by Lawrence Bush on April 25, 2012
Yuval Ne’eman, who founded Israel’s space program in 1983 and was a critical player in the country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, died at 80 on this date in 2006. Born in Tel Aviv in 1925, Ne’eman joined the Haganah at age 15 and ultimately rose to help organize the IDF into a reservist-based army for which he developed a mobilization system and wrote the first draft of the defense doctrine. Ne’eman was deputy head of Israeli military intelligence and created a database for all intelligence information. He also invented the spying bugs that yielded data that helped destroy Egypt’s air force on the ground in the 1967 Six Day War. Ne’eman’s scientific accomplishments included discovery of the quark (independently of Murray Gell-Man and George Zweig), and his honors included the Israel Prize (1969) and the Albert Einstein Award (1970). He was also a pioneer of extremist politics in Israel: In 1979, he founded Tehiya, a breakaway from Likud, to protest the Camp David peace talks, and he was a stubborn advocate of maximum territorial expansion. “Most Israelis,” wrote Lawrence Jaffe in a Guardian obituary, “deemed his views lunatic and often repulsive.”
“The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.” —Yuval Ne’eman
by Lawrence Bush on February 14, 2012
Richard Feynman, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965 and was one of the world’s great popularizers of science, died on this date in 1988. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, he did not speak until he was three but proved to be a math prodigy. He attended MIT as an undergraduate and Princeton for graduate studies, where his first seminar was attended by Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. “Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations,” writes James Gleick, his biographer, “like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau — but few others.” Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and then became an influential teacher at Cornell and Caltech, with many of his lectures collected into books, including The Feynman Lectures on Physics, of which more than 3 million copies have been sold in various languages. His many other books include Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think? A lifelong atheist, Feynman preferred not to identity as Jewish, even ethnically: “To select for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory,” he wrote in declining to be included in a book on Jewish Nobel laureates. (He probably would not have approved of his inclusion in JEWDAYO, either.)
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard Feynman
by Lawrence Bush on February 3, 2012
Facebook was launched from a Harvard dormitory room by Mark Zuckerberg, then 19 years old, and three classmates on this date in 2004. By summer they had an investor, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal, and an office in Palo Alto, California. Eight years later the company prepared an Initial Public Offering, was valued at $100 billion, and was on its way to having a billion users worldwide. (Zuckerberg and his colleagues had previously turned down a few buy-out offers by major corporations.”Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me,” he said.) Facebook has been a major force of communication in political uprisings worldwide and was a key tool in Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2008. The technology has also been an object of fear and loathing among people who criticize it as undermining to privacy and as a source of obsession and fetishization of the self. In December 2010, Zuckerberg joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in signing the “Giving Pledge,” a promise to donate at least half of their wealth to charity over the course of their lives.
“The question isn’t, ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?” —Mark Zuckerberg
by Lawrence Bush on December 16, 2011
Edwin Joseph Cohn, a biochemist whose work at Harvard Medical School with blood plasma saved many thousands of wounded soldiers during World War II, was born in New York City on this date in 1892. From 1938 to 1942, Cohn led the blood fractionation project, which most significantly isolated the serum albumin element of blood plasma. Albumin helps maintain osmotic pressure in the blood vessels to prevent their collapse; battlefield transfusions of the serum can prevent death from shock. After the war, Cohn developed systems by which every element of donated blood would be used, with nothing wasted. He created the Protein Foundation, now called the Center for Blood Research, in 1953, before dying from a stroke.
“Das Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft (Blood is a very special liquid).” —from Goethe’s Faust, inscribed in Cohn’s office
Yuval Ne’eman, who founded Israel’s space program in 1983 and was a critical player in the country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, died at 80 on this date in 2006. Born in Tel Aviv in 1925, Ne’eman joined the Haganah at age 15 and ultimately rose to help organize the IDF into a reservist-based army for which he developed a mobilization system and wrote the first draft of the defense doctrine. Ne’eman was deputy head of Israeli military intelligence and created a database for all intelligence information. He also invented the spying bugs that yielded data that helped destroy Egypt’s air force on the ground in the 1967 Six Day War. Ne’eman’s scientific accomplishments included discovery of the quark (independently of Murray Gell-Man and George Zweig), and his honors included the Israel Prize (1969) and the Albert Einstein Award (1970). He was also a pioneer of extremist politics in Israel: In 1979, he founded Tehiya, a breakaway from Likud, to protest the Camp David peace talks, and he was a stubborn advocate of maximum territorial expansion. “Most Israelis,” wrote Lawrence Jaffe in a Guardian obituary, “deemed his views lunatic and often repulsive.”
