"Nikola Tesla and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) had quite the interesting friendship over the years.
Twain “cured” Tesla of an illness through his writing:
“I had hardly completed my course at the Real Gymnasium when I was prostrated with a dangerous illness or rather, a score of them, and my condition became so desperate that I was given up by physicians. During this period I was permitted to read constantly, obtaining books from the Public Library which had been neglected and entrusted to me for classification of the works and preparation of the catalogues. One day I was handed a few volumes of new literature unlike anything I had ever read before and so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state. They were the earlier works of Mark Twain and to them might have been due the miraculous recovery which followed. Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship between us, I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears.”
And Tesla once cured Twain’s constipation by having him stand on a “healing machine”.
And in later years, Clemens would regularly visit with Tesla, engaging in stunningly intelligent entertainment such as shooting an x-ray gun at his head for fun. There’s even rumors that Twain’s story A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, an early sci-fi classic, based its main character around Tesla."====http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/142...-twain-had
"A picture taken in Princeton, New Jersey, in August 1950 shows Albert Einstein standing next to the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel. Both men are looking at the camera. Einstein is wearing a rumpled shirt and baggy slacks held up by suspenders. His body sags. Gödel, dressed in a white linen suit and wearing owlish spectacles, looks lean and almost elegant, the austerity of his expression softened by an odd sensuality that plays over the lower half of his face. The men are at ease; they are indulging the photographer. Clearly, they are friends. It is hardly surprising that they should have come to know each other. They were members of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and their offices were close. As refugees from the Third Reich, they had both felt the harsh breath of history and had in common the rich, throaty German language, a world of words in which the pivot of memory turns on Goethe, not Shakespeare. Although Einstein was a physicist and Gödel a mathematician, they shared an intellectual daring that transcended their disciplines.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems, published in 1931 when he was only 25, had rewritten the ground rules of modern science much as Einstein's theory of relativity had done 15 years before. Elementary arithmetic, Gödel demonstrated, is incomplete and will remain so. Whatever axiomatic system you base your calculations on, there are true statements that lie beyond the system's reach. Adding such statements to the system as further axioms does no good. The enriched system is also incomplete, the infection moving upward by degrees.
Einstein once remarked to Oskar Morgenstern, one of the cofounders of game theory, that he went to the Institute chiefly to walk home with Gödel. ("Um das Privileg zu haben, mit Gödel zu Fuss nach Hause gehen zu dürfen." There is in the original German a note of gentle deference that cannot quite be translated.) They did so often until Einstein's death in 1955. Yet their scientific affinities grew out of profound personal differences. Einstein was a man of unshakable self-confidence. Gödel retreated before controversy and twice suffered nervous collapses; he was, under the best of circumstances, a valetudinarian, and under the worst, a hypochondriac. When the two men met, in 1933, word of young Gödel's genius had yet to leave the academic cloister, where it was conveyed in whispers. Einstein, on the other hand, was 54, nearing the end of his productive career. Although he retained a sense of impudent playfulness, he had also acquired a marmoreal aspect, transcending fame itself to become one of the century's mythic figures, his plump, sad face known throughout the world.
These differences were inevitably reflected in the nature of the friendship. In a letter written to the biographer Carl Seelig, Einstein's secretary remarked on the "awed hush" that greeted Einstein whenever he appeared at seminars or conferences. Not even the sharp-tongued Wolfgang Pauli, a fellow Nobel Prize winner in physics, could bring himself to treat the great man as if he were mortal. Gödel seemed to share something of this attitude. In letters to his mother, he appeared to take pleasure in affirming that through his friendship with Einstein, he was basking in reflected glory. "I have so far been to his house two or three times," he wrote in 1946. "I believe it rarely happens that he invites anybody to his house."
Still, in the grandeur of their scientific achievements, Einstein and Gödel both stood alone and so must have turned to each another in part because they could turn to no one else. Although the content of their conversations has been lost, we can imagine at least one topic they must have discussed on those long evening walks. In 1948 Gödel turned his attention to Einstein's supreme creation, the general theory of relativity, and succeeded in coaxing a new and flamboyant universe from the alembic of its symbols. He did so by providing an exact solution to the heart of the theory—a field equation that allows one to calculate the force of a gravitational field—and his analysis reflects the distinctive characteristics of all his work. It is original and logically coherent, the argument set out simply but with complete and convincing authority. A sense of superb taste prevails throughout. There is no show.
"The famous psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli had a great influence on each others lives. In 1930, Pauli was experiencing personal troubles due to the end of his first marriage and unresolved issues with his mother’s suicide in 1927 [1]. His father recommended that he see Jung [2]. Jung arranged for Pauli to be analyzed by Erna Rosenbaum, an assistant to Jung. Rosenbaum advised Pauli to record his dreams, and Pauli continued to do this for most of his life [3]. In 1932, Pauli began to see Jung himself for personal therapy, which lasted until Pauli’s second marriage in 1934. However, the two men remained in correspondence for years afterwards [4].
