Nick and Paddy's Top Five Rudeboy Scientists

No, this isn’t a late night Channel 4 countdown – this is probably higher budget, and much more interesting. Before we begin we should consider what it means to be a ‘rudeboy’ in science. Science rudeboys are few and far between. Earning the title ‘rudeboy’ is hard, and whilst intelligence is important, it is certainly not everything. Take Gregor Mendel, a hugely intelligent man who is widely credited as the father of modern genetics. Gregor spent much of his life in a monastery, interested in beekeeping and gardening. Hardly gripping. Compare this to Albert Hofman. Hofman not only discovered LSD, but tested it out on himself, having no idea of the dosage or the side effects. Whilst riding a bike. Hofman went on to do further research into hallucinogens, investigating magic mushrooms, salvia and other varients of LSD. In short, Hofman would not of been out of place in ‘Trainspotting’. As we will see below, to be a rudeboy in science you have to back yourself, not play by the rules, be outspoken, and generally change the way people think.

5. Carl Scheele

Scheele, a Swedish born scientist, is a person few have heard of, which is unfortunate as he was a good chemist, discovering no less than 8 elements (including Molybdenum, and Chlorine before Davy) in his life, as well as developing processes for producing phosphorus and prussic acid. Many of his discoveries were hijacked by others, and there is even proof that he discovered oxygen before Lavoisier. Scheele had little formal education as a chemist, instead he made it up as he went along. Ultimately this would lead to his downfall; deciding that a true chemist should taste all of his chemicals, Scheele was the unfortunate discoverer of hydrogcyanic acid, and the rest, as they say, is history.

4. Wolfgang Pauli

A theoretical physicist much respected by his colleagues for his deep insight into the newly emerging quantum theory, Pauli was a genius. He was, however, not shy at disclosing his feelings on others research, commenting on one paper that ‘this theory is worthless. It isn’t even wrong.’ It was said that ‘Pauli would not just criticize your work; he would insult you for producing it.’ Friends with Bohr, another prominent scientist of the time, many of their conversations reportedly ended with Pauli shouting ‘shut up, you are being an idiot, I will not listen to another word.’

3.Lord Kelvin

Lord Kelvin, a ‘victorian Superman’, gained renown in almost every branch of the physical sciences, producing revolutionary work on electromagnetism, thermodynamics and light, churning out a massive 661 papers and 69 patents. Kelvin started university at the age of 10, and in his teens published papers on pure mathematics that were so good, he had to publish anonymously to avoid embarassing his superiors. Kelvin argued fiercely and was loathe to admit he was wrong about anything. One subject he was adament on was the age of the earth (although he revised he estimate about 5 times), so much so that Rutherford has been quoted as saying ‘I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep.’ It appears that even the world’s greatest thinkers have trouble staying awake in lectures after a heavy night out.

2.Richard Feynman

Described as an ‘eccentric genius’ Feynman was a particle physicist, quantum legend, founder of QED, and in between found time to help make the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos. One of Feynman’s hobbies was lockpicking, and he famously told a story of his days on the Manhatten project where he managed to open most of the safes on site and find the American nuclear secrets. He eventually demonstrated the problem to the Army officials in charge. Horrified, they promised to do something about it. The response? A memo ordering the staff to keep Feynman away from their safes. He was also known for his working out of complex physics problems on the back of napkins. Not a big deal, except he preferred to do it in topless bars, and even classed his favourite one as ‘his office’. His life mottos were ‘don’t trust anything rigorously grounded in science’ and ‘what do you care what other people think?’ Feynman changed the way we think about particle physics, whilst at the same time being the sort of man you could chat to in the pub.

1. Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton is a rudeboy of the highest order. Described by Bill Bryson as ‘brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, paranoid and distracted,’ Newton laid the basis for physics for centuries to come. Most people know about his laws of motion, gravity and optics (indeed it was Newtons equations of motions which put man on the moon in the 1960’s), but many do not know of the other experiments he carried out in his (home built) lab – he inserted a long sewing needle into his eye socket ‘just to see what would happen’, he stared at the sun for as long as he could, and blinded himself for a week. Whilst investigating diffraction he decided to see if he could make the lens in his eye diffract light, and decided the best way of testing this was to jam a pen in between his eye and his eye socket (incidentally it worked). He was so frustrated by the limits of mathematics at the time that he invented differential calculus; and then kept it a secret for 3 decades. A large proportion of his life was dedicated to alchemy, and a sample of his hair studied recently showed it contained almost 40 times the normal amount of mercury present in humans. So obsessed was Newton with gold that he was put in charge of the Royal Mint, where he would routinely have suspected counterfeiters hanged. Much of Newton’s work in alchemy is unknown as he was so secretive, as are his involvements in countless secret societies. A true rudeboy, and a contender for histories cleverest man, Newton was definitley one of a kind.