Ayn Rand
Howard Hughes
Albert Hofmann
Mother Teresa
Willem Kolff
John Wheeler
Ron Hubbard
Alan Turing
Milton Friedman
Alan Watts
Francis Crick
Maurice Wilkens
Arthur C. Clarke
Richard Feynman
Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982)
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged", and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935.
Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge, and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral, and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, and instead supported laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including property rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals. Literary critics received Rand's fiction with mixed reviews, and academia generally ignored or rejected her philosophy, though academic interest has increased in recent decades. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings. She has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives.
Rand was born to a Russian Jewish middle class bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg. Her father was a successful pharmacist and businessman, eventually owning a pharmacy and the building in which it was located. With a passion for the liberal arts, Rand later said she found school unchallenging and she began writing screenplays at the age of 8 and novels at the age of 10. She was 12 at the time of the Revolution of 1917, during which she favored Alexander Kerensky over Tzar Nicholas II. The subsequent Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the life the family had previously enjoyed. Her father’s business was confiscated and the family displaced. They fled to the Crimean Peninsula, which was initially under control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War.
She later recalled that, while in high school, she determined that she was an atheist and that she valued reason above any other human virtue. After graduating from high school in the Crimea at 16, Rand returned with her family to Saint Petersburg, where they faced desperate conditions, on occasion nearly starving. After the Russian Revolution, universities were opened to women, allowing Rand to be in the first group of women to enroll. At the age of 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. At the university she was introduced to the writings of Aristotle and Plato, who would be her greatest influence and counter-influence, respectively. She also studied the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche. She was able to read French, German and Russian, and Rand was an avid reader.
Along with many other "bourgeois" students, Rand was purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, however, many of the purged students were allowed to complete their work and graduate, which Rand did in 1924. By this time she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, and she adopted the first name Ayn. In 1925, Rand was granted a visa to visit American relatives. Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with relatives in Chicago, one of whom owned a movie theater and allowed her to watch dozens of films for free. She then set out for Hollywood, California.
Initially, Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic living expenses. A chance meeting with famed director led to a job as an extra in his film The King of Kings as well as subsequent work as a junior screenwriter. While working on The King of Kings, she met an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor. The 2 were married in 1929 and she became a permanent US resident and became an American citizen in 1931.Taking various jobs during the 1930s to support her writing, she worked for a time as the head of the costume department. She made several attempts to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they were unable to acquire permission to emigrate.
During the 1940s, Rand became politically active. This led to Rand's first public speaking experiences, including fielding the sometimes hostile questions. Rand's first major success as a writer came with "The Fountainhead" in 1943, a romantic and philosophical novel that she wrote over a period of 7 years. The novel centers on an uncompromising young architect and his struggle against what Rand described as "second-handers" - those who attempt to live through others, placing others above themselves. It was rejected by 12 publishers before finally being accepted.
While completing the novel, Rand was prescribed Benzedrine, a brand of amphetamine, to fight fatigue. The drug helped her to work long hours to meet her deadline for delivering the finished novel, but when the book was done, she was so exhausted that her doctor ordered 2 weeks of rest. Her use of the drug for approximately 3 decades contributed to what some of her later associates described as volatile mood swings.
"The Fountainhead" eventually became a worldwide success, bringing Rand fame and financial security. Rand sold the rights for a film version to Warner Bros., and she returned to Hollywood to write the screenplay. Finishing her work on that screenplay, she was hired as a screenwriter and script-doctor. Rand worked on other projects, including a planned nonfiction treatment of her philosophy to be called "The Moral Basis of Individualism". Although the planned book was never completed, a condensed version was published as an essay titled "The Only Path to Tomorrow", in Reader's Digest magazine.
Rand extended her involvement with free-market and anti-communist activism while working in Hollywood. In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the United States House Un-American Activities Committee. The Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from 1947-1956 was characterized by heightened political repression as well as a campaign spreading fear of Communist influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents. It was the origin of McCarthyism, the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.
Her testimony described the disparity between her personal experiences in the Soviet Union and the portrayal of it in the 1944 film "Song of Russia". Rand argued that the film grossly misrepresented conditions in the Soviet Union, portraying life there as being much better and happier than it actually was.
After several delays, the film version of "The Fountainhead" was released in 1949. In the years following the publication of the book, Rand received numerous letters from readers, some of whom the book profoundly influenced. In 1951 Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City, where she gathered a group of these admirers around her. This group, jokingly designated "The Collective" included future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. 36 years later, he led the FED for 21 years from 1987-2006 with an easy-money policy that led to the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble.
At first the group was an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment to discuss philosophy. Later she began allowing them to read the drafts of her new novel, Atlas Shrugged, as the manuscript pages were written. In 1954 Rand's close relationship with one of the younger members turned into a romantic affair, with the consent of their spouses.
"Atlas Shrugged", published in 1957, was considered Rand's masterpiece. The theme of the novel was the role of the mind in man's existence - and, as a corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest. It advocated the core tenets of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism that places individualism over collectivism. Objectivism's main tenets are that:
- the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness,
- the only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism,
In her book Rand expresses her concept of human achievement. The plot involves United States in which the most creative industrialists, scientists, and artists respond to a welfare state government by going on strike and retreating to a mountainous hideaway where they build an independent free economy.
The novel's hero and leader of the strike describes the strike as "stopping the motor of the world" by withdrawing the minds of the individuals most contributing to the nation's wealth and achievement. With this strike, Rand intended to illustrate that without the efforts of the rational and productive, the economy would collapse and society would fall apart. Despite many negative reviews, "Atlas Shrugged" became an international bestseller. After completing the novel, Rand fell into a severe depression that marked the end of Rand's career as a novelist and the beginning of her role as a popular philosopher.
In 1958, Rand`s lover established an institute "NBI" to promote an Objectivist movement that many described to be a cult or religion. Rand expressed opinions on a wide range of topics, from literature and music to sexuality and facial hair. Some of her followers mimicked her preferences, wearing clothes to match characters from her novels and buying furniture like hers. Rand was unimpressed with many of the NBI students and held them to strict standards, sometimes reacting coldly or angrily to those who disagreed with her.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through her nonfiction works and by giving talks to students at institutions. She often took controversial stances on political and social issues of the day. These included supporting abortion rights, opposing the Vietnam War and the military draft but condemning many draft dodgers as "bums". She supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and their right to the land they took. She compared it to the right of European colonists to develop land taken from American Indians. She called homosexuality immoral and disgusting, while also advocating the repeal of all laws about it. She also endorsed several Republican candidates for President of the United States, most strongly Barry Goldwater in 1964.
In 1964, Rand`s lover without her knowing about it, began an affair with a young actress, whom he later married. When she learned of it in 1968, Rand terminated her relationship with him which led to the closure of NBI.
In metaphysics, Rand opposed anything she regarded as mysticism or super-naturalism, including all forms of religion. In ethics, Rand argued for rational self-interest as the guiding moral principle. She said the individual should exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. She referred to egoism as the virtue of selfishness. She considered all knowledge to be based on sense perception and reason. She rejected all claims of non-perceptual or a priori knowledge, including 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.'
She condemned ethical altruism as incompatible with the requirements of human life and happiness, and held that the initiation of force was evil and irrational.
Rand's political philosophy emphasized individual rights including property rights, and she considered laissez-faire capitalism the only moral social system because in her view it was the only system based on the protection of those rights. Laissez-faire is an economic system in which transactions between private parties are free from government intervention such as regulation, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies.
She opposed statism, which she understood to include theocracy, absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, and dictatorship. Rand believed that natural rights should be enforced by a constitutionally limited government. Although her political views are often classified as conservative or libertarian, she preferred the term "radical for capitalism". She worked with conservatives on political projects, but disagreed with them over issues such as religion and ethics. She denounced libertarianism, which she associated with anarchism. She rejected anarchism as a naïve theory based in subjectivism that could only lead to collectivism in practice.
Rand acknowledged Aristotle as her greatest influence and remarked that in the history of philosophy she could only recommend "three A's"—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand. In a 1959 interview, when asked where her philosophy came from, she responded, "Out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgment of a debt to Aristotle, the only philosopher who ever influenced me. I devised the rest of my philosophy myself."
Rand said her most important contributions to philosophy were "my theory of concepts, my ethics, and my discovery in politics that evil - the violation of rights - consists of the initiation of force. I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."
Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974 after decades of heavy smoking. In 1976, she retired from writing her newsletter and ended up on welfare.
Rand died of heart failure at the age of 77.
Rand's novels became bestsellers largely through word of mouth. Although she rejected the labels "conservative" and "libertarian", Rand has had continuing influence on right-wing politics and libertarianism. The financial crisis of 2008 spurred renewed interest in her works, especially "Atlas Shrugged", which some saw as foreshadowing the crisis, and opinion articles compared real-world events with the plot of the novel.
There was also increased criticism of her ideas, especially from the political left, with critics blaming the economic crisis on her support of selfishness and free markets, particularly through her influence on Alan Greenspan.
Rand's particular genius has always been her ability to turn upside down traditional hierarchies and recast the wealthy, the talented, and the powerful as the oppressed. So oppressed that they are pressured to go on strike.
Howard Hughes (1905 – 1976)
Howard Hughes was an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, film director, and philanthropist, known during his lifetime as one of the most financially successful individuals in the world. He first made a name for himself as a film producer, and then became an influential figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle - oddities that were caused in part by a worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from several plane crashes, and increasing deafness. As a maverick film tycoon, Hughes gained prominence in Hollywood beginning in the late 1920s, when he produced big-budget and often controversial films.
Hughes enjoyed a highly successful business career beyond engineering, aviation, and filmmaking. Hughes' business ventures and investments involved electronics, mass media, manufacturing, and hospitality industries, real estate, petroleum drilling and oilfield services, consulting, entertainment, and engineering. Much of his fortune was later used for philanthropic causes, notably towards health care and medical research. Beyond extending his business prowess in the manufacturing, aviation, entertainment, and hospitality industries, Hughes was a successful real estate investor. Hughes was deeply involved in the American real estate industry where he amassed vast holdings of undeveloped land both in Las Vegas and in the desert surrounding the city that had gone unused during his lifetime. Hughes extended his financial empire to include Las Vegas real estate, hotels, and media outlets and used his considerable powers to take-over many of the well known hotels, especially the organized crime connected venues. He quickly became one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. He was instrumental in changing the image of Las Vegas from its Wild West roots into a more refined cosmopolitan city.
Hughes was the son of a successful inventor and businessman. His father had patented the 2-cone roller bit, which allowed rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible places. His father made the shrewd and lucrative decision to commercialize the invention by leasing the bits instead of selling them, obtained several early patents, and founded the Hughes Tool Company in 1909.
At a young age, Hughes demonstrated interest in science and technology. In particular, he had great engineering aptitude and built Houston's first "wireless" radio transmitter at age 11. He went on to be one of the first licensed ham radio operators in Houston. At 12, Hughes was photographed in the local newspaper, identified as being the first boy in Houston to have a "motorized" bicycle, which he had built from parts from his father's steam engine. He was an indifferent student, with a liking for mathematics, flying, and mechanics. He took his first flying lesson at 14. He later attended math and aeronautical engineering courses.
