Our electricity got cut off Tuesday morning by [dont know if i should be naming companies], even though [insert major electricity retailer] was meant to have taken over 2 weeks ago. The result was me resorting to reading, with a flat battery in my laptop and nothing better to do. I picked up where i left off 12 months ago with A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, and read about some of the funniest people ever.
One guy, J.B.S. Haldane, son of John Scott Haldane, was absolutely crazy. His father did work on figuring out how not to get the bends while resurfacing when diving, and carbon monoxide poisoning. They did things the old school way, he slowly poisoned himself and measured samples of his own blood, until his blood saturation reached 56% and he was moments away from losing all muscle control. The son started doing his work around world war one when he was drafted, but said he found it "a very enjoyable experience" and he "enjoyed the opportunity of killing people." What a cracker!
For whatever reason he was obsessed with submariners and divers. He got his hands on a decompression chamber, which he called the "pressure pot". Just a metal cylindar with a small window which could seat a few people inside. One time he jumped in himself, just to see what would happen in a really quick ascent (from high pressure to normal). The fillings in his teeth exploded.
On another occasion, while poisoning himself with elevated levels of oxygen, Haldane had a fit so severe that he crushed several vertebrae. Collapsed lungs were a routine hazard. Perforated eardrums were quite common, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, 'the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.'
Are you getting the idea.
What was extraordinary about this was not that Haldane was willing to subject himself to such risk and discomfort in the pursuit of science, but that he had no trouble talking colleagues and loved ones into climbing into the chamber, too. Sent on a simulated descent, his wife once had a fit that lasted thirteen minutes. When at last she stopped bouncing across the floor, she was helped to her feet and sent home to cook dinner. ... A similar experiment with oxygen deprivation left Haldane without feeling in his buttocks and lower spine for six years.
Old scientest guys were also pretty funny, you might remember hearing about Bohr in chemistry or physics. He was a physicist, back in 1926 when quantum mechanics originated from a guy called Heisenberg (remember Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle). Bohr said that a person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said. When Heisenberg was asked "how could one envision an atom, [he] replied: 'Don't try.'"