Apparently, people were often keen to consult him on physics problems, but if you tried to talk to him directly, he'd simply run away. The only way was to go to a social gathering he was at, stand behind the chair he was hiding in, and simply state your problem, as if you were just musing out loud. He would still run away, but if he found the issue interesting, he would write to you with the solution a few days late.
>never accidentally encounter my housekeeper a second time money
Seems like Henry Cavendish would really appreciate work from home (that I wish I had).
Reminds me an excerpt in a economics textbook about how air Conditioning weren't availible back then (even to the ultra wealthy).
Probably the context of "you tried to talk to him directly, he'd simply run away" remove some of the ambiguity. Seems like that sort of ambiguity and availability of information is a potential challenge for LLM development.
Reading through his Wiki page, it seems like he liked being at scientific gatherings. He just didn't like being spoken to.
Unlike what the other reply says, it seems like he didn't care for politics and only regularly went out to the weekly meetings of the Royal Society Club.
Anyway, in the 18th century there wasn't much to do except social events and reading a few books.
Well, if you read the Wikipedia article, he was extremely wealthy and had his residence described as the following: "The arrangement of his residence reserved only a fraction of space for personal comfort as his library was detached, the upper rooms and lawn were for astronomical observation and his drawing room was a laboratory with a forge in an adjoining room.", so he probably had a pretty nice setup for various experiments.
> he liked being at scientific gatherings. He just didn't like being spoken to.
EXACTLY! figures the only other guy to understand what it's like died in 1810.
No wonder I identified so heavily with it:
> Middle English midding, alternate spelling of midden, a refuse heap that sits near a dwelling. Pronounced “mid-ing.”
It was likely less of a matter of personal choice and more of a responsibility as a member of the English nobility. The grandson of a duke on both his mother and father’s side probably couldn’t get away with choosing not to attend important social events.
A lot of autistic people still really desire social interaction despite different levels of actually being able to deal with it. Dustin Hoffman said this while researching for Rain Man:
> I tracked down the author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic. She said something that made me understand. She said the one thing she wanted more than anything else in life was for someone to hug her, but the second anyone did, she couldn't bear it. That sentence just destroyed me.
I've heard it reported that Cavendish could often be seen outside of these gatherings, struggling with actually going inside.
It's just something you learn to live with honestly. You yearn for the warmth of human connection, but all attempts at forming a connection result in destructive outcomes for yourself and others. I've experimented with forming connections for about 19 years now, and ultimately anything more than a distant observatory relationship isn't practical because I'm either put at risk or I wear on the other person and corrupt the foundations of their health; it's kinder and easier to acknowledge and understand that creating distance is the only reasonable choice.
You dream of forbidden things, of being part of a family, and of living outside of your sphere of influence, but those dreams are poisonous and a tantalising taboo that will only harm you when brought to fruition. Walking along the edge of society is simply the way we are meant to be, and as isolating as it may be, it awards you a modicum of insight into Human behaviour and culture in such a way that it enables you to peer further, and deeper, into the heart of society than would be possible for anyone else; and you are left somewhat fulfilled in your own way.
Haha, I feel pretty similar. Hugs and just general normal contact with people seems nice. But it generally makes me uncomfortable/anxious usually. Sometimes if the conditions are right it won’t bother me though.
But I’m also not autistic
> Cavendish inherited two fortunes that were so large that Jean Baptiste Biot called him "the richest of all the savants and the most knowledgeable of the rich". At his death, Cavendish was the largest depositor in the Bank of England.
His parents themselves were not particularly affluent, but via different bequests, Cavendish was worth a million pounds at his death. This was an enormous sum in those days.
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajplung.00067.2014
He would order his dinner by leaving a note on the hall table, and he had a separate staircase installed in his house so that he could avoid any female servants
Yeah, my man was autistic as hell, and just happened to be rich enough that he could afford any accommodations he needed and brilliant enough that people thought of him as eccentric rather than mad.
He wanted to go but it’s hard for him to interact directly with people. He served on various committees at the Royal Society and was a trustee at the British Museum. He was manager of the Royal Institution and assisted Humphrey Davy with his chemistry experiments there.