His mother died when he was 17 years old of pregnancy complications. His father died 2 years later of a heart attack and Hughes inherited 75% of the family fortune. Their deaths apparently inspired Hughes to include the creation of a medical research laboratory in the will that he signed in 1925 at age 19. From a young age, Hughes was an excellent and enthusiastic golfer. He often scored near par figures, played the game to a 3 handicap during his twenties, and for a time aimed for a professional golf career. Hughes entered the entertainment industry after moving to Los Angeles. During the 1940s to the late 1950s, the Hughes Tool Company ventured into the film industry. His films cause controversy for their violence and revealing costumes.
A steady stream of lawsuits from minority shareholders of his film making studio had grown to be extremely annoying to Hughes. They had accused him with financial misconduct and corporate mismanagement. Since Hughes wanted to focus primarily on his aircraft manufacturing and TWA holdings during the Korean War years, Hughes offered to buy out all other stockholders in order to dispense with their distractions and he the sole owner of a Hollywood studio which he sold for a profit ending his 25-year involvement in the motion picture industry. However, his reputation as a financial wizard emerged unscathed.
Another portion of Hughes' business interests lay in aviation, airlines, and the aerospace and defense industries. Hughes was a lifelong aircraft enthusiast and pilot. He set many world records and commissioned the construction of custom aircraft for himself. He set the land-plane airspeed record of 566 km/h and set a transcontinental airspeed record by flying non-stop from Los Angeles to Newark in 7 and a half hours. In 1932, when he was 27 years old, Hughes formed the Hughes Aircraft Company hiring numerous engineers and designers. He spent the rest of the 1930s and much of the 1940s setting multiple world air speed records. He acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines. In 1938, Hughes set another record by completing a flight around the world in under 4 days. For this flight he flew a twin-engine transport with a 4-man crew fitted with the latest radio and navigational equipment. Hughes wanted the flight to be a triumph of American aviation technology, illustrating that safe, long-distance air travel was possible.
In 1939 Hughes quietly purchased a majority share of TWA stock and took control of the airline. Upon assuming ownership, Hughes was prohibited by federal law from building his own aircraft. Seeking an aircraft that would perform better than TWA's fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners, Hughes approached Boeing's competitor, Lockheed. Hughes had a good relationship with Lockheed since they had built the aircraft he used in his record flight around the world in 1938. Lockheed agreed that the new aircraft be built in secrecy.
Hughes produced the gigantic HK-1 Hercules flying boat for use during WWII to transport troops and equipment across the Atlantic as an alternative to seagoing troop transport ships that were vulnerable to German U-boats. The aircraft was not completed until after the end of WWII. The Hercules was the world's largest flying boat, the largest aircraft made from wood nearly 100m long with a 100m wingspan. The Hercules flew only once for 1.6km at 20m above the water, with Hughes at the controls. It was made largely from birch, and not of aluminum, because the contract required that Hughes build the aircraft of "non-strategic materials".
In 1947 Hughes started the Hughes Helicopters division. The company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor manufacturing numerous technology related products that include spacecraft vehicles, military aircraft, radar systems, electro-optical systems, the first working laser, aircraft computer systems, missile systems, ion-propulsion engines for space travel, commercial satellites, and other electronics systems. A year later, he created a new division of the company - the Hughes Aerospace Group.
In 1953, Howard Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the newly formed Howard Hughes Medical Institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a tax-exempt charitable organization with the goal of basic biomedical research, including trying to understand the "genesis of life itself," due to his lifelong interest in science and technology.
Hughes was eccentric, and suffered from a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Close friends of Hughes reported that he was obsessed with the size of peas, one of his favorite foods, and used a special fork to sort them by size. At one time, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. He stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than 4 months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate bars and chicken and drank only milk, and was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes that he continuously stacked and rearranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides giving them explicit instructions not to look at him nor speak to him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continually watching movies. When he finally emerged his hygiene was terrible. He had not bathed nor cut his hair and nails for weeks. Another time, he became obsessed with a film and had it run on a continuous loop in his home watching it 150 times.
Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects to insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains, or other imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of them. Once one of the most visible men in America, Hughes ultimately vanished from public view, although tabloids continued to follow rumors of his behavior and whereabouts. He was reported to be terminally ill, mentally unstable, or even dead. Injuries from numerous aircraft crashes caused Hughes to spend much of his later life in pain, and he eventually became addicted to codeine. The wealthy and aging Hughes, accompanied by his entourage of personal aides, began moving from one hotel to another, always taking up residence in the top floor penthouse. In the last 10 years of his life, Hughes lived in hotels in many cities.
In 1966 Hughes arrived in Las Vegas by railroad car and moved into the Desert Inn. Because he refused to leave the hotel and to avoid further conflicts with the owners, Hughes bought the hotel. The hotel's eighth floor became the nerve center of Hughes' empire and the ninth-floor penthouse became his personal residence. After Hughes left the Desert Inn, hotel employees discovered that his drapes had not been opened during the time he lived there and had rotted through. Between 1966-68, he bought several other hotel-casinos. He bought the small Silver Slipper casino for the sole purpose of moving its trademark neon silver slipper. Visible from Hughes' bedroom, it had apparently kept him awake at night.
Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas to something more glamorous. As Hughes wrote in a memo to an aide, "I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car." Hughes' considerable business holdings were overseen by a small panel unofficially dubbed "The Mormon Mafia" because of the many Latter-day Saints on the committee. In addition to supervising day-to-day business operations and Hughes' health, they also went to great pains to satisfy Hughes' every whim.
Hughes died when he was 71 years old of kidney failure on board an aircraft. His reclusiveness and possible drug use made him practically unrecognizable. His hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long and the FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body. Hughes was in extremely poor physical condition at the time of his death. He suffered from malnutrition. In this will, Hughes left his entire estate to the Hughes Medical Institute, as he had no connection to family and was seriously ill. He had no desire to leave any money to family, aides or churches. Hughes' $2.5 billion estate was eventually split in 1983 among 22 cousins.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors. In 1997, General Motors sold Hughes Aircraft to Raytheon and in 2000, sold Hughes Space & Communications to Boeing. A combination of Boeing, GM, and Raytheon acquired the Hughes Research Laboratories, where it focused on advanced developments in microelectronics, information & systems sciences, materials, sensors, and photonics. Their workspace spans from basic research to product delivery. It has particularly emphasized capabilities in high performance integrated circuits, high power lasers, antennas, networking, and smart materials.
Albert Hofmann (1906 – 2008)
Albert Hofmann was a Swiss scientist known best for being the first person to synthesize, ingest, and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Hofmann was also the first person to isolate, synthesize, and name the principal psychedelic mushroom compounds psilocybin and psilocin. He authored more than 100 scientific articles and numerous books.
Hofmann was born in Baden, Switzerland, the first of 4 children to a factory toolmaker. At the age of 20, Hofmann began his chemistry degree at the University of Zürich, finishing 3 years later. His main interest was the chemistry of plants and animals, and he later conducted important research on the chemical structure of the common animal substance chitin, for which he received his doctorate, with distinction, in 1929.
Chitin is a derivative of glucose, and is found in many places throughout the natural world. It is a characteristic component of the cell walls of fungi, the exoskeletons of crabs, lobsters and shrimps and insects, and on the scales and other soft tissues of fish. The structure of chitin is comparable to the polysaccharide cellulose, forming crystalline nanofibrils or whiskers. In terms of function, it may be compared to the protein keratin the fibrous structural proteins that are the main component making hair, nails, claws and beaks of animals.
Regarding his decision to pursue a career as a chemist, Hofmann provided insight during a speech he delivered to the 1996 Worlds of Consciousness Conference in Heidelberg, Germany:
“One often asks oneself what roles planning and chance play in the realization of the most important events in our lives... This career decision was not easy for me. I had already taken a Latin matriculate exam, and therefore a career in the humanities stood out most prominently in the foreground. Moreover, an artistic career was tempting. In the end, however, it was a problem of theoretical knowledge which induced me to study chemistry, which was a great surprise to all who knew me. Mystical experiences in childhood, in which Nature was altered in magical ways, had provoked questions concerning the essence of the external, material world, and chemistry was the scientific field which might afford insights into this”.
Hofmann became an employee of the pharmaceutical-chemical department of Sandoz Laboratories, a subsidiary of Novartis located in Basel. While researching lysergic acid derivatives, Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938. The main intention of the synthesis was to obtain a respiratory and circulatory stimulant. In 1943, while synthesizing LSD, he accidentally touched his hand to his mouth, nose or possibly eye, accidentally ingesting a small amount and fortuitously discovered its powerful effects. He described what he felt as being:
“... affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a pleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed - as I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring - I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some 2 hours this condition faded away”.
3 days later, Hofmann intentionally ingested 250 micrograms of LSD. This day is now known as "Bicycle Day," because after starting to feel the effects of the drug, he rode home on a bike. It became the first intentional acid trip.
Hofmann, later, was to discover ethylacybin, a hallucinogenic tryptamine. He first synthesized it in 1958 in the Sandoz lab. Hofmann became director of the natural products department at Sandoz and continued studying hallucinogenic substances found in Mexican mushrooms and other plants used by the aboriginal people there. This led to the synthesis of psilocybin, the active agent of many "magic mushrooms." Hofmann also became interested in the seeds of the Mexican morning glory species Turbina corymbosa, the seeds of which are called ololiuhqui by the natives. He was surprised to find the active compound lysergic acid amide (LSA), to be closely related to LSD. In 1962, he and his wife, sister of an important Swiss inventor, traveled to southern Mexico to search for the leaves of the plant “Mary the Shepherdess” later known as Salvia divinorum. He was able to obtain samples of this plant, but never succeeded in identifying its active compound.
Hofmann, interviewed shortly before his hundredth birthday, called LSD "medicine for the soul" and was frustrated by the worldwide prohibition of it. It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis, he said, adding that the drug was misused by the Counterculture of the 1960s, and then criticized unfairly by the political establishment of the day. He conceded that it could be dangerous if misused, because a relatively high dose of 500 micrograms will have an extremely powerful psychoactive effect, especially if administered to a first-time user without adequate supervision. After retiring from Sandoz in 1971, Hofmann was allowed to take his papers and research home. On his 100th birthday, he recalled:
“It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation.... I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be”.
Hofmann died of a heart attack. He was 102 years old.
Mother Teresa (1910 – 1997)
Mother Teresa was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She was born in Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia and when she was 18, she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life. In 1950 Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation. After her death, she was recognized by the church as a saint and canonized in 2016.
A controversial figure during her life and after her death, she was admired by many for her charitable work but she was criticized for her stance on contraception: “In destroying the power of giving life, through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self. This turns the attention to self and so destroys the gift of love in him or her.” She was also criticized for her opposition to abortion, especially in a poor over populated country like India. She naively claimed that she would take care of the unwanted babies in the 18 orphanages that she opened.
Her father, who was involved in Albanian-community politics in Macedonia, died in 1919 when she was 8 years old. By age 12, she was convinced that she should commit herself to religious life. Teresa left home in 1928 at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, to learn English with the view of becoming a missionary in India. She never saw her mother or her sister again. She became a teacher at the Loreto convent school in Calcutta and served there for 20 years.
