Born To Do Math 206: Cosmology from a Party Monster
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/09
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Rick Rosner: I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, home of the University of Colorado, where I eventually ended up attending after I had a nervous breakdown and failed to complete my application to any college.
I only wanted to go to Harvard and then I felt that I couldn’t even get a girlfriend in high school. Anyway, I ended up just going to my hometown school. This week, in a Covid devastated intercollegiate football season, my school and the school where I met my wife is for the first time in a while, they broke into the top twenty-five college football teams in the nation in a season, where nobody should be playing intercollegiate sports.
It’s just exploiting the kids. I’m sure all the players want to play, but it’s a sleazy proposition. But the schools make a shitload of money on school anyway. They would be late in the season. The season would be basically over by now because of Covid. They’ve played four games and won all of them.
So, they’re there nationally. So, I tweeted, “Congratulations.” Also, everybody’s stupid to be playing football. So, I thought I’d tweet another congratulation to my hometown school for having on its faculty back in the 60s, George Gamow, the guy who came up with the Big Bang Theory, which is the world’s the most important current theory in cosmology.
All cosmology stems from it and what’s interesting about Gamow, my dad, my stepdad, played poker with one of the chancellors of the university. The one who was in charge of cleaning up messes, and a faculty member did something. They wanted to make it go away back in the era when you could do that stuff.
So I don’t know if my dad knew this about Gamow. My dad owned a lady’s ready to wear school. So, he didn’t have a deep background in physics, but, somehow, he knew that Gamow was drinking and was prone to drive off the side of mountains because Boulder goes right for Boulder, up into the foothills, into the mountains.
So, I don’t know if my dad knew it because my dad knew everybody in town. He grew up there. He was a friendly guy. He was well-loved you, knew everybody and everything. I don’t know if he knew that Gamow was drunk because he knew everybody or because he knew the chancellor who was in charge of cleaning up messes.
Anyway, when I was going to tweet about it, but, before I did, I wanted to play. You can’t slander the dead, or is it libel? Libel as a print, I think, okay, you can’t libel the dead. You can say whatever you want about dead people in America, whether it’s true or not.
So I could go ahead and say he’s drunk and not get in trouble. But I didn’t want to do that without some verification. So, I Googled “George Gamow drunk” and like a gazillion references came up. It’s part of his standard biography.
He was a heavy drinker. He died at age 64, probably because of his heavy drinking, which amazed me that this is a well-known part of his biography. That one of the greatest the physicists with one of the greatest theories – Oh, right now. I don’t believe in an unadulterated Big BANG, but it’s still a great theory.
one of the greatest theories of the 20th century in physics and there it was. A party monster came up with it. He wasn’t a solitary, surly drunk. He was a gregarious fun drunk. So, what’s that? So, he likes going to and throwing parties and having a lot of cocktails.
There is a picture with a funny party hat on when he went drinking and Einstein showed up and all these great physicists. Those guys.
Jacobsen: Overdrinky?
Rosner: I don’t know how Drinky Einstein was, but he had a number of affairs. He banged like five women while he was married to other women. That’s the number I’m most comfortable with. I don’t think he went out of his way to do it.
But I think if women threw themselves at him or if he had a meeting of the minds to some extent, then he’d do it. So, Feynman was an unstoppable pussy hound. He would seduce anybody who got within 50 feet of it.
The wives of his grad students. Wives and girlfriends of his grad students in his later years. He’d go to teaching at Cal Tech, living in Pasadena, and he’d spend some of his afternoons in strip joints just scribbling physics on bar napkins.
So when people think of science, they don’t think of drunk people or of Feynman getting late into a science. We’ve talked about that. That’s one of the original pickup artists with developing principles for what would and wouldn’t work with women.
You might meet in a bar. Anyway, one of the greatest fucking theories of the 20th century in physics came from a party monster.
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