I have a big stack of exams and lab reports to grade, so I need to go off someplace where I don't have Internet access and do that. In my absence, here's a Dorky Poll question inspired by recent news:
Which Nobel laureate (in any field) is the craziest?
There's no real shortage of scientists who have won the Nobel Prize for something or another, and then gone completely goofy. But which Nobel laureate is the most goofy?
In physics, it's hard to top Brian Josephson, who was recently cited as a noble defender of Rusi Taleyarkhan against the mean folks at Nature.
The problem is, he has a couple of parallel beefs going with Nature: one is about the bubble fusion stuff, the other is about their unwillingness to believe in telepathy, which he thinks can be explained by quantum mechanics. His website is loaded with Usenet-quality rants about various skeptical organizations, which really don't do a whole lot to improve my opinion of parapsychological research.
He did unquestionably brilliant work on superconducting junctions back in the day, but this stuff... Not so much.
So, who's your favorite crazy Nobel laureate?
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Kary Mullis, who a) invented the Polymerase Chain Reaction, b) was abducted by aliens, and c) thinks (or thought) that the AIDS/HIV connection, global warming, and ozone depletion were myths.
Kary Mullis, who a) invented the Polymerase Chain Reaction, b) was abducted by aliens, and c) thinks (or thought) that the AIDS/HIV connection, global warming, and ozone depletion were myths.
Philip Lenard, German winner of the Physics prize in 1905, discoverer of (among other things) the photoelectric effect, thoroughly merits a dishonourable mention here.
Convinced he was not getting his due from his fellow physicists, Lenard became a member of the Nazi party. Worse, he turned against what the Nazis called "Jewish physics" and demanded a return to teaching classical physics only.
Not only mad, or just opportunistic, but unpleasant too. Among the physicists he attacked was Einstein, whom he thus repaid for explaining the effect he had discovered.
Kary Mullis surely deserves a top position on the list. Still, he gave one of the most entertaining presentations I have attended. Every second picture was taken from a swim suit calendar but at the end even some medical doctors grasped the principle.
OK, those were the times when young postdocs got permanent positions just because they have made a single PCR during their PhD work.
Kary Mullis, hands down.
Rolf Zinkernagel gave a presentation at a meeting earlier this year that required one to assume that memory T and B cells are a useless classification and they contribute nothing to the function of the immune system, based on what he seemed to think was a very basic physical fact that everyone but him was ignoring. Also, it was the only presentation out of over a hundred at the meeting that consisted largely of hand-drawn diagrams.
But he is still doing experiments with an actual lab and postdocs and whatnot, so he's not actually crazy.
From Kary Mullis's web site:
In "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field," Kary Mullis writes with passion and humor about a wide range of subjects: from the scientific method to parapsychology, from poisonous spiders to the HIV virus and AIDS, from global warming to astrology, from the O.J. Simpson trial to how you can turn a light bulb on with your mind.
My own papers seldom deal with more than two or three of these topics at once.
The London Review of Books has an entertaining review of Dancing Naked here.
Gotta give some love to Brian Josephson too.
Not in a league with Mullis but
Francis Crick decided he was going to descend on Neuroscience and solve 'consciousness'. He wrote the "Astonishing Hypothesis" a rather pedestrian book based around the "astonishing" concept that the "mind" is an emergent property of the brain. startling, that.
Brian Josephson (physics, 73) and his mind/matter stuff is pretty out there. If we wanted to go with demonstrably crazy, Nash (economics, 94) should obviously get the win.
Brian Josephson deserves a mention. 1973 Physics Nobel, now advocate of paranormal phenomena.
Don't forget William B. Shockley, who was a co-winner of the Physics prize for his work on transistors. He later abandoned physics to promote and "research" eugenics, even though hed had no formal education in the field. He even donated his sperm to a "genius" sperm bank. I don't know if anybody made a withdrawal from his account.
He was also an obnoxious person who alienated most of his co-workers and family. His children found out about his death through the news media.