Although Teresa enjoyed teaching at the school, she was increasingly disturbed by the Muslim-Hindu violence and the poverty surrounding her in Calcutta. She experienced "the call within the call” – an order from God to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. She replaced her traditional Loreto habit with a simple, white cotton sari with a blue border, adopted Indian citizenship, spent several months to receive basic medical training and ventured into the slums. She was joined in her effort by a group of young women, and she laid the foundation for a new religious community helping the "poorest among the poor." Her efforts quickly caught the attention of Indian officials, including the prime minister.
In 1950, when she was 40 years old, she received Vatican permission for the diocesan congregation which would become the Missionaries of Charity to care for "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone". She converted an abandoned Hindu temple into a Home for the Dying that was free for the poor. Those brought to the home received medical attention and the opportunity to die with dignity receiving communion, last rites and a blessing. "A beautiful death is for people who lived like animals to die like angels - loved and wanted."
The Missionaries of Charity established leprosy-outreach clinics throughout Calcutta, providing medication, dressings and food and took in homeless children founding the Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart, as a haven for orphans and homeless youth. The congregation began to attract recruits and donations, and by the 1960s it had opened hospices, orphanages and leper houses throughout India. She then expanded the congregation abroad, opening a house in Venezuela in 1965 with 5 sisters. Houses followed in Rome, Tanzania and Austria in 1968, and during the 1970s the congregation opened houses and foundations in the United States and dozens of countries in Asia, Africa and Europe.
In 1979, Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize "for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace". By 1996, she operated 517 missions in over 100 countries. Her Missionaries of Charity grew from 12 to thousands, serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centers worldwide.
In 1983 Teresa had a heart attack while she was visiting Pope John Paul II. Following a second attack 6 years later, she received an artificial pacemaker. 2 years after that after a bout of pneumonia, she had additional heart problems. In 1996 she fell, breaking her collarbone, and 4 months later she had malaria and heart failure. The Archbishop of Calcutta ordered a priest to perform an exorcism on her when she was first hospitalized with cardiac problems because he thought she might be under attack by the devil. Teresa resigned as head of the Missionaries of Charity, and she died a half year later.
At the time of her death, the Missionaries of Charity had over 4,000 sisters and an associated brotherhood of 300 members operating 610 missions in 123 countries. These included hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, orphanages and schools. Her charity centers worldwide care for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless and victims of floods, epidemics and famine. The Missionaries of Charity were aided by co-workers numbering over one million.
Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars she received in donations, she failed to give pain medicine to her suffering patients. Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross. She claimed that pain means Jesus was nearby and that suffering is an opportunity to share in the passion of Christ. She compared pain to “kisses from Jesus”.
She was also criticized for hygiene problems like needle reuse. Her first duty was to the Church and social service was incidental. She was accused of favoring Christians and conducting "secret baptisms" of the dying. Many claimed that her objective was to convert the dying into Christians. She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, “I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church.” Teresa represented the greatest Public Relations victory of the Church in the past 100 years. A suitably charismatic appearance, a penchant for photo opportunities with Princess Diana, and a global fund raising brand. Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity has raised and deployed billions of dollars across the world. Most people recognize an image of her than any of the last few Popes.
Willem Kolff (1911 – 2009)
Willem Kolff was a Dutch pioneer of hemodialysis as well as in the field of artificial organs. Willem is a member of the Kolff family, an old Dutch noble family. He made his major discoveries in the field of dialysis for kidney failure during WWII. He was able to clean blood with a laboratory setting when the kidney failed to do that. He immigrated in 1950 to the United States, where he obtained US citizenship in 1955, and received a number of awards and widespread recognition for his work.
Born in the Netherlands, Kolff was the eldest of a family of 5 boys. Kolff studied medicine in his hometown at Leiden University, and continued as a resident in internal medicine at Groningen University. One of his first patients there was a 22-year-old man who was slowly dying of renal failure. This prompted Kolff to perform research on artificial renal function replacement. Also during his residency, Kolff organized the first blood bank in Europe in 1940.
During WWII he was active in the resistance against the German occupation. Simultaneously, Kolff developed the first functioning artificial kidney. He treated his first patient in 1943, and in 1945 he was able to save a patient's life with hemodialysis treatment. In 1946 he obtained a PhD degree on the subject. It marks the start of a treatment that has saved the lives of millions of acute or chronic renal failure patients ever since.
When the war ended, Kolff donated his artificial kidneys to other institutions to spread familiarity with the technology. Kolff sent machines to London, Amsterdam, Poland and New York City. In 1950, Kolff left the Netherlands to seek opportunities in the US. At the Cleveland Clinic, he was involved in the development of heart-lung machines to maintain heart and pulmonary function during cardiac surgery. He also improved on his dialysis machine, and developed the first production artificial kidney.
He became head of the University of Utah's Division of Artificial Organs and Institute for Biomedical Engineering in 1967, where he was involved in the development of the artificial heart, the first of which was implanted in 1982 in patient Barney Clark, who survived for 4 months, with the heart still functioning at the time of Clark's death.
Kolff is considered to be the Father of Artificial Organs, and is regarded as one of the most important physicians of the 20th century. He obtained more than 12 honorary doctorates at universities all over the world, and more than 120 international awards.
Kolff died at the age of 98.
John Wheeler (1911 – 2008)
John Wheeler was an American theoretical physicist. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after WWII. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles behind nuclear fission. He is best known for coining the term "black hole" to objects with gravitational collapse already predicted early in the 20th century. He also coined the terms "quantum foam", "neutron moderator", "wormhole" and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing the "one-electron universe".
Wheeler earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. In 1939 he teamed up with Bohr to write a series of papers using the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism of fission. The liquid drop model treated the nucleus of an atom as a drop of incompressible nuclear fluid of very high density. The nucleus is made of protons and neutrons, which are held together by the nuclear force. This is very similar to the structure of spherical liquid drop made of microscopic molecules. During WWII, he worked with the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory where he helped design nuclear reactors, and then helped DuPont build them. He returned to Princeton after the war ended, but returned to government service to help design and build the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s. For most of his career, Wheeler was a professor at Princeton University, which he joined in 1938, remaining until his retirement in 1976.
Wheeler was born in Florida. Both his parents were librarians. For 72 years, Wheeler was married to a teacher and social worker. After graduating from high school when he was 15, Wheeler entered Johns Hopkins University with a scholarship. He published his first scientific paper in 1930, as part of a summer job at the National Bureau of Standards. In a 1934 paper, he described a mechanism by which photons can be potentially transformed into matter in the form of electron-antielectron pairs.
Bohr and Wheeler set to work applying a liquid drop model to explain the mechanism of nuclear fission. As the experimental physicists studied fission, they uncovered puzzling results. Uranium fissioned with both very fast and very slow neutrons. It was later determined that the fission at low energies was due to the uranium-235 isotope, while at high energies it was mainly due to the far more abundant uranium-238 isotope.
Considering the notion that positrons aka anti-electrons were electrons that were traveling backwards in time, Wheeler came up in 1940 with his one-electron universe postulate: that there was in fact only one electron, bouncing back and forth in time. His graduate student, Richard Feynman, found this hard to believe, but the idea that were electrons traveling backwards in time intrigued him and Feynman incorporated the notion of the reversibility of time into his Feynman diagrams.
Soon after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into WWII, Wheeler joined the Manhattan Project. The 1949 detonation of the Soviet Union's first atom bomb based on Uranium fission prompted an all-out effort by the United States to develop the more powerful atom bomb based on Hydrogen fusion. Wheeler was asked to join the effort. Most physicists were, like Wheeler, trying to re-establish careers interrupted by the war and were reluctant to face more disruption. Others had moral objections. Wheeler agreed to go to Los Alamos after a conversation with Bohr. In 1950 there was no practical design for a hydrogen bomb. In 1953 he was involved in a security breach when he lost a highly classified paper on lithium-6 and the hydrogen bomb design during an overnight train trip. This resulted in Wheeler being given an official reprimand.
In a 1955 paper he theoretically investigated the geon, an electromagnetic or gravitational wave packet held together by the attraction of its own field. He coined the name as a contraction of "gravitational electromagnetic entity." He found that the smallest geon was a toroid the size of the Sun, but millions of times heavier. While working on mathematical extensions to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity in 1957, Wheeler introduced the concept and word “wormhole” to describe hypothetical "tunnels" in space-time. Bohr asked if they are stable and further research by Wheeler determined that they are not.
During the 1950s Wheeler formulated geometrodynamics, a physical reduction of every physical phenomenon, such as gravitation and electromagnetism, to the geometrical properties of a curved space-time. Wheeler envisaged as the fabric of the universe, a chaotic sub-atomic realm of quantum fluctuations, which he called "quantum foam". For a few decades, general relativity had not been considered a very respectable field of physics, being detached from experiment. Wheeler was a key figure in the revival of the subject. The work of Wheeler and his students made huge contributions to the Golden Age of General Relativity. His work in general relativity included the theory of gravitational collapse. He used the term “black hole” in 1967 during a talk he gave. He was also a pioneer in the field of quantum gravity.
Wheeler's delayed choice experiment is actually several thought experiments in quantum physics that he proposed, with the most prominent among them appearing in 1978 and 1984. These experiments were attempts to decide whether light somehow "senses" the experimental apparatus in the double-slit experiment it will travel through and adjusts its behavior to fit by assuming the appropriate determinate state for it, or whether light remains in an indeterminate state, neither wave nor particle, and responds to the "questions" asked of it by responding in either a wave-consistent manner or a particle-consistent manner depending on the experimental arrangements that ask these "questions".
The thing that causes people to argue about when and how the photon learns that the experimental apparatus is in a certain configuration and then changes from wave to particle to fit the demands of the experiment's configuration is the assumption that a photon had some physical form before the astronomers observed it. Either it was a wave or a particle; either it went both ways around the galaxy or only one way. Actually, quantum phenomena are neither waves nor particles but are intrinsically undefined until the moment they are measured. In a sense, the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley was right when he asserted 2 centuries ago "to be is to be perceived." Wheeler speculated that reality is created by observers in the universe. "How does something arise from nothing?" he asked about the existence of space and time.
“We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?”
Wheeler retired from Princeton University in 1976 at the age of 65. 31 years later at the age of 96, he died of pneumonia.
Many quantum theory scientists regard him as a grandfather of their field. His role was to inspire by asking deep questions from a radical conservative viewpoint and, through his questions, to stimulate others’ research and discovery.
Ron Hubbard (1911 – 1986)
Ron Hubbard was an American author and the founder of the Church of Scientology. After establishing a career as a writer. He became best known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. In 1950, he developed a system called Dianetics which he called "the modern science of mental health". In 1952, he developed his ideas into a wide-ranging set of doctrines and practices as part of a new religious movement that he called Scientology and oversaw the growth of the Church of Scientology into a worldwide organization. His writings became the guiding texts for the Church of Scientology. The Church's dissemination of these materials led to Hubbard being listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most translated and published author in the world.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he spent much of his time at sea on his personal fleet of ships with an elite inner group of Scientologists. His expedition came to an end when Britain, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Venezuela all closed their ports to his fleet. At one point, a court in Australia revoked the Church's status as a religion, though it was later reinstated. In 1975, Hubbard returned to the United States and went into seclusion in the California desert. In 1978, a trial court in France convicted Hubbard of fraud in absentia.
