History Forum / General / British History / October 2007

Needing no introduction "an" Usenet stalwart wrote:

Do your own essays...

If you could have an ultimate poker party and money wasn't a
limitation, what male / female high profile people from history or
from philosophy, whom you admire or even dislike a great deal (if
anyone named is now deceased, assume they were made to become alive),
would you most want to invite to it.    Plus what else would you want
to get up to with (or discuss with) any of the people named ?

Assuming that we all could speak the same language, Emanuel Kant.
I would ask him to explain his philosophy to me.

"There are no enemies in science just anomalies"
*CUR*

Helen Keller - and after cleaning her out we could discuss our
favourite music and taste in paintings.

Ronald Reagan.  He's the only cow poke I remember...well there's the-o-
door...and then there's Georgie, but think he's more howdy duty then
than anything.

Robert Oppenheimer who I knew in passing but never got to
sit down with and have a deep discussion. He was one of the most
under-estimated physicists of the last several centuries in my
estimation. He had the dual gift of ground breaking theoretical
insight and the extreme-practical. He was one of the most insightful
intelligent people I ever knew, and Ive known many. He was very
special in his insghts and mathematical creativity. He did original
work which to this day has not acheived wide attention, but will
within the next 100 years. He was thee first to put gravitational
models on a sound quantum theoretical basis and the first to
bring the notion of 'event horizons/black holes' into the classroom
at Princeton and U of Chicago. I worked with him briefly in a summer
seminar at the U of Chicago sponsored by Argonne
National Laboratories. We came close to developing models
which might explain the emergence of all fundamental particles
from asymmetries in time fluxes operating in an imaginary
state (which we postulated had real irrational numerical values).

Oppenheimer anticipated the emrgence of something later called
String Theory which he felt was a dead end, but a predictable
theoretical premise people would explore (to a dead end).

Had Oppenheimer lived another 100 years, or even 25 or 50,
I feel he might have gone down in history as another Einstein or
Newton. He was always that close to major breakthroughs (his
whole life was spent in such proximity). Although he did not
achieve great personal fame as a theoretical physicist, he was was
pivital over and over again to others acheiving Nobel Prises and the
like. He slighed off fame like it meant nothing! He hated politics and
politicians. And he was one of the nicest kindest people I have ever
known.

I would rather spend an hour with Oppy than a year with Einstein!

...

Abe Lincoln and the beaver.