744
The Russians had a plasma microgravity experiment they ran on Mir (the origin of the plazmennyy-kristall or PK experiments now being performed on the ISS). Since the Russians didn't have access to reliable electric turbomolecular pumps like NASA did at the time, their solution for getting a good vacuum in the chamber was to connect a valve from the chamber to the waste ejection system on the station. Every time they needed to depressurize the chamber they just 'flushed' - exposing the waste ejection system (and the chamber) to the hard vacuum of space.

[Anonymous No.16172390]

>>16172365
>>16172263
>>16171744
All three of these men sound based.

What's the point of having everyone believe the same boring things? If everyone is always on the same page about everything, then what is there to learn in this world?

[Anonymous No.16172419]

>>16172365
I forgot to add:
He was infamous for the "Pauli effect", a tendency for all sorts of objects to break and devices not working properly when he was around. It was confirmed by several experimental physicists he worked with, who couldn't find anything wrong with their tools and which would work perfectly fine when he left.
He also originated the phrase "not even wrong" to indicate that a physics paper was so devoid of precision and rigor that you couldn't even properly criticize its claims. I bet he would have loved postmodernism and the Sokal hoaxes.

[Anonymous No.16172452]

>>16172305

[Anonymous No.16172478]

>>16172419
>He was infamous for the "Pauli effect", a tendency for all sorts of objects to break and devices not working properly when he was around. It was confirmed by several experimental physicists he worked with, who couldn't find anything wrong with their tools and which would work perfectly fine when he left.
We call this 'The Advisor Effect' in grad school - the tendency for shit to stop working the moment you finally get your advisor to come around and take a look.

[Anonymous No.16172580]

>>16172263
This is irrelevant for this thread

[Anonymous No.16172606]

>>16172305
an airburst detonation makes a roughly spherical explosion, and when the lowest point of the sphere touches the ground, some of it rebounds up and outwards and reflects off of the "limb" of the explosion and then back downwards into the enemy's buildings and puppies and stuff. The height at which damage is maximized depends on the radius of the explosion at a certain pressure, a smaller bomb should be detonated closer to the ground. Detonating the bomb on the ground displaces some of the ground right away, moving it to the edges of the explosion which creates a dish-shaped crater with edges that are taller than the surrounding ground, which directs the force of the explosion upwards away from the puppies.