In 1983 Hubbard was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an international information infiltration and theft project called "Operation Snow White", a criminal conspiracy by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s to purge unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder. This project included a series of infiltrations into and thefts from 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology. It was carried out by Church members in more than 30 countries. It was one of the largest infiltration of the United States government in history, with up to 5,000 covert agents. This operation also exposed a covert plan intended to have an American investigative journalist imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital. 11 highly placed Church executives pleaded guilty and were convicted in federal court of obstructing justice, burglary of government offices, and theft of documents and government property.
Hubbard was born the only child of a teacher and a United States Navy officer. As a child prodigy, he rode a horse before he could walk and was able to read and write by the age of 4. During the 1920s the Hubbards repeatedly relocated around the United States and overseas, traveling to Japan, China, the Philippines.
During the 1930s, he became a well-known and prolific writer for pulp fiction magazines -inexpensive on poor quality paper with ragged, untrimmed edges containing low-quality literature. In contrast, magazines printed on higher quality paper were called "glossies." Although he was best known for his fantasy and science fiction stories, he wrote in a wide variety of genres, including adventure fiction, aviation, travel, mysteries, westerns and even romance. In 1935 Hubbard was called to Hollywood to work on film scripts.
Hubbard's Excalibur was a key step in developing the principles of Scientology and Dianetics. The manuscript outlined "the basic principles of human existence." Excalibur's inspiration came during a dental extraction performed under nitrous oxide, a chemical known for its hallucinogenic effects. Hubbard believed that Excalibur would revolutionize everything and that it was somewhat more important, and would have a greater impact upon people than the Bible. It proposed that all human behavior could be explained in terms of survival and that to understand survival was to understand life. The notion that everything that exists is trying to survive became the basis of Dianetics and Scientology. The manuscript later became part of Scientology mythology.
After Hubbard's wedding to Sara, the couple settled in California. He remained short of money and Hubbard was dependent on his own father and Margaret's parents for money and his writings, which he was paid at a penny per word. In 1948 Hubbard and Sara moved to Georgia where he volunteered his time in hospitals and mental wards, saving the lives of patients with his counseling techniques. He began to make the first public mentions of what was to become Dianetics. His first thoughts on the subject contained basic conclusions about human aberrations and handling them with auditing.
Hubbard wrote to several professional organizations to offer his research on the cause and cure of nervous tension. None were interested so he turned to his editor who invited him and Sara to move not far from his own home and help him develop his new therapy of Dianetics.
The basic principle of Dianetics was that the brain recorded every experience and event in a person's life, even when unconscious. Bad or painful experiences were stored as what he called "engrams". These could be triggered later in life, causing emotional and physical problems. By carrying out a process that he called "auditing", a person could be regressed through his engrams to re-experiencing past experiences. This enabled engrams to be "cleared". The subject, who would now be in a state of "Clear", would have a perfectly functioning mind with an improved IQ and photographic memory. The "Clear" would be cured of physical ailments ranging from poor eyesight to the common cold, which Hubbard asserted were purely psychosomatic.
Hubbard called Dianetics a milestone for man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to the invention of the wheel and the arch. Despite that Dianetics was poorly received by the press and the scientific and medical professions. It was an immediate commercial success and sparked a nationwide cult of incredible proportions. Hubbard's book was selling at the rate of 4,000 a week and was being translated into French, German and Japanese.
Although Dianetics “auditing” was not cheap, a great many people were nonetheless willing to pay. Hubbard played a very active role in the Dianetics boom, writing, lecturing and training auditors. Many of those who knew him spoke of being impressed by his personal charisma.
Hubbard's supporters soon began to have doubts about Dianetics. The collapse of his marriage to Sara created yet more problems. He had begun an affair with his 20-year-old public relations assistant in late 1950, while Sara started a relationship with a Dianetics auditor. When Dianetics appeared to be on the edge of total collapse, he established a "Hubbard College" on the other side of town where he continued to promote Dianetics.
Only 6 weeks after setting up the Hubbard College and marrying an 18 year old staff member, Hubbard closed it down and moved with his new bride to Phoenix, Arizona. He established a Hubbard Association of Scientologists International to promote his new "Science of Certainty"—Scientology which differed from Dianetics. While Dianetics was all about releasing the mind from the distorting influence of engrams, Scientology was the study and handling of the spirit in relation to itself, universes and other life.
Hubbard expanded upon the basics of Dianetics to construct a spiritually oriented approach based on the concept that the true self of a person was a “thetan” - an immortal, omniscient and potentially omnipotent entity. He taught that the thetans, having created the material universe, had forgotten their god-like powers and became trapped in physical bodies. Scientology aimed to "rehabilitate" each person's thetan to restore its original capacities and become once again an "Operating Thetan". Hubbard insisted humanity was imperiled by the forces of "aberration", which were the result of engrams carried by the immortal thetans for billions of years.
Hubbard introduced a device called an E-meter that he presented as having an almost mystical power to reveal an individual's innermost thoughts. He promulgated Scientology through a series of lectures, bulletins and books. Scientology was organized in a very different way from the decentralized Dianetics movement. The Hubbard Association of Scientologists (HAS) was the only official Scientology organization. Training procedures and doctrines were standardized and promoted through HAS publications, and administrators and auditors were not permitted to deviate from Hubbard's approach. Branches or "orgs" were organized as franchises, rather like a fast food restaurant chain. Each franchise holder was required to pay 10% of income to Hubbard's central organization. They were expected to find new recruits, known as "raw meat", but were restricted to providing only basic services. Costlier higher-level auditing was only provided by Hubbard's central organization.
Although this model would eventually be extremely successful, Scientology was a very small-scale movement at first. Hubbard started off with only a few dozen followers, generally dedicated Dianeticists. Hubbard proposed that Scientology should be transformed into a religion. As membership declined and finances grew tighter, Hubbard had reversed the hostility to religion he voiced in Dianetics. He argued the legal and financial benefits of religious status. The idea may not have been new. He told a science fiction convention in 1948 that:
“writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion”.
He outlined plans for setting up a chain of "Spiritual Guidance Centers" charging customers for auditing. In 1953, he incorporated the “Church of Scientology”, “Church of American Science” and “Church of Spiritual Engineering”. Scientology franchises became Churches of Scientology and some auditors began dressing as clergymen, complete with clerical collars. If they were arrested in the course of their activities, Hubbard advised, they should sue for massive damages for molesting a Man of God going about his business. A few years later he told Scientologists: "If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace ... Don't ever defend, always attack." Any individual breaking away from Scientology and setting up his own group was to be harassed and sued in court to shut down.
Hubbard marketed Scientology through medical claims, such as attracting polio sufferers by presenting the Church of Scientology as a scientific research foundation investigating polio cases. Scientology became a highly profitable enterprise for Hubbard. He implemented a scheme under which he was paid a percentage of the Church of Scientology's gross income. By the start of the 1960s, Hubbard was the leader of a worldwide movement with thousands of followers. A decade later, however, he moved aboard his own private fleet of ships as the Church of Scientology faced worldwide controversy.
Hubbard believed that Scientology was being infiltrated by saboteurs and spies and introduced "security checking" to identify those he termed "potential trouble sources" and "suppressive persons". Members of the Church of Scientology were interrogated with the aid of E-meters and were asked questions such as "Have you ever practiced homosexuality?" and "Have you ever had unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?"
He also sought to exert political influence, advising Scientologists to vote against Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election and establishing a Department of Government Affairs to bring government and hostile philosophies or societies into a state of complete compliance with the goals of Scientology. The U.S. Government was already well aware of Hubbard's activities. The FBI had a lengthy file on him, including a 1951 interview with an agent who considered him a "mental case". Police forces in a number of jurisdictions began exchanging information about Scientology through the auspices of Interpol, which eventually led to prosecutions. In 1958, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service withdrew the Washington, D.C. Church of Scientology's tax exemption after it found that he and his family were profiting unreasonably from Scientology's ostensibly non-profit income. The Food and Drug Administration took action against Scientology's medical claims. Following the FDA's actions, Scientology attracted increasingly unfavorable publicity across the English-speaking world. It faced particularly hostile scrutiny in Australia, where it was accused of brainwashing, blackmail, extortion and damaging the mental health of its members.
In 1963, the Australian government established a Board of Inquiry into Scientology. Its report condemned every aspect of Scientology and Hubbard himself. He was described as being of doubtful sanity, having a persecution complex and displaying strong indications of paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur. His writings were characterized as nonsensical, abounding in self-glorification and grandiosity, replete with histrionics and hysterical, incontinent outbursts. The former conception of the movement as a relatively harmless, if cranky, health and self-improvement cult, was transformed into one which portrayed it as evil, dangerous, a form of hypnosis and brainwashing. The report led to Scientology being banned in parts of Australia and to more negative publicity around the world. Newspapers and politicians in the UK pressed the British government for action against Scientology.
In 1966, hoping to form a remote "safe haven" for Scientology, Hubbard traveled to Zimbabwe and looked into setting up a base there but was forced by the government to leave the country. In 1968, the British announced that foreign Scientologists would no longer be permitted to enter the UK and Hubbard himself was excluded from the country as an undesirable alien. Further inquiries were launched in Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.
Hubbard took 3 major new initiatives in the face of these challenges. "Ethics Technology" was introduced to tighten internal discipline within Scientology. It required Scientologists to "disconnect" from any organization or individual, including family members deemed to be disruptive or suppressive. Disconnecting meant not communicating and this broke up many families. Scientologists were also required to write "Knowledge Reports" on each other, reporting transgressions or misapplications of Scientology methods. Hubbard promulgated a long list of punishable "Misdemeanors", "Crimes", and "High Crimes". The "Fair Game" policy was introduced, which was applicable to anyone deemed an "enemy" of Scientology. This was a policy established in the 1950s towards people and groups the church perceived as its enemies. According to the policy, enemies of the church can be punished by trickery, law suits, harassment, injuries, until they are destroyed using any and all means possible.
In 1966, Hubbard created the Guardian's Office (GO), a new agency within the Church of Scientology that was headed by his wife. It dealt with Scientology's external affairs, including public relations, legal actions and the gathering of intelligence on perceived threats. As Scientology faced increasingly negative media attention, the GO retaliated with hundreds of writs for libel and slander.
In 1967, Hubbard acquired his own fleet of ships and began an 8 year voyage, sailing from port to port in the Mediterranean Sea and eastern North Atlantic. The ships were crewed by “Sea Org”, a group of Scientologist volunteers, with the support of a couple of professional seamen. Hubbard claimed that he had to keep moving because there were so many people after him. If they caught up with him they would cause him so much trouble that he would be unable to continue his work, Scientology would not get into the world and there would be social and economic chaos, if not a nuclear holocaust.
Along the way, Hubbard sought to establish a safe haven in a friendly little country where Scientology would be allowed to prosper. The Sea Org was represented as "Professor Hubbard's Philosophy School" in a telegram to the Greek government but Hubbard and his ships were ordered to leave. In 1972, Hubbard tried again in Morocco, establishing contacts with the country's secret police and training senior policemen and intelligence agents in techniques for detecting subversives. The program ended in failure when it became caught up in internal Moroccan politics, and Hubbard left the country hastily.