Jung analyzed many of Pauli’s dreams. The interpretation of these dreams, as well as his correspondence with Pauli, influenced Jung’s theories [5]. The interpretation of some of Pauli’s dreams featured prominently in Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy [6].
In 1952 Jung and Pauli published The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche in which they presented the synchronicity principle [7]. The synchronicity principle assumes that indestructible energy can be connected through two ways in the space-time continuum. The events can either be connected through causality, where there is a connection between two events (i.e. one causes the other) or synchronicity, which is when there is an inconsistent connection, or one that is not explained by causality [8]."====http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/211_fall2013...page3.html
"While minister to France in 1778, Benjamin Franklin met Voltaire at the Academy of the Sciences. On hand was John Adams, who wrote that “neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected” of them by the crowd. Eventually, the two embraced and kissed each other on the cheek, an act that Nicolas de Condorcet said provoked such enthusiastic approval that “it was said to be Solon who embraced Sophocles.”===http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/foreigne...et-embrace
Matisse and Picasso:
"Modern art was born ugly. “It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered
land of the ugly,” an American critic wrote, describing the 1910 Salon des Indépendents in Paris. “The drawing was crude past all belief, the color was as atrocious as the subject. Had a new era of art begun?” Even Matisse himself was sometimes shocked by his creations. According to his biographer Hilary Spurling, “His own paintings filled him with perturbation. At some point in 1901 or 1902 he slashed one of them with a palette knife.”
If Henri Matisse was regarded as the father of modern art at the dawn of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso was sleeping with the same muse. When Picasso finished his form shattering masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, portraying five prostitutes with primal masklike faces, their nudity more geometric than erotic, even his early dealer Ambroise Vollard blurted out, “It’s the work of a madman.” Matisse and Picasso didn’t like each other’s paintings at first, but they seemed to sense at once the power each had to challenge and stimulate the other. For the rest of their lives each would keep a keen eye on the other’s new work, provoking each other to paint the same subjects, sometimes even with the same title. There are many ways to describe their relationship. It could be called a rivalry, a dialogue, a chess game—Matisse himself once compared it to a boxing match. But it also became the abiding friendship of two titans who, daring to paint the ugly, transformed our sense of beauty in art..."
"From his earliest days as a prodigy in Bonn, Ludwig van Beethoven's great ambition had been to travel to Vienna to meet - and take lessons with - the man he knew was the greatest living composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It happened, when Beethoven was 16 years of age, thanks largely to the intervention of his patron Count Waldstein with Elector Max Franz.
At around March 20 he left Bonn on six months' leave of absence from the court orchestra, and arrived in Vienna on 20 April. Armed with a letter of introduction from Max Franz, whom Mozart knew, he gained entry into Mozart's home and was ushered into the music room to meet his great idol.
Mozart was in no mood to receive him. His health was plaguing him - his untimely death at the age of 35 was less than five years away - and he did not relish having to stop work to listen to a child prodigy from somewhere hundreds of miles away.
"Play something," he told Beethoven. Beethoven played the opening of Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto. "Not that," said Mozart. "Anybody can play that. Play something of your own."
Beethoven did. When the young man had finished, Mozart walked into the adjoining room where his wife Constanze was entertaining friends.
"Stanzi, Stanzi," he said, pointing back into the music room, "watch out for that boy. One day he will give the world something to talk about."
He agreed to take Beethoven on as a pupil, but when Beethoven returned to his lodgings there was an urgent telegram from his father telling him to return to Bonn by the next stage - his mother was seriously ill with consumption and doctors feared for her life.
Beethoven had no choice but to leave. Less than two weeks after arriving in Vienna for what promised to be a trip that would change his life, he left for Bonn - without ever achieving his ambition of taking lessons with Mozart.
By the time he returned to Vienna in November 1792, Mozart was dead.
Beethoven's admiration for, and championing of, Mozart's music remained undimmed for the rest of his life. In 1798 he published his variations for cello and piano on the aria "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen" from Mozart's The Magic Flute, and in 1802 published his variations - again for cello and piano - on another Magic Flute aria, Papageno's "Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen".
Aug 26, 2015 01:28 AM
(This post was last modified: Aug 26, 2015 01:31 AM by Magical Realist.)
![[Image: Godel_6.jpeg]](http://www.p-i-a.com/Magazine/Issue17/Godel_6.jpeg)
![[Image: gall_1401301802-pauli-e-jung-20140528_202949.jpg]](https://i0.wp.com/laspezia.cronaca4.it/upload/immagini/librerie/21-usa-e-getta-provvisorie/gall_1401301802-pauli-e-jung-20140528_202949.jpg)