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Ten Scientists Commit Suicide!

RSLancastr

www.StopSylvia.com
RSLancastr
Joined
Sep 7, 2001
Messages
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Location
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In a recent (now-deleted) thread on a believer forum, one of the believers brought up something I had not heard before, but which has the distinct aroma of an urban legend about it.

She said that many people simply cannot handle concepts which they find too much at odds with their currently held beliefs (no big news there), but as an example of that, she said (and I am paraphrasing here):

"It's like when science proved that everything - chairs, rocks, people - is made up mostly of empty space, several scientists (I think it was ten) committed suicide. My professor told us this story back in college."
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Again, I'm paraphrasing there, but I think I have the essence of it right.

I tried to find references to the story on Snopes and elsewhere, but to no avail.

Anyone else familiar with this?

I have no clue why this knowledge would make anyone - let alone a scientist - commit suicide.
 
That's nothing!

I heard that God himself vanished in a puff of logic after inventing an online translation engine.

I read it somewhere I think.
 
So just when did science prove that "everything - chairs, rocks, people - is made up mostly of empty space"? And like RLancaster said, that concept wouldn't disturb anybody, least of all a scientist. Anyway, how many scientists after the Middle Ages believed that everything was solid?
It's an urban legend all right, on a par with that perennial story about God proving His existence to an atheist professor by playing around with a piece of chalk.
 
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Regardless of the silliness of the statement, why would such a "discovery" cause anyone to Kill themselves...how would it, as a fact, change anything? Am I missing something?
 
I have never heard of any suicides atributed to the Rutherford gold foil experiment, and am sure that none of the participants commited suicide shortly after it.

If it was physicists that year, well is 10 doing that statisticaly significant?
 
Having new discoveries really is the only way to effectively and humanely control the scientist population. If their numbers become too great, special hunting permits need to be issued - its all quite tiresome. Luckily after new scientific discoveries are made, several will kill themselves. It's only logical.
 
Multiple choice question:

A physicist makes a discovery sure to give him a Nobel Prize. Does he:

A: Kill himself?
B: Party like it's 1999 and hurry to write an article for Nature?
C: On Planet X they have all the answers so nobody makes new discoveries.
 
Ririon said:
Multiple choice question:

A physicist makes a discovery sure to give him a Nobel Prize. Does he:

A: Kill himself?
B: Party like it's 1999 and hurry to write an article for Nature?
C: On Planet X they have all the answers so nobody makes new discoveries.
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Well as the discovery noted seems to be the Rutherford gold foil experiment, that showed that the plum pudding model was incorrect and that mass and charge where concentrated into a very small region of the atom. I can find the people involved and when they died.

The experiment was in 1909. The people involved died in 1937, 1945 and 1970. It does not seem like there was any dirrect connection between discovering that matter is mostly empty and commiting suicide.

You might be able to argue for a connection to the Nazi party as Geiger was a member of that, or being on the new zeland 100 dolar bill, as rutherford is on that.
 
This is what I found out. I found this page on the Wikipedia of Scientists who committed suicide. I found they all died at different times in different parts of the world, and they all worked in many different disciplines. So there aren't a group of 10 who all died at the same time, in the same place by suicide.

Here is an interesting thing, though. George R. Price, born 1922 and died 1975, a geneticist, was an aethiest. He converted to Christianity, gave away all his stuff and then committed suicide.

So I could not find a bunch scientists committing suicide together, but I did find one that committed suicide after converting to Christianity.
 
This seems like an odd variation of the Pythagorean legend - the one where they killed the guy that proved that the square root of two was an irrational number.
 
sophia8 said:
So just when did science prove that "everything - chairs, rocks, people - is made up mostly of empty space"? And like RLancaster said, that concept wouldn't disturb anybody, least of all a scientist. Anyway, how many scientists after the Middle Ages believed that everything was solid?
It's an urban legend all right, on a par with that perennial story about God proving His existence to an atheist professor by playing around with a piece of chalk.
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Essentially early 1900s when they (Rutherford I believe) did the "let's shoot really energetic small particles through really thin gold leaf" experiment and noticed that most passed straight through but a very few were deflected - demonstrating something there but not a heck of a lot of it,
 
fuelair said:
Essentially early 1900s when they (Rutherford I believe) did the "let's shoot really energetic small particles through really thin gold leaf" experiment and noticed that most passed straight through but a very few were deflected - demonstrating something there but not a heck of a lot of it,
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Err, no. The fact that it was a thin piece of gold showed that there wasn't much stuff there (Avogadro's number was worked out before Rutherford's experiment). The observation that this thin piece of gold would occasionally cause the particles to rebound completely indicated that what positively charged stuff was in there was concentrated into an incredibly small volume. The analogy is "imagine firing cannon balls at tissue paper, and seeing one bounce back at you".

Of course, even knowing that the positively charged particles are in a small fraction of the atom's volume doesn't say the atom is mostly empty. If you assume electrons are points with no volume, then you have the problem that 'voluminous' objects don't exist (unless you imagine that electrons are points but protons aren't, which seems like a very odd thing to imagine, in my opinion), and if you allow the electrons to have some volume why shouldn't they take up the entire atom, or at least a large part of it?
 
RSLancastr said:
She said that many people simply cannot handle concepts which they find too much at odds with their currently held beliefs (no big news there), but as an example of that, she said (and I am paraphrasing here):
Click to expand...

At that time the whole physics of the atom being rewriten so I doubt anyone predisposed to comit suicide due to that kind of thing would still be around.
 
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