Upstairs Downstairs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Feynman_Nobel.jpg

When Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in 1965, CERN director Victor Weisskopf worried that he would be driven out of physics and into administration. He goaded Feynman into signing a wager before witnesses:

Mr. FEYNMAN will pay the sum of TEN DOLLARS to Mr. WEISSKOPF if at any time during the next TEN YEARS (i.e. before the THIRTY FIRST DAY OF DECEMBER of the YEAR ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE), the said MR. FEYNMAN has held a ‘responsible position.’

The two agreed: “For the purpose of the aforementioned WAGER, the term ‘responsible position’ shall be taken to signify a position which, by reason of its nature, compels the holder to issue instructions to other persons to carry out certain acts, notwithstanding the fact that the holder has no understanding whatsoever of that which he is instructing the aforesaid persons to accomplish.”

Feynman, who once called administration an “occupational disease,” collected the $10 in 1976.

| Science & Math · Society

Misc

  • It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.
  • More than half of Uganda’s population is under 15.
  • 176502 + 381252 = 1765038125
  • Uzbekistan is surrounded by “stans”: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan.
  • Great Britain never puts its name on postage stamps.

In June 2011, 49-year-old Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov of Russia woke up in a coffin surrounded by weeping relatives. Realizing she was at her own funeral, she began screaming and was rushed back to the hospital, which declared her dead of a heart attack. “I am very angry and want answers,” her husband, Fagili, told the Sun. “She wasn’t dead when they said she was, and they could have saved her.” (Thanks, Mark.)

| Death · Science & Math · Trivia

Math Notes

This equation:

122 + 542 + 695 = 211 + 364 + 784

… remains valid when the digits of each term are permuted in the same way:

122 + 542 + 695 = 211 + 364 + 784
122 + 524 + 659 = 211 + 346 + 748
212 + 452 + 965 = 121 + 634 + 874
221 + 425 + 956 = 112 + 643 + 847
212 + 254 + 569 = 121 + 436 + 478
221 + 245 + 596 = 112 + 463 + 487

And everything above remains valid if you square each term.

(Discovered by Albert Gloden.)

| Science & Math

Product Placement

chord theorem

Draw a chord AB through a point P inside a circle, and the product PA × PB is constant — it has the same value for every chord through P.

“Again we have perfect democracy,” write Eli Maor in The Pythagorean Theorem. “Every chord has the same status in relation to P as any other.”

| Science & Math

Under Way

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_-_The_Gare_Saint-Lazare,_Arrival_of_a_Train.jpg

A stationmaster waves his flag, and a train begins to move. There is a last moment of rest, and a first moment of motion.

But this is a problem. If time is infinitely divisible, then there is a moment between these two moments. Is it a moment of rest or of motion?

(From Robin Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions, 2003.)

| Science & Math

Unquote

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fractal_Broccoli.jpg

“How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?” — Albert Einstein

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” — Eugene Wigner

| Quotations · Science & Math

A Versatile Palindrome

From Royal V. Heath in Scripta Mathematica, March 1955:

0264 + 4125 + 5610 = 0165 + 5214 + 4620

… remains valid if you split each term with a multiplication sign:

02 × 64 + 41 × 25 + 56 × 10 = 01 × 65 + 52 × 14 + 46 × 20

… or an addition sign:

02 + 64 + 41 + 25 + 56 + 10 = 01 + 65 + 52 + 14 + 46 + 20

Remarkably, everything above holds true if you square each term.

| Science & Math

Can Can’t

“If anything is possible, then it is possible to prove that something is impossible. And if it is possible to prove that something is impossible, then necessarily, something is impossible.”

— Roy Sorensen, Vagueness and Contradiction, 2001

| Science & Math