2 years before, he designated several existing Scientology courses as confidential, repackaging them as the first of the esoteric "OT levels". In 1967 he announced the release of OT3, the "Wall of Fire", revealing the secrets of an immense disaster that had occurred on this planet, and on the other 75 planets which form this Confederacy, 75 million years ago.
Scientologists were required to undertake the first two OT levels before learning how Xenu, the leader of the Galactic Confederacy, had shipped billions of people to Earth and blown them up with hydrogen bombs, following which their traumatized spirits were stuck together at "implant stations", brainwashed with false memories and eventually became contained within human beings. A year later, in 1968, he unveiled OT levels 4 to 6 and began delivering OT training courses to Scientologists aboard one of his ships.
Scientologists around the world were presented with a glamorous picture of life in the Sea Org and many applied to join Hubbard aboard the fleet. What they found was rather different from the image. Most of those joining had no nautical experience at all. Mechanical difficulties and blunders by the crews led to a series of embarrassing incidents and near-disasters. Conditions on board were appalling. The crew was worked to the point of exhaustion, given meager rations and forbidden to wash or change their clothes for several weeks. Hubbard maintained a harsh disciplinary regime aboard the fleet, punishing mistakes by confining people under the deck without toilet facilities and with food provided in buckets.
Hubbard was attended aboard ship by the children of Sea Org members. They were mainly young girls dressed in hot pants and halter tops, who were responsible for running errands for Hubbard such as lighting his cigarettes, dressing him or relaying his verbal commands to other members of the crew. In addition to his wife Mary Sue, he was accompanied by all 4 of his children by her.
During the 1970s, Hubbard faced an increasing number of legal threats. French prosecutors charged him and the French Church of Scientology with fraud and customs violations in 1972. He was advised that he was at risk of being extradited to France. Hubbard left the Sea Org fleet temporarily living incognito in New York, until he returned to his flagship a year later when the threat of extradition had abated. Hubbard's health deteriorated significantly during this period. A chain-smoker, he also suffered from excessive weight.
Hubbard was heavily involved in directing the activities of the Guardian's Office (GO), the legal bureau/intelligence agency that he had established in 1966. He believed that Scientology was being attacked by an international Nazi conspiracy, through a network of drug companies, banks and psychiatrists in a bid to take over the world.
In 1973, he instigated the "Snow White Program" and directed the GO to remove negative reports about Scientology from government files and track down their sources. The GO was ordered to:
"get all false and secret files on Scientology that cannot be obtained legally, by all possible lines of approach, i.e. job penetration, janitor penetration, suitable guises utilizing covers."
His involvement in the GO's operations was concealed through the use of code names. The GO carried out covert campaigns on his behalf such as Operation Bulldozer Leak, intended to effectively spread the rumor that would lead Government, media, and individuals to conclude that LRH has no control of the Church and no legal liability for Church activity. He was kept informed of GO operations, such as the theft of medical records from a hospital, harassment of psychiatrists and infiltrations of organizations that had been critical of Scientology at various times, such as the Better Business Bureau, the American Medical Association, and American Psychiatric Association.
Members of the GO infiltrated and burglarized numerous government organizations, including the U.S. Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). After 2 GO agents were caught in the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the IRS, the FBI carried out simultaneous raids on GO offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. in 1977. They retrieved wiretap equipment, burglary tools and some 90,000 pages of incriminating documents. Hubbard was not prosecuted, though he was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator by government prosecutors. His wife Mary Sue was indicted and subsequently convicted of conspiracy and was sent to a federal prison along with 10 other Scientologists.
In 1978 Hubbard's troubles increased when a French court convicted him in absentia for obtaining money under false pretenses. He was sentenced to 4 years in prison. He went into hiding where his only contact with the outside world was via 10 trusted Messengers. He cut contact with everyone else, even his wife, whom he saw for the last time. Hubbard faced a possible indictment for his role in Operation Freakout, the GO's campaign against a journalist who wrote a critical article about him and his church.
For the first few years of the 1980s, Hubbard lived on the move and used his time in hiding to write his first new works of science fiction for nearly 30 years. The works received mixed responses -treated derisively by most critics but greatly admired by followers. In Hubbard's absence, members of the Sea Org staged a takeover of the Church of Scientology and purged many veteran Scientologists. A young member David Miscavige, became Scientology's de facto leader. Mary Sue Hubbard was forced to resign her position and her daughter Suzette became Miscavige's personal maid.
In 1985, the IRS notified the Church that it was considering indicting Hubbard for tax fraud. A year later, Hubbard suffered a stroke and died a week later. His body was cremated and the ashes were scattered at sea.
Scientology leaders announced that his body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another planet, having "learned how to do it without a body".
The copyrights of his works and much of his estate and wealth were willed to the Church of Scientology. Hubbard told his followers to preserve his teachings until an eventual reincarnation when he would “return not as a religious leader but as a political one". The Church of Spiritual Technology (CST), a sister organization of the Church of Scientology, has engraved Hubbard's entire corpus of Scientology and Dianetics texts on steel tablets stored in titanium containers. They are buried in a vault under a mountain on top of which the CST's logo has been bulldozed on such a gigantic scale that it is visible from space.
Alan Turing (1912 – 1954)
Alan Turing was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
During WWII, Turing worked for the British Government breaking the code used by the German military. The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became Nazi Germany's principal crypto-system. Cracking intercepted coded messages enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements and in so doing helped win the war. It has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than 2 years and saved over 14 million lives.
In 1946, Turing presented a paper which was the first detailed design of a stored-program computer. The Colossus computer which he helped design was the world's first programmable digital electronic computer. It was fast enough that it allowed the statistical decryption techniques to be applied usefully to decrypt encrypted messages.
Turing was born in London. Very early in life, he showed signs of the genius that he was later to display prominently. In 1936, at the age of 24, he published a paper concerning the limits of proof and computation. As late as 1930, Hilbert the famous mathematician believed that there would be no such thing as an unsolvable problem. Instead of using arithmetic-based formal language, Turing used a mathematical definition of a computer and program that became known as a Turing machine. He proved that his "universal computing machine" would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation as long as it could be representable as an algorithm - an unambiguous specification expressed by a finite number of words of how to solve a problem. He went on to prove that it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a Turing machine will ever finish running or continue to run forever. The halting problem, an example of a decision problem with only 2 possible outputs, a yes or a no, remained unsolvable. Turing proved that there was no solution to the decision problem, and thus it was not possible to prove that all problems are solvable.
Turing conceived of the idea of a sequential statistical technique to assist in breaking the German codes by ruling out certain sequences in the encryption. He used statistical techniques to optimize the trial of different possibilities in the code breaking process. He used mathematical analysis to try and determine the more likely settings so that they can be tried as quickly as possible. Turing's most important contribution was the idea that from a contradiction, you can deduce everything.
In 1948, Turing addressed the problem of artificial intelligence, and proposed an experiment that became known as the Turing test, an attempt to define a standard for a machine to be called "intelligent". The idea was that a computer could be said to "think" if a human interrogator could not tell it apart, through conversation, from a human being. In the paper, Turing suggested that rather than building a program to simulate the adult mind, it would be better rather to produce a simpler one to simulate a child's mind and then to subject it to a course of education. A reversed form of the Turing test is widely used on the Internet; the CAPTCHA test is intended to determine whether the user is a human or a computer. A human brain has a vast greater capability of pattern recognition than a computer.
In 1951, when Turing was 39 years old, he turned to mathematical biology. He was interested in morphogenesis, the development of patterns and shapes in biological organisms. Among other things, he wanted to understand the existence of Fibonacci numbers in plant structures. He used systems of partial differential equations to model catalytic chemical reactions. A differential equations relates a changing function defined by inputs and outputs with the function's rate of change. Solving non-linear differential equations for complex systems requires a powerful computer which was not yet invented, so he had to use linear approximations in order to solve the equations by hand. Fortunately these calculations gave the right qualitative results.
Although published before the structure and role of DNA was understood, Turing's work on morphogenesis is considered a seminal piece of work in mathematical biology. One of the early applications of Turing's paper was explaining spots and stripes on the fur of cats, large and small and can partially explain the growth of feathers, hair follicles, the branching pattern of lungs, and even the left-right asymmetry that puts the heart on the left side of the chest.
In 1952, Turing, then 39, started a relationship with a 19-year-old unemployed man. Homosexual acts were criminal offenses in the UK at that time, and both men were charged. He was convicted and given a choice between imprisonment and probation, which would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. Turing called it chemical castration.
The treatment rendered Turing impotent and 2 years later he committed suicide with cyanide poisoning at the age of 42.
Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006)
Milton Friedman was an American economist. In the 1960s, he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies. Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as "monetarism" arguing for a steady, small expansion of the money supply. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis of 2007–08 by creating money by printing it that they called “quantitative easing”.
Monetarism emphasizes the role of governments in controlling the amount of money in circulation. Monetarist theory asserts that variations in the money supply have major influences on national output in the short run and on price levels over longer periods. Monetarists assert that the objectives of monetary policy are best met by targeting the growth rate of the money supply by a central bank policy aimed at keeping the supply and demand for money at equilibrium, as measured by growth in productivity and demand. Most monetarists oppose the gold standard. Friedman viewed a pure gold standard as impractical. Whereas one of the benefits of the gold standard is that the intrinsic limitations to the growth of the money supply by the use of gold would prevent inflation, if the growth of population or increase in trade outpaces the money supply, there would be no way to counteract deflation and reduced liquidity except for the mining of more gold.
Friedman was an adviser to Republican U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, and school vouchers.
Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York to parents who were Jewish immigrants who worked as merchants.
Friedman believed price controls interfered with an essential signaling mechanism to help resources be used where they were most valued. Indeed, Friedman later concluded that all government intervention was "the wrong cure for the wrong disease." He believed that the best of a country's abilities come from its free markets while its failures come from government intervention.
Friedman was regarded the 'guru' of the Reagan administration. He was best known for his “quantity theory of money” and the way in which money supply fluctuations contribute to economic fluctuations and that the long term effect of a change of the money supply was primarily on the price levels.
Friedman maintained that there is a close and stable association between inflation and the money supply, mainly that inflation could be avoided with proper regulation of the money supply. He famously used the analogy of "dropping money out of a helicopter," in order to avoid dealing with money injection mechanisms and other factors that would over-complicate his models.
He held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be restricted severely. Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, which he termed the Great Contraction, arguing that it had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve. He was very critical about Federal Reserve policies and believed that the Federal Reserve Board should be abolished due to its poor performance. He believed that if the money supply was to be centrally controlled, as by the Federal Reserve System, that the preferable way to do it would be with a mechanical system that would keep the quantity of money increasing at a steady rate. He claimed that the Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money. Friedman claimed that the depression was not caused by the failure of the free-enterprise system, but rather by the failure of government. Friedman argued for the cessation of government intervention in currency markets, thereby promoting the practice of freely floating exchange rates. An advocate for floating exchange rates, he argued that a flexible exchange rate would make external adjustment possible and allow countries to avoid Balance of Payments crises. He saw fixed exchange rates as an undesirable form of government intervention.
