Comments on: The Hair of Physicists (1930s)

By: Peter Zimmerman

Peter Zimmerman — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 01:10:08 +0000

At least through his Nobel award ceremony, Dick Feynman was quite conservatively cropped. I know personally; I stood in line next to him for the same men’s room. I don’t know when he started to wear it long.

By: One year of Restricted Data | Restricted Data

One year of Restricted Data | Restricted Data — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:06:27 +0000

[...] horrible maps or bizarre security videos or the emblems of the atomic institutions or even just one another’s hairstyles. A hauntingly grim painting that I’d love to know more about: “Atomic Landscape [...]

By: Giants’ Shoulders #49: The “Crisis what Crisis?” edition. | The Renaissance Mathematicus

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:56:12 +0000

[...] Staying in the 20th century we have Paul on Philadelphia’s somewhat bizarre Einstein Museum, the NYT on a strange case of biological fraud, the Smithsonian on Louis Leakey, Amy on the first women in space, Larry Moran on Stephen J Gould, Berfois on Hugh Everett, the BBC on Peter Higgs, Egil on religion and scientific change between the wars, and finally Nuclear Secrecy on the Hair of Physics! [...]

By: Friday Image: Atomic Editorial Cartoons (August 1945) » Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:05:08 +0000

[...] Another from the Chicago Tribune, this one more explicitly ambivalent about what the bomb means for the future. Gotta love the depiction of the long-haired scientist… [...]

By: Weekly Document: Bethe on SUNSHINE and Fallout (1954) » Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 11:47:45 +0000

[...] from 1954, after SUNSHINE had been completed. It’s a request from December 1954 from the well-coifed Hans Bethe to the aforementioned Willard F. Libby, the physical chemist best known as the [...]

By: Mike Lehman

Mike Lehman — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 03:32:26 +0000

Gotta be careful when playing into mad scientist stereotypes with your hair style – especially when working on bombs.

This brings to mind another name for this phenomenon — van de Graaff hair.

If you look like you have it, even when not touching the generator, then you really must have something going on up stairs. Yikes!

By: Mark Leifer

Mark Leifer — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 18:33:21 +0000

These photos of Oppie are great! I suspect that Einstein, who was the only scientist of his day with any significant public exposure, started the hair thing, It was taken to the next level by director Fritz Lang, however, who created the wild-haired mad scientist in his widely seen and highly influential science-fiction film “Metropolis”. Check out the evil Dr. Rotwang’s hair in these images. The film character became the template for all mad scientists to come.

Against this background, perhaps big hair could only be carried off by scientists who really had the goods–beyond Oppie and Bethe, Feynman comes to mind. Anyone else risked being marginalized as a mad scientist.

By: Alex Wellerstein

Alex Wellerstein — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 03:11:55 +0000

Fair enough, Will! I was thinking of mesons (something Oppenheimer spent a lot of time working on), but my brain reached to the wrong word and I didn’t think to double-check it.

By: Will Thomas

Will Thomas — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 20:42:25 +0000

I’m going to be a total pedant and point out that, as far as I know, nobody talked about “muons” in the ’30s. Generally speaking, it was all “mesons” (if you were talking about the theoretical Yukawa particle) or “mesotrons” (if you were talking about the medium-mass cosmic ray). Actually, Bethe was the one who advocated that terminological distinction. It was only once the pi-meson, or pion, was distinguished in 1947 that the original mesotron starting being referred to as the mu-meson.

By: Alex Wellerstein

Alex Wellerstein — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:23:56 +0000

“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed…”