How do you know that Schwinger’s young women counterparts weren’t fascinated about source theory and perhaps didn’t have their own ideas on the subject? Afterall, many young women I meet today are very well versed on the subject.

Re: Feynman, I’m amazed that he owns up to his misdemeanours in his books … knocking a slice off his student’s wives, whoring, hanging out in strip clubs. Definitely taking the “What do you care what other people think?” philosophy on board, although I don’t suppose that his first wife really meant him to interpret her words in that way.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/bbdb0b4511b84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

There is a story about one wealthy industrialist who developed cancer of the jaw by consuming these drinks which allegedly enhanced sexual performance.

Strange but true.

Elliot

I quote:
“To understand Schrödinger’s request for March we must digress a little and comment on Schrödinger’s liking for women. His relations with his wife had never been good and he had had many lovers with his wife’s knowledge. Anny had her own lover for many years, Schrödinger’s friend Weyl. Schrödinger’s request for March to be his assistant was because, at that time, he was in love with Arthur March’s wife Hilde.”
Biography

To appoint a research assistant because you want an affair with his wife??
He then went on to live in an openly bigamous relationship with both Hilde and his wife Anny.
and it goes on, in total he had four daughters to four different women.

Physicists (especially the experimentalists) are under incredible pressure to get things right. Chemists are satisfied with yield. One therefore posits that string theory is the place to get lucky - not even a rumor of empirical constraint.

Cheers,

-cvj

Heisenberg writes about Paulis excellent knowledge of the Munich nightlife, and legend has it he came up with the exclusion principle while watching a cabaret show in Paris (he was married briefly to a cabaret performer actually).

Let me revert to “something else” I learnt about Feynman.

That I might shock you about “such honor” attributed to “love” in the relationship. After all, this part on sex, it came through anothers mouth too. Individuals, who had past it on from one mouth to another, all the while we are getting closer to the source.

Might it have been biased by the individual writer? A discription on the scene, could some how “the truth” have filtered through?

Feynman:

I’m not worried about my own future in heaven or hell. I have a theory about that that does come from science. I believe in scientific discoveries and therefore have a view about myself that is consistent. Now I’ve just been to the hospital and I don’t know how long I have to live. It happens to us sooner or later. Everybody dies. It’s just a matter of when. But with Arlene I was really happy for a while. So I have had it all. After Arlene, the rest of my life didn’t have to to be so good, you see, because I had already had it all

Feynman’s Rainbow, by Leonard Mlodinow, pg 159 and 160

So, we had not noticed this side of the man? I leave it now, for who Arlene was. I leave it, for those closest to him.

I like to think more, on the perspective he had on science, then the attributes “good professors and mathematicians who would lead us into the “ethical behaviors debate,” as the sex proliferates our views of the man. One can realize the impact “that experience” had on Feynman? Tells us something about him?

As for particle physics, the tone of the field sure seems to have shifted; even with the arxiv, people seem much less willing to publically discuss (or publish) half-baked ideas than a generation ago - to brainstorm out loud, as it were. I bet most young theorists would say that bold and saucy wrong ideas are far worse for your career than tame and dry right ones. We’re risk-averse. Maybe that’s just what happens when a field gets huge and institutionalized — or disconnected from data. (Which predicts that more and more wild papers should appear as the LHC start date draws near…)

That said, there are still loads of iconoclasts. Philandering or not.