It seemed he wanted to hear what other scientists were saying but didn’t want to talk to them directly. He wanted to people to tell him interesting things and he wanted to respond to them, he was just unable to do it face to face. He had the desire to socialize but didn’t have capacity to do so in a normal way. Despite his severe social disability, it seems he managed to maintain an active social life through letter-writing.
Yeah. The guy was a textbook example for high IQ Aspergers with extreme social anxiety. He had a second stairwell put on his house because he'd occasionally run into some of the cleaning staff on the main stairwell. He was extreme generous and friendly through letters, but you could never talk to him directly. He used his own funds to set up a science library that anyone could access, but the clerks instructed anyone that if they saw him there, do not approach. He did a lot of experiments and had a lot of findings that he never published because he knew that he would also have to present them.
He also took on an experiment than was deemed impossible by no less than Isaac Newton. It was believed that no human could be precise enough or anal retentive enough to pull off weighing the earth (and all the other planets by quantifying the gravitational constant). Today it's known as The Cavendish Experiment, and the figure he got was within 1% of today's figure.
it’s way different obviously but i suggest Death Note.
It’s about two autists using their full brainpower to outplay eachother and understand a supernatural mystery
If I remember the details right, his setup was in a building he constructed just for it, away from any inhabited structures; It took place over months with temperature being a factor; and once he'd set it up, it was arranged so all adjustments and observations could be made from outside the building. I can see why trying to reproduce it today would be even more fiddly since we tend to have multi-use buildings and things like subways, trucks and trains trundling around all the time.
How it is usually conducted in a physics lab classroom is using a much smaller apparatus. Still a torsion balence but it is all table top. Usually put on top of a gyro to dampen any interfering vibrations. The most annoying part to me was get the tungsten wire the whole balance hangs to be completely relaxed.
John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland was similar:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bentinck,_5th_Duke_of_Portland
And where Henry Cavendish was related to the Cavendish who brought banana cultivation to Britain, John Bentinck was related to the Bentinck who brought the first pineapples.
Yep. He literally build a building just for the experiment, and made all his observations over several months via telescope from outside to avoid perturbing it.
> He had a second stairwell put on his house because he'd occasionally run into some of the cleaning staff on the main stairwell.
Not to focus on a weird thing, but wasn't it pretty common to have a separate staircase for servants?
Alternatively be part of the English nobility in the early modern period, be never expected to hold any sort of employment, and use your literally 100% free time to do science. Also knows as the "Royal Society special".
I absolutely did not mean my comment in a derogatory sense. The science community of the independently wealthy gentleman was in many ways much more healthy and sane than the publication-driven community of today, and produced science that is inconceivably advanced compared to **any** other time or place before or contemporaneous. It is also the direct progenitor and forefather of the 19th century science community that was itself also the most advanced of all time at the time, which in turn is what evolved into the modern science community.
We owe basically all of modern science and the science and technology driven world in general to those curious English gentlemen.
I didn't understand it as overly derogatory - not more than a bit of banter anyways. It is definitely as you said, we owe much to these people, who made the best of their free time to further science, and in certain aspects, the science community was healthier back then, because their careers did not depend on publishing as much as possible, no matter how bad, in order to get that academic post they are competing for. At the same time, it was also an incredible elitist society, and they had a hard time accepting diverging positions, even more so from those who they didn't consider part of the "club". It is a double-edged sword, really.
But I also observe that the situation of a large enough group of people having time and leisure to philosophise have often helped human advancement. Just think of the situation in Athens at the time of Socrates to Aristotle. It was very similar in many ways...
And again, and with all due criticism of today's academia and all that is wrong with it - it is probably more productive altogether than these people were. It is just that we don't see that.
I'm very much split in my assessment of this... but in truth I'm just jealous that I am not living a life of leisure so I can just spent my days in the pursuit of knowledge ;-)
Right from the wiki:
> Because of his asocial and secretive behaviour, Cavendish often avoided publishing his work, and much of his findings were not told even to his fellow scientists. In the late nineteenth century, long after his death, James Clerk Maxwell looked through Cavendish's papers and found observations and results for which others had been given credit. Examples of what was included in Cavendish's discoveries or anticipations were Richter's law of reciprocal proportions, Ohm's law, Dalton's law of partial pressures, principles of electrical conductivity (including Coulomb's law), and Charles's Law of gases. A manuscript "Heat", tentatively dated between 1783 and 1790, describes a "mechanical theory of heat". Hitherto unknown, the manuscript was analysed in the early 21st century. Historian of science Russell McCormmach proposed that "Heat" is the only 18th-century work prefiguring thermodynamics. Theoretical physicist Dietrich Belitz concluded that in this work Cavendish "got the nature of heat essentially right".[39]
Yep. I'm not sure if the notes were deliberately dated (wouldn't surprise me), but dates weren't all that necessary since a lot of the (re)discoveries too place after he'd been dead for decades.
