[Icarus]

Gents,

You may enjoy reading this article on famous theoretical physicists who were players: Einstein, Feynman and other famous swingers (2006).

An excerpt:

Quote:

Schrödinger, Curie, Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer… the finest names of pre-Cold War 20th-century physics, some of whom gave us the most concise theories ever posited, form a roster of lamentable philanderers. Albert Einstein was completely “given to flirtation” and had legions of affairs. Caltech professor and bestselling raconteur Richard Feynman was probably the only Nobel Prize winner to befriend porn stars, claim a foolproof manner for bedding women and do his calculations on napkins in strip clubs. And it wasn’t just the guys: Marie Curie was relentlessly hounded by the press for seducing away her late-husband’s former student from his wife and kids.

(...)

The most shameless cad of the group was Richard Feynman. When he once nearly crashed his car while eyeing a passing beauty, his only excuse was, “I only see the women, the rest is all a blur.” He even kept a picture in his office of one acquaintance, buxom adult film star Candi Samples, signed, “To Big Dick, Love from Candi.”

Remarkably, some physicists’ trysts seem to have actually led to physical insight: While once floundering on a problem, Erwin Schrödinger shacked up in an alpine villa for an extended holiday with “an old girlfriend” and, in the “late erotic outburst” that followed, produced the eponymous equation that would net him the Nobel.

At the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, the assembled brain trust was as hard-partying as a troop of college kids on spring break. Weekends with the physicists were “big and brassy,” replete with poker and booze. They played so hard that the program tried to quarantine the women’s dorms; as one boss euphemized, “The girls had been doing a flourishing business of requiting the needs of our young men.” So many babies resulted that Robert Oppenheimer (or his boss, nobody’s really sure), himself having tried to run off with the wife of Linus Pauling and bed the wife of another colleague, was told to halt the extracurricular activities. (Oppenheimer didn’t.)

[Teutatis]

Well, that sure puts a different perspective on what we think of extremely high intelligent individuals and their supposed social outcast, nerdy ways.

[iknowexactly]

(11-28-2013 04:07 PM)Teutatis Wrote:  

Well, that sure puts a different perspective on what we think of extremely high intelligent individuals and their supposed social outcast, nerdy ways.

True, but these are guys that were so smart the gubmint came looking for them, they aren't applying for things trying to prove they're smart, they're the ones everyone goes to to find out the real deal.

[Giovonny]

Sexual satisfaction leads to greater brain function.

When you are having amazing sex, when you want, how you want, and with who you want..

Your body and mind can reach a deeper level of relaxation. Your worries, anxieties, insecurities, and anger can melt away. Your perception can temporarily (or permanently) change. You can see the world more clearly..

I'm not surprised that these guys mixed sex and science.

Some of my deepest thoughts come after good sex.

*****

These guys had real fame. They weren't your average nerds. They were the most talented and well known nerds on the planet.

*****

(11-28-2013 07:22 AM)Icarus Wrote:  

Richard Feynman

claim a foolproof manner for bedding women

Do we have any details about his "foolproof" manner???

[Icarus]

(11-28-2013 05:18 PM)Giovonny Wrote:  

Do we have any details about his "foolproof" manner???

It's almost certainly a reference to the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, a chapter of which is devoted to his PUA activities during the Summer, when he was a professor at Cornell in the late 1940s. He describes his swallowing of the red pill:

Quote:

“OK,” he says. “The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.

“Therefore,” he continued, “under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything -- not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”

“Uh… you mean… you don’t… uh… you just ask them?”

“OK,” he says, “I know this is your first lesson, and it may be hard for you to be so blunt. So you might buy her one thing — just one little something — before you ask. But on the other hand, it will only make it more difficult.”

Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

Then that night I was ready to try it out. I go into the bar as usual, and right away my friend says, “Hey, Dick! Wait’ll you see the girl I got tonight! She had to go change her clothes, but she’s coming right back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, unimpressed, and I sit at another table to watch the show. My friend’s girl comes in just as the show starts, and I’m thinking, “I don’t give a damn how pretty she is; all she’s doing is getting him to buy her drinks, and she’s going to give him nothing!”

After the first act my friend says, “Hey, Dick! I want you to meet Ann. Ann, this is a good friend of mine, Dick Feynman.”

I say “Hi” and keep looking at the show.