He argued that economics as science should be free of value judgments for it to be objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its descriptive realism but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of prediction. Friedman predicted that rational consumers spend their permanent income, saving only their gains.
Friedman proposed supplementing publicly operated schools with privately run but publicly funded schools through a system of school vouchers. Reforms similar to those proposed in the article were implemented in Chile and Sweden.
Friedman claimed that the military draft to serve was "inconsistent with a free society" arguing that conscription is inequitable and arbitrary, preventing young men from shaping their lives as they see fit. During the Nixon administration he headed the committee to research a conversion to a paid/volunteer armed force. He would later state that his role in eliminating the conscription in the United States was his proudest accomplishment. Friedman did, however, believe a nation could compel military training as a reserve in case of war time.
Friedman was supportive of the state provision of some public goods that private businesses are not considered as being able to provide. However, he argued that many of the services performed by government could be performed better by the private sector. Above all, if some public goods are provided by the state, he believed that they should not be a legal monopoly where private competition is prohibited.
Friedman claimed that there is no way to justify our present public monopoly of the post office.
“It may be argued that the carrying of mail is a technical monopoly and that a government monopoly is the least of evils. Along these lines, one could perhaps justify a government post office, but not the present law, which makes it illegal for anybody else to carry the mail. If the delivery of mail is a technical monopoly, no one else will be able to succeed in competition with the government. If it is not, there is no reason why the government should be engaged in it. The only way to find out is to leave other people free to enter”.
Friedman criticized Social Security arguing that it had created welfare dependency. However, he argued that while capitalism had greatly reduced the extent of poverty in absolute terms,
“poverty is in part a relative matter and even in wealthy western countries, there are clearly many people living under conditions that the rest of us label as poverty."
He supported libertarian policies such as legalization of drugs and prostitution. Friedman was also a supporter of gay rights.
During 1975, two years after the military coup that brought military dictator President Augusto Pinochet to power and ended the government of Salvador Allende, the economy of Chile experienced a severe crisis. Friedman stated that the only one way to end inflation is by drastically reducing the rate of increase of the quantity of money. He claimed that cutting government spending is by far the most desirable way to reduce the fiscal deficit, because it strengthens the private sector thereby laying the foundations for healthy economic growth. He suggested that cutting spending to reduce the fiscal deficit would result in less transitional unemployment than raising taxes. Friedman did not criticize Pinochet's dictatorship at the time, nor the assassinations, illegal imprisonments, torture, or other atrocities that were well known by then. In 1976 Friedman defended his unofficial adviser position with:
"I do not consider it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean government, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean government to help end a medical plague."
Friedman defended his activity in Chile on the grounds that, in his opinion, the adoption of free market policies not only improved the economic situation of Chile but also contributed to the eventual transition to a democratic government during 1990. He said the following:
"Chile is not a politically free system, and I do not condone the system. But the people there are freer than the people in Communist societies because government plays a smaller role. The conditions of the people in the past few years has been getting better and not worse. They would be still better to get rid of the junta and to be able to have a free democratic system."
In 1984, Friedman stated that he has never refrained from criticizing the political system in Chile. In 1991 he said:
"I have nothing good to say about the political regime that Pinochet imposed. It was a terrible political regime. The real miracle of Chile is not how well it has done economically; the real miracle of Chile is that a military junta was willing to go against its principles and support a free market regime designed by principled believers in a free market. In Chile, the drive for political freedom, that was generated by economic freedom and the resulting economic success, ultimately resulted in a referendum that introduced political democracy. Now, at long last, Chile has all 3 things: political freedom, human freedom and economic freedom. Chile will continue to be an interesting experiment to watch to see whether it can keep all 3 or whether, now that it has political freedom, that political freedom will tend to be used to destroy or reduce economic freedom."
The lectures he gave in Chile were the same lectures he later gave in China and other socialist states.
Friedman was criticized for his claims that government intervention could serve no useful purpose in regulating the economy. He claimed that only free markets can self-regulate the economy and that they always work. Many criticized Friedman's economic liberalism, identifying it with the principles that guided the economic restructuring that followed the military coups in countries such as Chile and Argentina. They claimed that Friedman's neoliberal policies contributed to income disparities and inequality, and was as an ideological cover for capital accumulation by multinational corporations. Because of his involvement with the Pinochet government, there were international protests when Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976. Friedman credited his contribution to Chile's economic restructuring as causing high levels of economic growth and the establishment of democracy that has subsequently occurred in Chile.
Friedman died of heart failure at the age of 94 years.
Alan Watts (1915 – 1973)
Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in England, he moved to the United States in 1938 when he was 23. and he began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he received a master's degree in theology. He became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer at a radio station. He wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the youth culture to "The Way of Zen", one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In 1961, he proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He also explored human consciousness.
Watts disliked much in the conventional idea of "progress". He hoped for change, but he preferred amiable, semi-isolated rural social enclaves, and also believed in tolerance for social misfits and eccentric artists. Watts denounced as harmful the sub-urbanization of the countryside and the way of life that went with it.
In regards to his ethical outlook, Watts advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens. He wrote out of an appreciation of a racially and culturally diverse social landscape. He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature.
Watts was born to middle class parents. His father was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tyre Company; his mother was a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings. He was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative.
Watts spent several holidays in France in his teen years, accompanied by a wealthy Epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and exotic little-known aspects of European culture.
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who lived in 300BC followed in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" was the greatest good, but that the way to attain such pleasure was to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one's desires. This he claimed would lead one to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear as well as an absence of bodily pain. The combination of these 2 states constitutes happiness in its highest form.
It was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about, he chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge.
When he left secondary school, Watts worked in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" who was influenced by Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, and the varied psycho-analytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler. Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom.
In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he met Suzuki, the esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Watts's fascination with the Zen tradition, beginning during the 1930s, developed because it embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical and the traditions "work", "life", and "art" were not demoted due to a spiritual focus.
In 1938 Watts and his wife left England to live in the United States. He became a United States citizen in 1943.
Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher did not suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a vocational outlet for his philosophical inclinations. He studied Christian scriptures, theology, and church history and attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology in response to his thesis.
Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing - no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism.
Watts was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1945 when he was 30 and resigned the ministry 5 years later partly as a result of an extramarital affair which resulted in his wife having their marriage annulled, but also because he could no longer reconcile his Buddhist beliefs with the formal doctrine of the church. In 1951, he moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies and taught from 1951-1957.
Watts also studied written Chinese and practiced Chinese brush calligraphy with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the academy. While Watts was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, "the new physics", cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.
After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid-1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running volunteer weekly radio program at a Radio station.
In the 1960s, Watts became increasingly interested in how identifiable patterns in nature tend to repeat themselves from the smallest of scales to the most immense. This became one of his passions in his research and thought. Watts considered himself not an academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer."
Watts had begun to experiment with psychedelics, initially with mescaline. He tried LSD several times in 1958, with various research teams. He also tried marijuana and concluded that it was a useful and interesting psychoactive drug that gave the impression of time slowing down. Watts' books of the '60s reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook. He later said about psychedelic drug use:
"If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen."
For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe proposed by 20th-century physicists. He later equated mystical experience with ecological awareness.
Watts alluded to a group of neighbors who had endeavored to combine architecture, gardening, and carpentry skills to make a beautiful and comfortable life for themselves. These neighbors accomplished this by relying on their own talents and using their own hands, as they lived in what has been called "shared bohemian poverty".
Regarding his intentions, Watts attempted to lessen the alienation that accompanies the experience of being human that he felt plagued the modern Westerner, and like his fellow British expatriate and friend, Aldous Huxley to lessen the ill will that was an unintentional by-product of alienation from the natural world. He felt such teaching could improve the world, at least to a degree.
Aldous Huxley was an English writer, novelist, and philosopher. The author of nearly 50 books, Huxley was best known for his novels among them "Brave New World", set in a dystopian future; for nonfiction works, such as "The Doors of Perception", in which he recalls his experiences taking psychedelic drugs; and for his wide-ranging essays. Huxley was a humanist and pacifist. He became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism.
Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom, architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all of great interest to him. Though known for his Zen teachings, he was also influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta, and spoke extensively about the nature of the divine reality which man misses.
Friends of Watts had been concerned about him for some time over what they considered his excessive alcohol consumption.
He died in his sleep at the age of 58.
Francis Crick (1916 – 2004)
Francis Crick was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuro-scientist, most noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.
Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played a crucial role in research related to revealing the genetic code. He is widely known for use of the term "central dogma" to summarize the idea that genetic information flow in cells is essentially one-way, from DNA to RNA to protein. His later research centered on theoretical neuro-biology and attempts to advance the scientific study of human consciousness. He remained in this post until his death. He was editing a manuscript on his death bed, - a scientist until the bitter end.
Francis Crick was born and raised in a small village in England where his father and uncle ran the family’s boot and shoe factory. At an early age, Francis was attracted to science and what he could learn about it from books. As a child, he was taken to church by his parents. But by about age 12, he said he did not want to go to church anymore, as he preferred a scientific search for answers over religious belief. At the age of 21 he managed to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from University College London. Crick began his PhD but was interrupted by WWII.
In 1947, aged 31, Crick began studying biology and became part of an important migration of physical scientists into biology research. Crick had to adjust from the elegance and deep simplicity of physics to the elaborate chemical mechanisms that natural selection had evolved over billions of years. He described this transition as, almost as if one had to be born again. According to Crick, the experience of learning physics had taught him something important - the conviction that since physics was already a success, great advances should also be possible in other sciences such as biology. Crick felt that this attitude encouraged him to be more daring than typical biologists who tended to concern themselves with the daunting problems of biology and not the past successes of physics.
Crick was interested in 2 fundamental unsolved problems of biology: how molecules make the transition from the non-living to the living, and how the brain makes a conscious mind. He realized that his background made him more qualified for research on the first topic and the field of biophysics. It was at this time of Crick’s transition from physics to biology that he was influenced by both Linus Pauling and Erwin Schrödinger. It was clear in theory that covalent bonds in biological molecules could provide the structural stability needed to hold genetic information in cells. It only remained as an exercise of experimental biology to discover exactly which molecule was the genetic molecule.
In Crick’s view, combining Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, with Gregor Mendel’s genetics, and with knowledge of the molecular basis of genetics, revealed the secret of life. Crick had the very optimistic view that life would very soon be created in a test tube. It was clear that some macro-molecule such as a protein was likely to be the genetic molecule.
In the 1940s, evidence was found pointing to DNA, the other major component of chromosomes, as a candidate genetic molecule. However, other evidence was interpreted as suggesting that DNA was structurally uninteresting and possibly just a molecular scaffold for the apparently more interesting protein molecules. Crick was in the right place, in the right frame of mind, at the right time in 1949 to begin to work on the X-ray crystallography of proteins. X-ray crystallography theoretically offered the opportunity to reveal the molecular structure of large molecules like proteins and DNA, but there were serious technical problems then preventing X-ray crystallography from being applicable to such large molecules. Crick taught himself the mathematical theory of X-ray crystallography. During the period of Crick's study of X-ray diffraction, researchers in the Cambridge lab were attempting to determine the most stable helical conformation of amino acid chains in proteins - the Alpha helix.