I was going to mention Raymond Damadian, one of the developers of medical MRI scanning, who is also a young-earth creationist. Alas, he did not get the Nobel, since he was not directly involved in MRI Imaging, which was what the award was for. However, there's been a big to-do claiming that Damadian's creationism was behind his not receiving the Nobel.
I think it's pretty clearly a contest between Josephson and Mullis, both of whom came to mind when I saw your post title. They're both way off the crazy charts, and everyone else who comes to mind is just mildly nutty.
Are we disqualifying Nash on the basis that he was ACTUALLY insane, rather than just being looney?
Or are we disqualifying him because the nobel prize for Econ isn't REALLY a nobel prize?
Maybe not in a league with Mullis, but don't forget Linus Pauling, Nobel winner for both Chemistry in 1954 and the Peace prize in 1962, and his crazy Vitamin C and "orthomolecular medicine" advocacy.
"There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. "
Arthur Conan Doyle (as Sherlock Holmes).
Bob Laughlin clearly deserves a mention, especially after trying to 'Wolfram' the field of biology.
I don't think we should actually be disqualifying Nash because economics "isn't a really a nobel prize", but since we were asked which turned "goofy" after winning, I don't think Nash really qualifies, seeing as schizophrenia is an actual disease and his ideas didn't seem all that crazy beyond that.
Josephson and Mullis both posit some pretty out there ideas...if that is what in fact we're being asked, Mullis definitely wins the crazy prize in my opinion.
I'm surprised to find that nobody's suggested a recipient of the literary or peace prizes yet.
OK, here's a literary prize winner: George Bernard Shaw (a fellow Irishman) believed in vegetarianism and a brand of gradualist socialism called Fabianism. He also thought Soviet Russia a rather jolly place.
Come to think of it, another Irish prizewinner, William Butler Yeats believed in spiritualism.
Jean Paul Sartre turned down the literature prize. Just as well. He thought the truth about Soviet Gulags should be covered up in case the French working class despaired of communism.
Does being just literary excuse these gentlemen their madnesses. Or is there a higher standard for science prizewinners?
OK, here's a literary prize winner: George Bernard Shaw (a fellow Irishman) believed in vegetarianism and a brand of gradualist socialism called Fabianism. He also thought Soviet Russia a rather jolly place.
Come to think of it, another Irish prizewinner, William Butler Yeats believed in spiritualism.
Jean Paul Sartre turned down the literature prize. Just as well. He thought the truth about Soviet Gulags should be covered up in case the French working class despaired of communism.
Does being just literary excuse these gentlemen their madnesses. Or is there a higher standard for science prizewinners?
Vegetarianism?! *GASP*!
My fave is Linus Pauling, whose advocacy of Vitamin C for everything from flu prevention to cancer cures was just... weird. Mullins is a close second, though. And Crick was not wrong - he was just not able to demonstrate what is still a fairly astonishing hypothesis.
Well, we need to distinguish between loons and jerks. A consensus has emerged on the loons, with Josephson and Mullis grabbing the top spots. Among the jerk nominees, however, the top two Uberjerks have not yet even been mentioned:
(1) Johannes Stark, of Stark Effect fame. Toby has already, with very good cause, mentioned Philipp Lenard's Nazi sympathies. But if you want truly bat$#!+ rabid enthusiasm for Nazi beliefs, it's hard to top Stark.
Check out the "National Socialist" section of this biography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Stark
(2) Carleton Gajdusek, of kuru fame. Truly great scientist. Too bad he's also a convicted serial child molester.
Finally, Robert Shrieffer, of BCS superconductivity fame, isn't in the same repugnant league as Stark and Gajdusek, but he did get a two-year prison sentence for killing two people and injuring six, including one permanently paralyzed, in a car crash. He was driving 100 mph with a suspended license due to nine previous incidents, and he fabricated a story about a non-existent truck being the real cause of the crash.
I'd like to nominate George Smoot, winner of the prize in 2006. He's not as wacky as some of the other candidates. I don't think he has a serious criminal record either. But his talk at OSU last month gave me reason to suspect he's at least a little nutty. Check out my description of the lecture:
darw1n.net post about Smoot's OSU talk.