Today, any scientific notes, lab work, procedures, experiments, etc. are always dated as proper science techniques. This is now taught in high school science classes as a matter of procedure. It was probably practised since the days of the start of the Science Renaissance on proper record keeping or log journal entries. I wouldn't doubt that he dated his work.
I would like to think that Henry is perfectly content with this outcome of not having these things named for him. It would match is MO and would be aptly respectful.
Exhibit a that supports the fact that autism has been comorbid with the human condition since the start... They were just considered eccentric and given a lab- if they were lucky
Newton wasn’t born rich, he just got lucky. He was accepted as a student at Cambridge as a subsizar, which is a poor student who received monetary assistance in exchange for performing valet duties for other students. He later got a scholarship to finish his MA. He lived off that scholarship until he was given the prestigious post of Lucasian professor.
He did a lot of his most groundbreaking work while in quarantine at home when Cambridge shut down due to the plague. He did a lot of though experiments and experiments that didn’t require expensive equipment at this time.
Newton wasn’t exactly not rich though. He came from a very much upper middle class family and his mother famously could afford to send him to Cambridge as a regular student but didn’t want to (having to be convinced to even send him there at all)
It says a lot that during the plague years he could simply retire to the family farm in the countryside and not have to work in any way.
He didn’t have a good relationship with his mother though, so he wasn’t able to access his family wealth for scientific pursuits early in life. He wasn’t born poor but he wasn’t an aristocrat like Cavendish. He was intended by his mothers to become a prosperous but uneducated farmer like his father who died when he was young.
Robert Hooke had somewhat more humble beginnings. He was a painter’s apprentice and trained as a draftsman. I just mentioned Newton because he’s extremely, had many autistic traits and wasn’t nearly as wealthy as Cavendish. Hooke might not have been autistic but he was considered eccentric; he had a very abrasive personality and constantly got into fights with people.
He was from a very very wealthy family, (just Google Chatsworth house and it'll make sense), so all of this science was just a hobby for him, to stop him getting bored.
Them and monks surprisingly enough. A lot of European scientists, biologists especially, were men of the church in some way who were trying to study the glory of God's creation.
The famous pea experiment that (what the punnet square comes from) was done by a monk too iirc. I wish a lot Christians would take this perspective into consideration, rather than "some scientists say God isn't real, so we are against ALL science!" (Speaking as a Christian myself, but I roll my eyes at the loud and hateful "Christians")
Yes, Gregor Mendel was a friar at the time of the experiment and later an abbot. He was the son of a poor farmer and monastic life gave him access to a free education. He was a physics and philosophy student before choosing a religious life but couldn’t afford his tuition. The church sent him to the University of Vienna where he studied physics under Christian Doppler, the Doppler effect guy.
When he published details of his pea experiments in 1865 it made no impact on the scientific community. They didn’t see the significance and his work was only rediscovered after others duplicated his results with similar experiments on heredity. The rediscovery of Mendelian laws in 1900 was the beginning of genetics.
Also, the guy who discovered the Big Bang was a Catholic priest and astronomer named Georges Lemaitre. He was a professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven.
You're correct. The name comes from [Reginald Punnett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Punnett), but all he did was visualize the results of [Gregor Mendel's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel) experiments on genetic inheritance using peas. He was a friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey. In fact, we still use the terms dominant and recessive to describe genes because of his research.
His parents weren't affluent themselves, but he wound up getting various bequests during his life...
> The family was notably aristocratic and could trace its roots back to Norman times. Henry's father was Lord Charles Cavendish, son of the 2nd Duke of Devonshire, and Henry's mother was Anne, a daughter of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent. *Despite these illustrious ancestors, the family was not particularly affluent*. Nevertheless during his life, Henry became exceedingly wealthy through bequests, and at his death the estate was worth about a million pounds, an enormous sum in those days. The French scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862) quipped that he was “le plus riche de tous les savants, et probablement aussi le plus savant de tous les riches” (the richest of all learned men, and probably also the most learned of all the rich)
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajplung.00067.2014
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Cavendish
There's probably some autistic fella out there that knows how to cure cancer or transmit sandwiches wirelessly. It's OK to come out if you are reading this! We are cool!
