We saw in a previous pill how the mathematical beauty of the trajectories of balls in billiards could serve as an analgesic against the pains of power. Today we will see that there may be a certain incompatibility between science, billiards and love (or perhaps it is only with heterosexual sex; as we will see, the pill does not go so far as to specify it).
This possible, though unproven, side effect of billiards was reported by Stanislaw Ulam in his memoirs, referring to the Hungarian scientists Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) and John von Neumann (1903-1957). We have reported on the former, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963, here (see, for example, this post o this one); and on the latter, who celebrated the 120th anniversary of his birth this year, here too (see this post). Both were born in Hungary, but spent most of their scientific careers in the USA, expelled there by Nazi barbarism. They had been trained, however, in Europe. Both had first attended the Lutheran School in Budapest (Wigner one year ahead of von Neumann), which at that time was one of the best secondary schools in Europe (I remind that both were Jewish). Later they also coincided at the Zurich Polytechnic (where Einstein also studied).
It was there, according to Ulam, that they discovered the incompatibility between science, billiards and love: “Eugene and Johnny went to a billiard room and asked a local expert to teach them how to play. The expert said to them: ‘Are you interested in your studies? Are you interested in women? If you really want to learn to play billiards seriously, you’ll have to forget about both’. Johnny and Wigner retired to a corner to deliberate for a few moments; they then decided that they could give up one, but not both. And they didn’t learn to play billiards.”
References
Ulam, S., Adventures of a mathematician, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.
(On the cover picture: photo of Shanelle Lorraine, from the University of Central Florida’s official pool team).
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