A few moments later Ann says to me, “Why don’t you come and sit at the table here with us?”

I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.” I say, “I can see fine from here.”

A little while later a lieutenant from the military base nearby comes in, dressed in a nice uniform. It isn’t long, before we notice that Ann is sitting over on the other side of the bar with the lieutenant!

Later that evening I’m sitting at the bar, Ann is dancing with the lieutenant, and when the lieutenant’s back is toward me and she’s facing me, she smiles very pleasantly to me. I think again, “Some bitch! Now she’s doing this trick on the lieutenant even!”

Then I get a good idea: I don’t look at her until the lieutenant can also see me, and then I smile back at her, so the lieutenant will know what’s going on. So her trick didn’t work for long.

A few minutes later she’s not with the lieutenant any more, but asking the bartender for her coat and handbag, saying in a loud, obvious voice, “I’d like to go for a walk. Does anybody want to go for a walk with me?”

I think to myself, “You can keep saying no and pushing them off, but you can’t do it permanently, or you won’t get anywhere. There comes a time when you have to go along.” So I say coolly, “I’ll walk with you.” So we go out. We walk down the street a few blocks and see a cafe, and she says, “I’ve got an idea — let’s get some coffee and sandwiches, and go over to my place and eat them.”

The idea sounds pretty good, so we go into the cafe and she orders three coffees and three sandwiches and I pay for them. As we’re going out of the cafe, I think to myself, “Something’s wrong: too many sandwiches!”

On the way to her motel she says, “You know, I won’t have time to eat these sandwiches with you, because a lieutenant is coming over…” I think to myself, “See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn’t asked her anything, and now I know I’m gonna get nothing! I have to recover, if only for the pride of my teacher.”

I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You… are worse than a WHORE!”

“Whaddya mean?”

‘“You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”

“Well, you cheapskate!” she says. “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll pay you back for the sandwiches!”

I called her bluff: “Pay me back, then.”

She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and coffee and went off.

After I was through eating, I went back to the bar to report to the master. I explained everything, and told him I was sorry that I flunked, but I tried to recover.

He said very calmly, “It’s OK, Dick; it’s all right. Since you ended up not buying her anything, she’s gonna sleep with you tonight.”

“What?”

“That’s right,” he said confidently; “she’s gonna sleep with you. I know that.”

“But she isn’t even here! She’s at her place with the lieu —”

“It’s all right.”

Two o’clock comes around, the bar closes, and Ann hasn’t appeared. I ask the master and his wife if I can come over to their place again. They say sure. Just as we’re coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, “Come on, let’s go over to my place.”

The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!

Note that Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.

[runsonmagic]

Intelligent people seek more novel experiences, because the everyday bores them. While someone of average intelligence might be satisfied going to the same job everyday and coming home to the same wife, and intelligent person's imagination while drive them to new experiences. This is why intelligent people are more likely to try drugs, and engage in novelty seeking behaviors like casual sex. It's the Khan principle: "Superior ability breeds superior ambition."

[FretDancer]

Great post Gio, but these guys were not nerds. They were highly intelligent men, geniuses if you may say so. Probably not just at an academic and scientific level, clearly.

[Peregrine]

So I've been putting off reading "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". It goes back on the list next to Stoic philosophy.

[Icarus]

Erwin Schrödinger was a really bad boy:

Quote:

The physicist Hermann Weyl noted that Erwin Schrödinger was at his most inspired when he was in the throes of a passionate affair. In truth, Schrödinger was a serial seducer who would convince himself he was in love as he moved from conquest to conquest, recording the details in his diary. In 1926, the year that he published his Nobel-prize winning monograph describing quantum – or particle – effects as a wave equation, he was chasing the neighbour’s 14-year-old daughter.

John Gribbin does not shy away from Schrödinger’s sex life in this biography. Indeed, he ends by interviewing an Australian physicist who learnt in his twenties that he was Schrödinger’s grandson. His Irish grandmother had been seduced while packing Red Cross parcels alongside Schrödinger’s mistress, Hilde March (the wife of Schrödinger’s ex-assistant and the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Ruth). Around the same time, Schrödinger got the well-known actress Sheila May pregnant and had to be warned off a friend’s 12-year-old niece. He later described his 17 years in Dublin as the happiest of his life.