For part 1 – featuring Disraeli, Schopenhauer, and Hitchens – click here.
Zwicky on All Other Astronomers
Fritz Zwicky always seemed to think he never received the credit he deserved, despite world-wide recognition for his work in astronomy.
Perhaps only overshadowed only by Newton’s work during the 1660s or Einstein’s 1900s, Zwicky’s 1930s efforts produced a prolific amount of new and important scientific thought.
In 1933, he was the first person to discover that the galaxies’ rotations cannot be accounted for by the mass of their stars alone. If we aren’t wildly mistaken about gravitation, the stars only account for around 1/160th of the total mass of each galaxy! He coined ‘dark matter’ as a way of explaining the problem. We still have no satisfactory solution.
Next, in 1934, he coined the term ‘supernovae’ as part of a suggestion that the dramatic brightening of stars signified their transition to neutron stars. This began whole new branches of physics into the evolution of stars. A few years later, calculations were made that predicted some supernovae emit identical maximum luminosities. This means that the distance of these objects can be calculated from their perceived brightness, allowing astronomers to measure the scale and age of the universe. We still use these methods today, and it was how it was recently determined that the universe is accelerating.
Then in 1937, Zwicky suggested that galaxies (and clusters of galaxies) could act as ‘gravitational lenses’. Just as Arthur Eddington had demonstrated that distant starlight is distorted by the gravitation of the Sun, Zwicky thought the light from very distant galaxies could be distorted by ‘nearer’ ones. The effect was not observed until five years after his death in 1979. A very dramatic example, discovered in 2007, is pictured below (bottom right). You can see the lensing effect of a blue galaxy that is behind the elliptical yellow galaxy.[1]
Now you might think this would be enough for one lifetime, yet Zwicky continued to publish hundreds of papers up until his death. Perhaps part of the motivation was the continual feeling he was underappreciated by fellow astronomers.
In this short description of Zwicky from one of his graduate students, 3 years after Zwicky died, we see one of the most imaginative and efficient insults ever created. Another of Zwicky’s ingenious ideas.
Zwicky, the astrophysical swashbuckler who named the supernovae and the dark matter, charted the galaxy clusters, and launched the first interplanetary ball bearing. Zwicky, who claimed his “Morphological Method” was the greatest contribution to human thought since Pascal. Zwicky, at age 72, a terrifying spectacle for a fledging graduate student who maybe ought to be studying the sun instead of Zwicky’s own subject, supernovae. … He was tall and gaunt. His speech was as intimidating as his looks.
He began to talk to me briefly each day. He usually launched into a bitter vituperation in a spicy Swiss-German accent, aimed at the current staff, including my advisor, Ben Oke.
“Those spherical bastards threw me off the 200 goddam-inch telescope!” he fumed. “Made up a special rule. No observing after the age of 70! Grrrr, them I could crush!”
A spherical bastards was a bastard any way you looked at it.[2]
Bertie Wooster on Right Hon. A B Filmer
Well, more like P G Wodehouse on A B Filmer. In his short story, ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom‘[3], we see Bertie Wooster being summoned by his formidable Aunt to partake in another undisclosed scheme:
I hit Woollam Chersey at about four o’clock, and found Aunt Agatha in her lair, writing letters. And, from what I know of her, probably offensive letters, with nasty postscripts. She regarded me with not a fearful lot of joy.
‘Oh, there you are, Bertie.’
‘Yes, here I am.’
‘There’s a smut on your nose.’
I plied the handkerchief.
‘I am glad you have arrived so early. I want to have a word with you before you meet Mr Filmer.’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Filmer, the Cabinet Minister. He is staying in the house. Surely even you must have heard of Mr Filmer?’
‘Oh, rather,’ I said, though as a matter of fact the bird was completely unknown to me. What with one thing and another, I’m not frightfully up in the personnel of the political world.
‘I particularly wish you to make a good impression on Mr Filmer.’
‘Right-ho.’
‘Don’t speak in that casual way, as if you supposed that it was perfectly natural that you would make a good impression upon him. Mir Filmer is a serious minded man of high character and purpose and you are just the type of vapid and frivolous wastrel against which he is most likely to be prejudiced.’
Later in the story, when Mr Filmer is remarkably absent for tea, Bertie comments on his new acquaintance:
For this man Filmer, you must understand, was not one of those men who are lightly kept from the tea table. A hearty trencherman, and particularly fond of his five o’clock couple of cups and bite of muffin, he had until this afternoon always been well up among he leaders in the race for the food-trough. If one thing was certain, it was that only the machinations of some enemy could be keeping him from being in the drawing room now, complete with nose-bag.
So, as you might have gathered by now, Mr Filmer is fat. And, as Bertie suspects, he has indeed gone missing due to intervention of a foe. Namely, Bertie’s young cousin Thomas who was seeking revenge for Filmer catching him smoking a cigarette.
When Bertie finally realised Filmer is stranded on an island in the middle of a lake on his Aunt’s estate, Bertie takes it upon himself to rescue the man. But not before reminding us of the generous dimensions of his rescuee:
The Right Hon. was a tubbly little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!’…
Dawkins on The Abrahamic God
Dawkins has since commented that the opening sentence to his book ‘The God Delusion‘ was part seriousness, part comic hyperbole. Nevertheless, anyone who has read the Old Testement will be troubled to find error with his assessment. That the sentence was so shocking vindicated the rest of the book. Several centuries after the enlightenment, religious criticism is a taboo still worth challenging.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.[4]
References
[1] NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day: 2011/12/21 - http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111221.html
[2] Kirshner, Robert P (2002) ‘The Extravagant Universe’ Princeton University Press p 144
[3] Wodehouse, P G (1926) ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom‘
[4] Dawkins R (2006) ‘The God Delusion‘