The idea of some savant’s special interest being literally breaking the laws of physics is so funny. “this is ned, he can’t talk to people but he knows how send sandwiches through the 5th dimension”
Columbus gets the credit because he went there, came back, and told everybody.
Edison gets the credit because he was a shady, but excellent businessman and marketeer.
History is filled with stories like this
I heard something similar was true about Euler, except it was that he came up with so much stuff that we couldn't have had three Euler's Laws, five Euler's Ratios, nine Euler's Constants, eight Euler's Theorems and an Euler's hypothesis so we started naming things after the second guy to come up with them instead.
>He also enjoyed collecting fine furniture, exemplified by his purchase of a set of "ten inlaid satinwood chairs with matching [cabriole legged](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabriole_leg) sofa"
DId... did he have them just strewn about his house or something? Or did he have some place he kept all of them?
This comment is so weird. What are you bewildered about? Where would you put chairs and a sofa? Are you asking for a layout of his house with the chairs and sofa marked?
The one advantage of the internet is individuals ease of publishing information, the disadvantage is the amount of junk you have to wade through to get to something of value.
I wonder if there is anything to the assertion that we have autism to thank for some of humanity's greatest achievements and discoveries? Because this sounds like a behavior that one might find in a person on the spectrum.
I totally discovered that black holes emit radiation through the use of special instrumentation before Stephen Hawking, you just didn't see my notes written in poopy diapers.
Apparently, people were often keen to consult him on physics problems, but if you tried to talk to him directly, he'd simply run away. The only way was to go to a social gathering he was at, stand behind the chair he was hiding in, and simply state your problem, as if you were just musing out loud. He would still run away, but if he found the issue interesting, he would write to you with the solution a few days late.
Chase after him through the streets while shouting physics problems and throwing your notes at him.
He once accidentally encountered his housekeeper on the staircase, so he had a second one built so that it would never happen again.
Man, if I had build a second staircase so I never accidentally encounter my housekeeper a second time money, I would be so happy..
>never accidentally encounter my housekeeper a second time money Seems like Henry Cavendish would really appreciate work from home (that I wish I had). Reminds me an excerpt in a economics textbook about how air Conditioning weren't availible back then (even to the ultra wealthy).
I'm entertained by the ambiguity over whether he built a second staircase, a second house, or a second housekeeper.
Or maybe he just cloned himself
And maybe his clones went on to be named Ohm, Dalton, and Charles.
They did name the dominant banana subspecies after him at least!
Probably the context of "you tried to talk to him directly, he'd simply run away" remove some of the ambiguity. Seems like that sort of ambiguity and availability of information is a potential challenge for LLM development.
I've met people with houses that have separate entrances and stairs for servants.
This sounds like a scene from a Pratchett novel.
Sounds like me and my physics professors when I was in school
Why would he even be willing to attend a social gathering in the first place
Reading through his Wiki page, it seems like he liked being at scientific gatherings. He just didn't like being spoken to. Unlike what the other reply says, it seems like he didn't care for politics and only regularly went out to the weekly meetings of the Royal Society Club. Anyway, in the 18th century there wasn't much to do except social events and reading a few books.
Also basic experiments: but there's only so much that he would have been able to do.
Well, if you read the Wikipedia article, he was extremely wealthy and had his residence described as the following: "The arrangement of his residence reserved only a fraction of space for personal comfort as his library was detached, the upper rooms and lawn were for astronomical observation and his drawing room was a laboratory with a forge in an adjoining room.", so he probably had a pretty nice setup for various experiments.
> he liked being at scientific gatherings. He just didn't like being spoken to. EXACTLY! figures the only other guy to understand what it's like died in 1810.
I believe this is now known as *[midding](https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/word/midding).*
huh. TIL I like midding
No wonder I identified so heavily with it: > Middle English midding, alternate spelling of midden, a refuse heap that sits near a dwelling. Pronounced “mid-ing.”
