Reader mode to the rescue... This whole article reeks of artificial academic elitism. Not the entire content of it, but just sprinkled in here and there.
I studied Physics, and I ended up doing some computational work around High-Energy Physics. All the postdocs I worked with received a lot of insane emails about crank theories. Many were more silly ideas, but some of the proposers had put in serious effort.
IIRC they were getting the same emails, like they were on a list. They were a magnet for this, particularly as high-energy physics was in the news a lot.
The people who seemed to get it worst were the particle-physics phenomenology people.
I would imagine they start out funny, but could after several years get tiring.
The "list" is self-organizing. When nobody listens to a purveyor of a poor theory, the proponent casts an ever-wider net.
Eventually, they have the bright idea to scrape the web pages of physics departments for emails. At least in my case, they started sending email within a few months of starting grad school.
The truly ambitious can decide to simply show up at the lab/building. A common refrain is, "here is my theory, tell me why it is wrong". No amount of countervailing evidence will be sufficient, usually because such a person will have critical misunderstandings of a fundamental concept or three and an intuitive sense that they are correct.
Don't invite them into your office and attempt to help them resolve said misunderstandings in a youthful desire to save them from wasting their time; they might not leave. Do, however, give them the references they might need in order to see the light.
Given his achievements, I would give him the benefits of the doubt that it's just a grumpy person who's seen enough polished turd having a rent.
I don't know if theoretical physics is particularly susceptible to producing the type of "bad" people that the OP writes about: but of all type of scientists I have worked with in the past, it appears that theoretical physicists do have higher tendency of doing those "bad" things described in the article.
On a personal level, I am biased because I have quit a job due to exactly the type of behavior in question, where everyone thought what we were doing was the greatest thing in history and they remained undeterred no matter how many times I said what we were doing is a pile of shit. Our competitors were like that, too.
I just cannot find it in me to get upset by the notion that a group of people who have tried hard to understand something, including by trying to rip apart their own and their colleagues' ideas, might know something, and also might have grounds to be irritated by being harangued by people who have done neither.
On the matter of the presentation of this web page, however...
lol people don't understand that science at gerard 't hooft's level is just as petty and vulgar as your local bar.
what i mean is very accomplished scientists brag and sneer and bluster all the time - they feel entitled to and we worship and empower them to. examples abound; read any of feynman's books; landau had a scale by which he measured other scientists; von neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with him; the cat fight right now around Mochizuki's proof; etc etc etc. if you've never been around these people you think they're saints when in fact they're almost universally assholes.
it's not unlike ultra-wealthy people competing with each other for the greatest monument to their wealth...
i'm sure someone will respond to me to say something like they need to be this way to accomplish (just like with the slavish worship of the ultra wealthy) what they've accomplished and to this i always present to them john bardeen, who won two nobels and still managed to be a good neighbor.
> you think they're saints when in fact they're almost universally assholes
This does not match my experience, and outside the classroom I have been in 1:1 or 2:1 situations with several Nobel prize winners. I'm commenting on individual demeanor, not whatever happens when departmental politics plays out.
As you describe Bardeen, I would take that to be the norm.
Edit: That much said, the topic article rubs me the wrong way. As someone above says, the tone is harsh.
> von neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with him
Imagine what that experience was like from his perspective, constantly explaining simple things to people too lazy to put in the work necessary to have a proper discussion about whatever before ultimately wasting his time. Over and over and over again. That gets old quickly no matter what level you're operating on.
Lol this is exactly what I preemptively alluded to - how we (as a culture) enable this kind of behavior. It becomes even worse when you realize that at least the ultra wealthy pay people for the right to abuse them and von Neumann et al are abusing, frequently, poorly paid junior scientists.
>That gets old quickly no matter what level you're operating on.
If you can't handle being around people that are differently abled from you then the answer is not to take your frustrations out on them. The answer is to stop being around people. No community/culture/society owes anyone, not even people at this level, some kind of pampered sphere of existence that revolves around them.
> If you can't handle being around people that are differently abled from you then the answer is not to take your frustrations out on them.
Of course. But von Neumann was just as human as the people who struggled to keep up with him, he just had different weaknesses. Having low emotional intelligence is every bit as deserving of understanding as having low general intelligence.
> The answer is to stop being around people. No community/culture/society owes anyone, not even people at this level, some kind of pampered sphere of existence that revolves around them.
You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited from von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a small price to pay.
>You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited from von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a small price to pay.
The flawed premise implicit in this is that he (or even someone else) wouldn't have produced all the same things while being cordial. More importantly the even greater flaw is the assumption that he wouldn't have produced even more if he'd been easier to work with
You could speculate to that effect, just as easily and correctly as you could speculate that he would have been even more productive still had he surrounded himself with people he didn't consider mentally slow.
Wait what? What did I say that lead you to that conclusion?
I'm sure there were people in his time who would rightly consider him to be slower than they were (and equally sure that he wouldn't be acknowledging that if confronted about it).
My point is more that he had his own flaws, just like the people he had trouble getting along with. Being around slow people _is_ often frustrating, especially if you're more concerned with working than teaching. Was he an ass? Absolutely. But we should we try to understand_why_ he was, rather than just talk about how he should have been kicked out of society. Especially in von Neumann's case, where his net utility to society was insanely high (compare to, say, Mochizuki).