Watson and Crick together developed a model for a helical structure of DNA, which they published in 1953. For this and subsequent work they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962. When James Watson came to Cambridge, Crick was a 35-year-old graduate student due to his work during WWII and Watson was only 23, but he already had a Ph.D. They shared an interest in the fundamental problem of learning how genetic information might be stored in molecular form. Watson and Crick talked endlessly about DNA and the idea that it might be possible to guess a good molecular model of its structure.
A key piece of experimentally-derived information came from X-ray diffraction images that had been obtained by Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and their research student, Raymond Gosling. In 1951, Wilkins came to Cambridge and shared his data with Watson and Crick. Wilkins had reached the conclusion that X-ray diffraction data for DNA indicated that the molecule had a helical structure - but Franklin vehemently disputed this conclusion. Stimulated by their discussions with Wilkins and what Watson learned by attending a talk given by Franklin about her work on DNA, Crick and Watson produced and showed off an erroneous first model of DNA. Their hurry to produce a model of DNA structure was driven in part by the knowledge that they were competing against Linus Pauling. Given Pauling's recent success in discovering the Alpha helix, they feared that Pauling might also be the first to determine the structure of DNA.
Of great importance to the model building effort of Watson and Crick was Rosalind Franklin's understanding of basic chemistry, which indicated that the hydrophilic phosphate-containing backbones of the nucleotide chains of DNA should be positioned so as to interact with water molecules on the outside of the molecule while the hydrophobic bases should be packed into the core. Franklin shared this chemical knowledge with Watson and Crick when she pointed out to them that their first model from 1951, with the phosphates inside was obviously wrong. The key problem for Watson and Crick, which could not be resolved, was to guess how the nucleotide bases pack into the core of the DNA double helix. Crick described what he saw as the failure of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin to cooperate and work towards finding a molecular model of DNA as a major reason why he and Watson eventually made a second attempt to do so. In order to construct their model of DNA, Watson and Crick made use of information from unpublished X-ray diffraction images of Franklin's shown at meetings and freely shared by Wilkins.
Another key to finding the correct structure of DNA was that it was experimentally determined that the nucleotide subunits of DNA, guanine (G) and cytosine (C) were in equal amounts just like the amounts of adenine (A) and thymine (T). The significance of these ratios for the structure of DNA were not recognized until Watson, persisting in building structural models, realized that A:T and C:G pairs were structurally similar. In particular, the length of each base pair was the same. The base pairs were held together by hydrogen bonds, the same non-covalent interaction that stabilizes the protein α-helix. The correct structures were essential for the positioning of the hydrogen bonds. These insights led Watson to deduce the true biological relationships of the A:T and C:G pairs. After the discovery of the hydrogen bonded A:T and C:G pairs, Watson and Crick soon had their anti-parallel, double helical model of DNA, with the hydrogen bonds at the core of the helix providing a way to "unzip" the 2 complementary strands for easy replication - the last key requirement for a likely model of the genetic molecule. As important as Crick's contributions to the discovery of the double helical DNA model were, he stated that without the chance to collaborate with Watson, he would not have found the structure by himself. Identification of the correct base-pairing rules (A-T, G-C) was achieved by Watson "playing" with cardboard cut-out models of the nucleotide bases, much in the manner that Linus Pauling had discovered the protein alpha helix a few years earlier. The Watson and Crick discovery of the DNA double helix structure was made possible by their willingness to combine theory, modeling and experimental results to achieve their goal.
Crick referred to himself as a humanist, which he defined as the belief that human problems can and must be faced in terms of human moral and intellectual resources without invoking supernatural authority. He publicly called for humanism to replace religion as a guiding force for humanity. Crick was especially critical of Christianity claiming that he did not respect Christian beliefs. He thought them ridiculous and that if we could get rid of them we could more easily get down to the serious problem of trying to find out what the world is all about. Crick joked that Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children. In his book “Of Molecules and Men”, Crick expressed his views on the relationship between science and religion. After suggesting that it would become possible for a computer to be programmed so as to have a soul, he wondered: at what point during biological evolution did the first organism have a soul? At what moment does a baby get a soul? For Crick, the mind is a product of physical brain activity and the brain had evolved by natural means over millions of years.
In 1969 Crick attempted to make some predictions about what the next 30 years would hold for molecular biology. He held little hope that extraterrestrial life would be found by the year 2000. He also discussed what he described as a possible new direction for research, what he called "biochemical theology". Crick suggested that it might be possible to find chemical changes in the brain that were molecular correlates of the act of prayer. He speculated that there might be a detectable change in the level of some neurotransmitter when people pray. He might have been imagining substances such as dopamine that are released by the brain under certain conditions and produce rewarding sensations. Crick's suggestion that there might someday be a new science of "biochemical theology" seems to have been realized under an alternative name, the new field of neurotheology. Crick's view of the relationship between science and religion continued to play a role in his work as he made the transition from molecular biology research into theoretical neuroscience. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.
During the 1960s, Crick became concerned with the origins of the genetic code. Crick speculated about possible stages by which an initially simple code with a few amino acid types might have evolved into the more complex code used by existing organisms. At that time, everyone thought of proteins as the only kind of enzymes. Ribozymes had not yet been found. Many molecular biologists were puzzled by the problem of the origin of a protein replicating system that is as complex as that which exists in organisms currently inhabiting Earth. In the early 1970s, Crick further speculated about the possibility that the production of living systems from molecules may have been a very rare event in the universe, but once it had developed it could be spread by intelligent life forms using space travel technology.
Crick noted that they had been overly pessimistic about the chances of abiogenesis - the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds - on Earth when they had assumed that some kind of self-replicating protein system was the molecular origin of life. Crick hoped he might aid progress in neuroscience by promoting constructive interactions between specialists from the many different sub-disciplines concerned with consciousness.
In 1983, as a result of studies of computer models of neural networks, Crick proposed that the function of REM sleep was to remove certain modes of interactions in networks of cells in the mammalian cerebral cortex; they called this hypothetical process 'reverse learning' or 'unlearning'. Crick along with Christof Koch published a series of articles on consciousness focusing on how the brain generates visual awareness within a few hundred milliseconds of viewing a scene. They proposed that consciousness seems so mysterious because it involves very short-term memory processes that were still poorly understood. Crick also published a book describing how neurobiology had reached a mature enough stage so that consciousness could be the subject of a unified effort to study it at the molecular, cellular and behavioral levels. Crick claimed that neuroscience had the tools required to begin a scientific study of how brains produce conscious experiences.
Crick died of colon cancer when he was 88 years old.
Maurice Wilkens (1916-2004)
Maurice Wilkins was a British physicist and molecular biologist, and Nobel laureate whose research contributed to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and to the development of radar. He is best known for his work on the structure of DNA.
Wilkins' work on DNA falls into 2 distinct phases. The first was in 1948-50, when his initial studies produced the first clear X-ray images of DNA, which he presented at a conference in 1951 attended by Watson.
In 1953 Wilkins' colleague Franklin gave Wilkins a high quality image of DNA which she had made in 1952 but had put it aside. This image, along with the knowledge that Linus Pauling had proposed an incorrect structure of DNA, mobilized Watson and Crick to restart model building. With additional information from research reports of Wilkins and Franklin, Watson and Crick correctly described the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953.
Wilkins continued to test, verify, and make significant corrections to the Watson-Crick DNA model and to study the structure of RNA. Wilkins, Crick, and Watson were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize.
Wilkins was born in New Zealand where his father was a medical doctor. His family had come from Dublin, where his paternal and maternal grandfathers were.
Wilkins studied the Natural Sciences specializing in Physics, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Wilkins became a Ph.D. Student. In 1945, he published 4 papers on phosphorescence and electron traps. Wilkins received a PhD for this work. During WWII, Wilkins developed improved radar screens and then worked on isotope separation at the Manhattan Project during the years 1944–45. Randall, Wilkins's long-time mentor was negotiating to set up a laboratory to apply the experimental methods of physics to problems of biology. The combination of these disciplines as biophysics was a novel idea. In 1946 Randall was appointed in charge of the entire Physics department with the funding to set up a Biophysics Unit. He brought Wilkins with him as Assistant Director of the unit. They appointed a team of scientists trained in both the physical and biological sciences. The "management philosophy" was to explore the use of many techniques in parallel, to find which looked promising, and then to focus on these. Wilkins, as the scientist with most diverse experience of physics and Assistant Director of the unit, had general oversight of the varied projects besides direct involvement in his personal research projects that included new types of optical microscopy.
At King's College, Wilkins pursued, among other things, X-ray diffraction work on sperm and DNA that had been obtained from calf thymus which was much more intact than the DNA which had previously been isolated. Wilkins discovered that it was possible to produce thin threads from this concentrated DNA solution that contained highly ordered arrays of DNA suitable for the production of X-ray diffraction patterns. Using a carefully bundled group of these DNA threads and keeping them hydrated, Wilkins and a graduate student obtained X-ray photographs of DNA that showed that the long, thin DNA molecule had a regular, crystal-like structure in these threads. Gosling later said:
"When... I first saw all those discrete diffraction spots ...emerging on the film in the developing dish was a truly eureka moment....we realized that if DNA was the gene material then we had just shown that genes could crystallize!"
It was one of the X-ray diffraction photographs taken in 1950, shown at a meeting in Naples a year later, that sparked Watson’s interest in DNA causing him to write "suddenly I was excited about chemistry.....I began to wonder whether it would be possible for me to join Wilkins in working on DNA". At that time Wilkins also introduced Crick to the importance of DNA. Wilkins knew that proper experiments on the threads of purified DNA would require better X-ray equipment. Wilkins ordered a new X-ray tube and a new micro-camera. He also suggested to Randall that the soon-to-be-appointed Rosalind Franklin should be reassigned from work on protein solutions to join the DNA effort.
In 1951 Franklin finally arrived. Wilkins was away on holiday. No work had been done on DNA in the laboratory for several months. The new X-ray tube sat unused, waiting for Franklin. Franklin had the expectation that DNA X-ray diffraction work was her project. Wilkins returned to the laboratory expecting, on the other hand, that Franklin would be his collaborator and that they would work together on the DNA project that he had started. The confusion over Franklin's and Wilkins' roles in relation to the DNA effort which later developed into considerable tension between them is attributable to Randall who promised them both what they wanted.
By 1951, Wilkins had evidence that DNA in cells as well as purified DNA had a helical structure. This information from Wilkins stimulated Watson and Crick to create their first molecular model of DNA, a model with the phosphate backbones at the center. Upon viewing the model of the proposed structure, Franklin told Watson and Crick that their model was wrong, in effect inside-out. Crystallographic evidence showed that the structural units of DNA were progressively separated by the addition of water, leading to the formation of a gel and then a solution. Franklin believed that the simplest explanation of this was for the hydrophilic part of the molecule to be on the outside. Crick tried to get Wilkins to continue with additional molecular modeling efforts, but both Wilkins and Franklin refused to participate in molecular modeling efforts and continued to work on step-by-step detailed analysis of her X-ray diffraction data.
Linus Pauling had published a proposed but incorrect structure of DNA, making the same basic error that Watson and Crick had made a year earlier. Some of those working on DNA in the United Kingdom feared that Pauling would quickly solve the DNA structure once he recognized his error and put the backbones of the nucleotide chains on the outside of a model of DNA. After 1952 Franklin concentrated on the X-ray data . Most of his new results were for biological samples like sperm cells, which also suggested a helical structure for DNA.