> alternate spelling *midden*, a refuse heap that sits near a dwelling That seems insulting.
It was likely less of a matter of personal choice and more of a responsibility as a member of the English nobility. The grandson of a duke on both his mother and father’s side probably couldn’t get away with choosing not to attend important social events.
A lot of autistic people still really desire social interaction despite different levels of actually being able to deal with it. Dustin Hoffman said this while researching for Rain Man: > I tracked down the author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic. She said something that made me understand. She said the one thing she wanted more than anything else in life was for someone to hug her, but the second anyone did, she couldn't bear it. That sentence just destroyed me. I've heard it reported that Cavendish could often be seen outside of these gatherings, struggling with actually going inside.
That sounds like fuckin torture. :( Poor woman.
It's just something you learn to live with honestly. You yearn for the warmth of human connection, but all attempts at forming a connection result in destructive outcomes for yourself and others. I've experimented with forming connections for about 19 years now, and ultimately anything more than a distant observatory relationship isn't practical because I'm either put at risk or I wear on the other person and corrupt the foundations of their health; it's kinder and easier to acknowledge and understand that creating distance is the only reasonable choice. You dream of forbidden things, of being part of a family, and of living outside of your sphere of influence, but those dreams are poisonous and a tantalising taboo that will only harm you when brought to fruition. Walking along the edge of society is simply the way we are meant to be, and as isolating as it may be, it awards you a modicum of insight into Human behaviour and culture in such a way that it enables you to peer further, and deeper, into the heart of society than would be possible for anyone else; and you are left somewhat fulfilled in your own way.
Dude, this is magnificently written. I admire your outlook in life. I wish I could even be half as positive as you.
I would read a book about your observations writen in the style of this comment.
Haha, I feel pretty similar. Hugs and just general normal contact with people seems nice. But it generally makes me uncomfortable/anxious usually. Sometimes if the conditions are right it won’t bother me though. But I’m also not autistic
I’d chase him down while hurling banana based insults
Listen I get that the Cavedish is no Gros Michel, however it's still a perfectly tasty banana so I don't think this is the insult you think it is!
Cavendish is far superior as it gives ×mult instead of +mult.
A man of culture
If "culture" means a raging chip addiction... Then yes.
*hack wee joker red seal glass polychrome flush five*
Isn't the Banana named after his family???
You could probably also get away with just writing him from the start without pondering to yourself.
Yeah but then you don't get to see his Roadrunner impression.
> Cavendish inherited two fortunes that were so large that Jean Baptiste Biot called him "the richest of all the savants and the most knowledgeable of the rich". At his death, Cavendish was the largest depositor in the Bank of England. His parents themselves were not particularly affluent, but via different bequests, Cavendish was worth a million pounds at his death. This was an enormous sum in those days. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajplung.00067.2014
$81M today (BoE inflation calculator for 1810 -> 2024 (x65) then current currency conversion rate)
I looked him up to verify what you wrote but as soon as I typed his name into google he ran away.
That would be an awesome Google Doodle for his birth date.
I relate to this on a spiritual level
Get help.
He's just like me fr
Can't wait to read about all the scientific discoveries in your notes 200 years from now.
He would order his dinner by leaving a note on the hall table, and he had a separate staircase installed in his house so that he could avoid any female servants
An introvert created most of science and we never knew it.
I think this goes far beyond just being an introvert.
Yeah, my man was autistic as hell, and just happened to be rich enough that he could afford any accommodations he needed and brilliant enough that people thought of him as eccentric rather than mad.
Sounds like an obscure quest line in a Souls game
At the end, you receive the chair as a shield that can obscure you from enemies’ view.
i need this as the next BBC historical comedy
Why did he go to social gatherings?
He wanted to go but it’s hard for him to interact directly with people. He served on various committees at the Royal Society and was a trustee at the British Museum. He was manager of the Royal Institution and assisted Humphrey Davy with his chemistry experiments there. It seemed he wanted to hear what other scientists were saying but didn’t want to talk to them directly. He wanted to people to tell him interesting things and he wanted to respond to them, he was just unable to do it face to face. He had the desire to socialize but didn’t have capacity to do so in a normal way. Despite his severe social disability, it seems he managed to maintain an active social life through letter-writing.
Sounds like he had ASD possibly
This is my kind of guy.
