4 ms·
I "came here to say this", but then thought about it and was thinking what kind of a movie it would be. The synopsis of the movie would basically be "there's th
by karmakurtisaani 3y ago
I "came here to say this", but then thought about it and was thinking what kind of a movie it would be. The synopsis of the movie would basically be "there's this guy who knows everything, creates a few fields of science and pretty much solves any problem coming at him", not sure if that would be interesting to large audiences (although super interesting to me for sure).
I'm a but bummered to hear he's not in the movie tho, so I'm gonna just go ahead and share an anecdote about him: apparently the first time he joined the Manhattan project and met with the team in a dinner party, he basically explained them that the charges around the uranium have to be arranged spherically in order to maximize the compression of the uranium. This was already known by the team, but only after experimenting with several different shapes!
- defrost 3y agoSo .. your anecdote is that Oppenheimer repeated the contents of the Frisch–Peierls memorandum as explained to him by the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant?
- karmakurtisaani 3y agoIt was about von Neumann, but I have no idea, just something I read somewhere. As with all anecdotes about him, I take them as entertaining stories. Another one: Von Neumann was supposed to give an address on the international mathematics congress in 1950 (I think) as the keynote speaker. He was expected to deliver similar speech as Hilbert did 50 years ago. Somehow he forgot and did not prepare much, and ended up talking about operator theory and his work in the 1930s. After the disappointed audience had listened to his address for a while, someone heckled him, he apologized and promptly left the stage.