Improbable Research

Italian member of the Parliament Gabriella Carlucci is giving logic lessons. Today’s lesson is the idea that: Anyone who does not have a Nobel Prize is at best second-rate.

Carlucci has been making speeches and writing letters disparaging the work of Italian physicist Luciano Maiani. Carlucci, who does not yet have a Nobel Prize, sent the following letter to Nobel Prize winner (and Luciano Maiani’s research collaborator) Sheldon Glashow:

Dear Prof. Glashow,

You wrote to the President Prodi brutally insulting me, yet—without getting to the substance of things.

I inform you that the contents of the letter that caused your anger come from news published on italian newspapers, on Nature and “Lettere al Nuovo Cimento” [an italian-scientific publication of secondary importance, ndt]. News that were never disproven. I write to you only now to ask you one simple question:

If Maiani and his friends are, as you say, stellar luminaries highly esteemed throughout the world, why did they never win a Nobel prize ? Yet, italian Particle Physics (and in particular that in Rome) is in percentage and absolute value among the best financed in the world.

I hope you will answer without insulting me. And do not tell lies: I could surprise you.

Regards,

Gabriella Carlucci.

That letter (actually, this translation of that letter) appears on a detailed history of Gabriella Carlucci’s adventure, prepared by physicist Tommaso Dorigo. For a more concise history, see the Gravitas Free Zone Weblog.

(Thanks to investigator Giovanni Peccati for bringing this to our attention.)

U.S. patent #7255627 was granted to Elena N. Bodnar of Hinsdale, Illinois, and Raphael C. Lee and Sandra Marijan of Chicago on August 14, 2007 for an “Garment device convertible to one or more facemasks.” Their intent, they say, is “to provide a garment which is operable to be converted into a facemask” and “to increase accessibility to facemasks.” This is:

“a garment device which converts into one or more facemasks. In one embodiment, the garment device is a bra or a brassiere garment. The bra has two cups…. The inner portions of the cups are disconnectable, and the outer portions of the cups are disconnectable. As such, the bra is separable into two halves. Each halve is securable to a user’s face to form a facemask….”

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Medical Review,” published in AIR 14:3.)

H. Paul Shuch has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

This photo shows me lecturing (?) this past summer at NRAO Green Bank, West Virginia. My hair speaks for itself.

H. Paul Shuch, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Executive Director Emeritus, The SETI League, Inc.
Cogan Station Pennsylvania, USA

Investigator Stanley Eigen writes:

What’s wrong with baseball - mathematically that is?

I don’t know but apparently G.H. Hardy did.

Hardy was a pure mathematician in Cambridge. Outside of mathematics, he is probably best known as having recognized the Indian genius Ramanujan. Just to remind you, Ramanujan was a poor clerk in Madras with limited education who invented (discovered - whatever you want to call it) a huge number of new mathematical formulas. In 1913, he sent off three letters crammed with equations to English mathematicians. The first two mathematicians ignored him. The third, Hardy, knew genius when he saw it.

Anyway, besides mathematics, Hardy’s passion was cricket. He didn’t just watch cricket or play cricket, he analyzed cricket, judged people by their own analysis of cricket and rated people in terms of cricket.

C. P. Snow was a physicist and novelist. He went on to coin the phrase “The Two Cultures”, lamenting the gulf between scientists and “literary intellectuals”. He tells of his first meeting with Hardy when he was a new fellow at Christ’s College. Hardy, he explained “without any preamble whatever began: ‘You’re supposed to know something about cricket, aren’t you?’ ” Hardy proceeded to put him through “a moderately stiff viva”, after which came a series of “more tactical questions.”

Snow passed, they became friends and it was to Snow that Hardy told about his letter. You see, Hardy, being a famous mathematician, was often invited to the United States. But there was no cricket. So Hardy turned to baseball. I was told, that Hardy once explained that he preferred visiting Harvard University to Princeton University because Boston had two baseball teams while Princeton had none (the Braves were still in Boston at that time).

But there was a problem and, according to Snow, Hardy “wrote a serious suggestion to the Baseball Commissioners, proposing a technical emendation to one of the rules.” What that was, and if it was implemented I just don’t know.

(I got the quotes from the foreword to Hardy’s book A Mathematician’s Apology. The book is approximately 100 pages but Hardy only wrote half of it. The other half is the foreword by Snow.)

The October issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Ig Nobel winners; Genoa presentation; tongue scraper poets, Delicious Guinea Pigs; Draculaic Disorders; Oddington, Genius, Ghoul; Almond/Dracula; Supersymmetry and Ghosts; etc.

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