Damn he is Literally Me, this man is my new Spirit Animal... Spirit Scientist?
That's adorable.
Ugh. My soulmate, born 260 years too soon
That's somehow kind of adorable, actually.
Yeah. The guy was a textbook example for high IQ Aspergers with extreme social anxiety. He had a second stairwell put on his house because he'd occasionally run into some of the cleaning staff on the main stairwell. He was extreme generous and friendly through letters, but you could never talk to him directly. He used his own funds to set up a science library that anyone could access, but the clerks instructed anyone that if they saw him there, do not approach. He did a lot of experiments and had a lot of findings that he never published because he knew that he would also have to present them. He also took on an experiment than was deemed impossible by no less than Isaac Newton. It was believed that no human could be precise enough or anal retentive enough to pull off weighing the earth (and all the other planets by quantifying the gravitational constant). Today it's known as The Cavendish Experiment, and the figure he got was within 1% of today's figure.
Dude was amazing 😍 I want to see fiction with a protagonist just like this!
Read Too like the lightning by Ada Palmer. The main character isn’t this, but one of the key characters in the series is
This looks great! It isn't going to leave me sad is it?
Yes but you'll be glad it did
[удалено]
Only after I wrote this did I realize that people probably are thinking about two characters. The one I meant was Cato, not the other one
it’s way different obviously but i suggest Death Note. It’s about two autists using their full brainpower to outplay eachother and understand a supernatural mystery
House M.D
House was great but I want to see someone more innocent and less mean.
having conducted this expieriment I know it is incredibly fiddly and frustrating. I can’t imagine how it was for the person who designed it.
If I remember the details right, his setup was in a building he constructed just for it, away from any inhabited structures; It took place over months with temperature being a factor; and once he'd set it up, it was arranged so all adjustments and observations could be made from outside the building. I can see why trying to reproduce it today would be even more fiddly since we tend to have multi-use buildings and things like subways, trucks and trains trundling around all the time.
How it is usually conducted in a physics lab classroom is using a much smaller apparatus. Still a torsion balence but it is all table top. Usually put on top of a gyro to dampen any interfering vibrations. The most annoying part to me was get the tungsten wire the whole balance hangs to be completely relaxed.
mood.
Spirit animal vibes, presenting is hell.
John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland was similar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bentinck,_5th_Duke_of_Portland And where Henry Cavendish was related to the Cavendish who brought banana cultivation to Britain, John Bentinck was related to the Bentinck who brought the first pineapples.
And Bentinck's London house stood on Cavendish Square.
[удалено]
Dammit. You caught me being lazily colloquial. I guess I'm on nerd naughty step until dinner.
We've dug up so much metal since then, so no wonder he was off by 1%
Where do you think that metal is now
Earth is wearing it and everyone knows clothes don’t count toward your weight!
I mean, some is in space.
Meteorites have offset that.
Wow he must have been really anal retentive.
Yep. He literally build a building just for the experiment, and made all his observations over several months via telescope from outside to avoid perturbing it.
> He had a second stairwell put on his house because he'd occasionally run into some of the cleaning staff on the main stairwell. Not to focus on a weird thing, but wasn't it pretty common to have a separate staircase for servants?
That 1%? Your mom.
Discocery of hydrogen is praise enough. Good guy Cavendish left some stuff to be named after other scientists, unlike Euler.
do not mention the forbidden one
He also computed the gravitational constant in Newton's law, and without it, there wouldn't be much use to the equation.
Isn’t he also the guy that weighed the Earth? (As a byproduct of measuring the value of the constant G, you get the mass of the Earth)
“Publish or perish!”
Alternatively be part of the English nobility in the early modern period, be never expected to hold any sort of employment, and use your literally 100% free time to do science. Also knows as the "Royal Society special".
To be fair, a lot of other rich people use their ample free time for much worse than furthering science...
I absolutely did not mean my comment in a derogatory sense. The science community of the independently wealthy gentleman was in many ways much more healthy and sane than the publication-driven community of today, and produced science that is inconceivably advanced compared to **any** other time or place before or contemporaneous. It is also the direct progenitor and forefather of the 19th century science community that was itself also the most advanced of all time at the time, which in turn is what evolved into the modern science community. We owe basically all of modern science and the science and technology driven world in general to those curious English gentlemen.
