Curious anecdotes of famous physicists

Einstein and his nationalities

Albert Einstein had three nationalities: German, Swiss and American. At the end of his life, a journalist asked him what possible repercussions these changes had had on his fame. The physicist gave the following answer:

-If my theories had turned out to be false, the Americans would say that I was a Swiss physicist; the Swiss, who was a German scientist; and the Germans that he was a Jewish astronomer.

Without divine intervention

When Pierre Simon Laplace presented his voluminous work Treatise on Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon, the following exchange of opinions took place between them:

-Monsieur Laplace, I am told that he has written this great book on the system of the universe without once mentioning its creator.

– Sire, I have never needed that hypothesis.

The third man

In the 1930s, an interviewer commented to the astronomer and physicist Arthur Eddington the following:

I have heard that you are one of the three people in the world who understands the theory of general relativity.

Hearing this, Eddington looked surprised. When the interviewer asked him the reason for his strangeness, the English physicist replied:

I'm trying to think who the third person could be.

Einstein and how to fry an egg

During an interview, a journalist asked Einstein if he could explain the law of Relativity to him in a simple way so that he could understand it.

Einstein replied:

– Can you explain to me how to fry an egg?

The journalist looked at him strangely and replied:

-Well, yes, yes I can.

To which Einstein replied:

-Well, do it, but imagining that I don't know what an egg is, or a frying pan, or oil, or fire.

Coded conversation

In December 1942, the first successful nuclear chain reaction occurred at the University of Chicago. The physicist Arthur Holly Compton communicated the news to his colleague J.B. Conant by telephone, but in code.

This was the conversation:

–Italian navigator found the New World

"And how did he find the natives?"

-Very friendly

Oppenheimer, Dirac and poetry

When the American physicist J.Robert Oppenheimer was working in Göttingen, Paul Dirac went to see him and they had the following conversation:

-I have been told that you write poetry. I cannot understand how someone who works on the limits of physics can combine his work with poetry that represents an activity at the opposite pole. When you work in science you have to write about things that no one knows in words that everyone can understand. By writing poetry you are limited to saying… something that everyone knows in words that no one understands.

The Medal Founder

Persecuted by the Nazis, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, before leaving his native country, dissolved in aqua regia (a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid) the gold medals awarded with the Nobel Prize that had been entrusted to him by his colleagues Max von Laue and James Frank.

He hid the bottle with the molten metal on a shelf in his Copenhagen laboratory and, at the end of the war, Bohr sent the gold to the Swedish Academy and there they recast the physicists' medals.

Do you work or do you think?

On one occasion, the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) learned that one of the students in his laboratory was a tireless worker.

One afternoon, the teacher turned to the diligent student and asked him:

Do you also work in the morning?

"Yes sir," he answered all excited.

"But then, when do you think?" snapped the professor.

Good memory

In a lecture that Einstein gave at the College de France, the French writer Paul Valéry asked him:

-Professor Einstein, when he has an original idea, what does he do? Do you write it down in a notebook or on a loose sheet?

"When I have an original idea I don't forget it," replied the physicist.

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