Watson and Crick published their proposed DNA double helical structure in a paper in the journal Nature in 1953. In this paper Watson and Crick acknowledged that they had been "stimulated by.... the unpublished results and ideas" of Wilkins and Franklin. Following the initial 1953 series of publications on the double helix structure of DNA, Wilkins continued research as leader of a team that performed a range of meticulous experiments to establish the helical model as valid among different biological species to establish the universality of the double helix structure.
Wilkins was married twice. His first wife was an art student. Their marriage ended in divorce. Wilkins married his second wife in 1959. They had 4 four children.
He died at the age of 90.
Arthur C. Clarke ( 1917 – 2008)
Arthur C. Clarke was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He is famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: "A Space Odyssey", widely considered to be one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science writer, who was both an avid populariser of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability. On these subjects he wrote over a dozen books and many essays, which appeared in various popular magazines and along with his science fiction writings eventually earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age". With a large readership he became one of the towering figures of science fiction. For many years Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.
Early in his career, Clarke had a fascination with the paranormal and stated that it was part of the inspiration for his novel Childhood's End. Citing the numerous promising paranormal claims that were shown to be fraudulent, Clarke described his earlier openness to the paranormal having turned to being "an almost total sceptic" by 1992.
In Arthur C. Clarke's defines 3 kinds of "mysteries":
- Once utterly baffling, but is now completely understood like a rainbow.
- Not fully understood but can be in the future.
- Something of which we have no understanding.
Clarke was born in England and grew up on a farm enjoying stargazing, fossil collecting, and reading American science fiction pulp magazines. In his teens, he joined the Junior Astronomical Association and contributed to Urania, the society's journal.
Clarke was a lifelong proponent of space travel. In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the British Interplanetary Society. In 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system.
During WWII from 1941-1946 he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early-warning radar defense system, which contributed to the RAF's success during the Battle of Britain. In 1943, he was commissioned as a pilot officer. He was promoted flying officer and appointed chief training instructor with the rank of flight lieutenant. After the war he attained a degree in mathematics and physics.
Although he was not the originator of the concept of geostationary satellites, one of his most important contributions in this field may be his idea that they would be ideal telecommunications relays. He advanced this idea in a paper privately circulated among the core technical members of the British Interplanetary Society in 1945. Clarke also wrote a number of non-fiction books describing the technical details and societal implications of rocketry and space flight. The most notable of these may be Interplanetary Flight, The Exploration of Space and The Promise of Space. In recognition of these contributions, the geostationary orbit 36,000km above the equator is officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union as a Clarke Orbit.
On a trip to Florida in 1953 Clarke met and married Marilyn a 22-year-old American divorcee with a young son. They separated permanently after six months, although the divorce was not finalized until 1964. Clarke never remarried preferring men to women.
Clarke emigrated from England to Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, in 1956, largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving. That year he discovered the underwater ruins of an ancient temple. Clarke lived in Sri Lanka 1956 until his death.
Following the 1968 release of "2001 A Space Odyssey", Clarke became much in demand as a commentator on science and technology, especially at the time of the Apollo space program. In 1969 Clarke appeared as a commentator for the Apollo 11 moon landing.
In particular, Clarke was a populariser of the concept of space travel. His books on space travel usually included chapters about other aspects of science and technology, such as computers and bio-engineering. He predicted telecommunication satellites albeit serviced by astronauts in space suits who would replace the satellite's vacuum tubes as they burned out.
His many predictions culminated in 1958 when he began a series of magazine essays that eventually became Profiles of the Future, published in book form in 1962. A timetable up to the year 2100 describes inventions and ideas including such things as a "global library" for 2005. The same work also contained Clarke's three laws of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
In a 1959 essay Clarke predicted global satellite TV broadcasts that would cross national boundaries indiscriminately and would bring hundreds of channels available anywhere in the world. He also envisioned a "personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one." He wrote: "the time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth merely by dialing a number." Such a device would also, in Clarke's vision, include means for global positioning so that "no one need ever again be lost." He predicted the advent of such a device taking place in the mid-1980s.
In 1974 Clarke described a future of ubiquitous, internet-enabled, personal computers. Clarke accurately predicted many things that became reality, including online banking and online shopping. Responding to a question about how the interviewer's son's life would be different, Clarke responded:
"He will have, in his own house a console through which he can talk, through his friendly local computer and get all the information he needs, for his everyday life, like his bank statements, his theater reservations, all the information you need in the course of living in our complex modern society, this will be in a compact form in his own house... and he will take it as much for granted as we take the telephone."
Clarke contributed to the popularity of the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays.
In his novel "The Fountains of Paradise", he described a space elevator. This, he believed, would make rocket-based access to space obsolete and, more than geostationary satellites, would ultimately be his scientific legacy.
A famous quotation of Clarke's is often cited:
"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion."
Just hours before Clarke's death a massive gamma-ray burst (GRB) reached Earth. It set a new record as the farthest object that could be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It occurred about 7.5 billion years ago roughly equal to half the time since the Big Bang, taking the light that long to reach Earth.
Clarke died at the age of 91 in Sri Lanka after suffering from respiratory failure.
Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988)
Richard was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the super-fluidity of super-cooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed that the neutrons and protons in the nucleus are made of subatomic particles called quarks. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during WWII. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures. After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers.
Feynman was born in New York City to the son of a Jewish sales manager. Like Einstein, Feynman was a late talker, and by his third birthday had yet to utter a single word. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.
When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Feynman applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted. Instead, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Attendees at Feynman's first seminar included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. He received a PhD from Princeton in 1942; his thesis adviser was John Archibald Wheeler. His doctoral thesis lay the groundwork for Feynman diagrams, and was titled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics". A key insight was that positrons also known as anti-electrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time.
In 1941, with WWII raging in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, he was recruited to work on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. Wilson's team at Princeton was working on a device called an isotron, a coil placed between 2 angled sheet metal plates. An isotron electro-magnetically separated uranium-235 from uranium-238 theoretically many times more efficiently than calutrons did. Calutrons were based on a cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator in which charged particles accelerate outwards from the center along a spiral path. The particles are held to a spiral trajectory by a static magnetic field and accelerated by a rapidly varying electric field. A calutron was like a linear cyclotron where an ionized sample of uranium was accelerated by electric fields and deflected by magnetic fields. Since the ions of the different isotopes have different masses, the heavier isotopes were deflected less by the magnetic field, causing the beam of particles to separate out into several beams by mass, striking the plate at different locations.
At this juncture, in early 1943, Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory on a remote mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs would be designed and built. Like many other young physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform him that he had found a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Arline, Feynman`s wife who had tuberculosis and was not expected to live more than 2 years.
At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe calculated ‘the yield of a fission bomb. Feynman administered the computation group of human computers in the theoretical division established the system for using IBM punched cards for computation. Other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality.
Feynman was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. Feynman said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties. Perhaps because of this, Bohr never warmed to Feynman.
Due to the top secret nature of the work, the Los Alamos Laboratory was isolated. Feynman indulged his curiosity by discovering the combination locks on cabinets and desks used to secure papers. He found that people tended to leave their safes unlocked, or leave them on the factory settings, or write the combinations down, or use easily guessable combinations like dates. Feynman played jokes on colleagues. In one case he found the combination to a locked filing cabinet by trying the numbers he thought a physicist would use, 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, e = 2.71828.. and found that the 3 filing cabinets where a colleague kept a set of atomic bomb research notes all had the same combination. He left a series of notes in the cabinets as a prank, which initially spooked people into thinking a spy or saboteur had gained access to atomic bomb secrets. On weekends, Feynman drove to Albuquerque to see his ailing wife in a car he borrowed from his friend Fuchs. When Fuchs was asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs speculated that Feynman, with his safe cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque, was the mostly likely candidate. The FBI compiled a bulky file on Feynman. Fuchs later confessed to being a spy for the Soviet Union in 1950.
Feynman was working in the computing room when he was informed that Arline was dying. He borrowed Fuchs' car and drove to Albuquerque where he sat with her for hours until she died. He immersed himself in work on the project, and was present at the Trinity nuclear test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. On witnessing the blast, Feynman ducked towards the floor of his truck because of the immense brightness of the explosion, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage of the event.
Once Feynman no longer worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from the draft, and was called up to serve in the army in 1946. He avoided this by faking mental illness, and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption on mental grounds. His father died suddenly and Feynman suffered from depression. Unable to focus on research problems, Feynman began tackling physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these involved analyzing the physics of a twirling disk as it is moving through the air, inspired by an incident in the cafeteria at Cornell when someone tossed a dinner plate in the air.
His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize–winning work. Yet because he felt burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities. Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical physicist in the early post-war years. Quantum electrodynamics suffered from infinite integrals in perturbation theory. These were clear mathematical flaws in the theory, which Feynman and Wheeler had unsuccessfully attempted to work around. The problems plaguing quantum electrodynamics were discussed, but the theoreticians were completely overshadowed by the achievements of the experimentalists, who reported the discovery of the measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron.
Feynman diagrams, pictorial representations of the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles appeared in 1950, and soon became prevalent. Students learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Eventually computer programs were written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a formal language with a formal grammar. By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends until these arrangements became sexually volatile. He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends.Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro in 1949, and brought back a woman from Copacabana who lived with him for a time.
The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, generating anti-communist hysteria. Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950, and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. Physicist David Bohm was arrested in 1950 and immigrated to Brazil in 1951. A girlfriend told Feynman that he should consider moving to South America. He had a sabbatical coming and elected to spend it in Brazil where he was particularly impressed with the Samba music, and learned to play a metal percussion instrument, the frigideira. He was an enthusiastic amateur player of bongo drums and often played them in the pit orchestra in musicals. He spent time in Rio with his good friend Bohm, but Bohm could not convince Feynman to take up investigating Bohm's ideas on physics.
He had fallen in love with a platinum blonde from Kansas and they married in 1952. They frequently quarreled and she was frightened by his violent temper. Their politics were different; although he registered and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative. She sued for divorce in 1956 on the grounds of extreme cruelty. In 1958 he fell in love again and married in 1960.
Feynman tried LSD during his professorship at Caltech. He also tried marijuana as a way of studying consciousness. He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics of the super-fluidity of super-cooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the theory of super-fluidity. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale.
Experiments of the late 1960s showed that nucleons made from protons and neutrons contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically-neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically-neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks and keep the charged protons in the nucleus from repelling and flying apart.
In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment for abdominal pains, and was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Surgeons removed a tumor the size of a football that had crushed his kidney and spleen. Further operations were performed in 1986 and 1987. He was again hospitalized in 1988. A ruptured ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined dialysis that might have prolonged his life for a few months. His last words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."
He died when he was 70 years old.
NEXT:->1924 (5)
Sun Myung Moon, Isaac Asimov, Roselind Franklin, Pope John Paul II, Mandelbrot,
NEXT:->1924 (5)
Sun Myung Moon, Isaac Asimov, Roselind Franklin, Pope John Paul II, Mandelbrot,
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