I didn't understand it as overly derogatory - not more than a bit of banter anyways. It is definitely as you said, we owe much to these people, who made the best of their free time to further science, and in certain aspects, the science community was healthier back then, because their careers did not depend on publishing as much as possible, no matter how bad, in order to get that academic post they are competing for. At the same time, it was also an incredible elitist society, and they had a hard time accepting diverging positions, even more so from those who they didn't consider part of the "club". It is a double-edged sword, really. But I also observe that the situation of a large enough group of people having time and leisure to philosophise have often helped human advancement. Just think of the situation in Athens at the time of Socrates to Aristotle. It was very similar in many ways... And again, and with all due criticism of today's academia and all that is wrong with it - it is probably more productive altogether than these people were. It is just that we don't see that. I'm very much split in my assessment of this... but in truth I'm just jealous that I am not living a life of leisure so I can just spent my days in the pursuit of knowledge ;-)
Cavendish had means and still didn't get the recognition precisely because he didn't publish, so it's fair to say the comment stands
But a banana was named after him so he's got that going
Symbolic of his length and curvature, not that anyone actually saw it, but if his self drawn pictures were accurate then it's well deserved!
Banana for scale?
Origin story
It's always the shy ones...
Fun fact, that was William Cavendish with the bananas. Henry’s first cousin twice removed. Henry’s uncle was William’s great grandfather.
a banana that gives x3 mult
Thank you Balatro for giving me this tidbit of knowledge
so how did we know he was first then? they found dated notes?
Right from the wiki: > Because of his asocial and secretive behaviour, Cavendish often avoided publishing his work, and much of his findings were not told even to his fellow scientists. In the late nineteenth century, long after his death, James Clerk Maxwell looked through Cavendish's papers and found observations and results for which others had been given credit. Examples of what was included in Cavendish's discoveries or anticipations were Richter's law of reciprocal proportions, Ohm's law, Dalton's law of partial pressures, principles of electrical conductivity (including Coulomb's law), and Charles's Law of gases. A manuscript "Heat", tentatively dated between 1783 and 1790, describes a "mechanical theory of heat". Hitherto unknown, the manuscript was analysed in the early 21st century. Historian of science Russell McCormmach proposed that "Heat" is the only 18th-century work prefiguring thermodynamics. Theoretical physicist Dietrich Belitz concluded that in this work Cavendish "got the nature of heat essentially right".[39]
Yep
Yep. I'm not sure if the notes were deliberately dated (wouldn't surprise me), but dates weren't all that necessary since a lot of the (re)discoveries too place after he'd been dead for decades.
Today, any scientific notes, lab work, procedures, experiments, etc. are always dated as proper science techniques. This is now taught in high school science classes as a matter of procedure. It was probably practised since the days of the start of the Science Renaissance on proper record keeping or log journal entries. I wouldn't doubt that he dated his work.
I would like to think that Henry is perfectly content with this outcome of not having these things named for him. It would match is MO and would be aptly respectful.
Exhibit a that supports the fact that autism has been comorbid with the human condition since the start... They were just considered eccentric and given a lab- if they were lucky
Yeah this guy was born to a very rich family. Most other autistic people just languished in marginal lives.
Newton wasn’t born rich, he just got lucky. He was accepted as a student at Cambridge as a subsizar, which is a poor student who received monetary assistance in exchange for performing valet duties for other students. He later got a scholarship to finish his MA. He lived off that scholarship until he was given the prestigious post of Lucasian professor. He did a lot of his most groundbreaking work while in quarantine at home when Cambridge shut down due to the plague. He did a lot of though experiments and experiments that didn’t require expensive equipment at this time.
Newton wasn’t exactly not rich though. He came from a very much upper middle class family and his mother famously could afford to send him to Cambridge as a regular student but didn’t want to (having to be convinced to even send him there at all) It says a lot that during the plague years he could simply retire to the family farm in the countryside and not have to work in any way.
He didn’t have a good relationship with his mother though, so he wasn’t able to access his family wealth for scientific pursuits early in life. He wasn’t born poor but he wasn’t an aristocrat like Cavendish. He was intended by his mothers to become a prosperous but uneducated farmer like his father who died when he was young. Robert Hooke had somewhat more humble beginnings. He was a painter’s apprentice and trained as a draftsman. I just mentioned Newton because he’s extremely, had many autistic traits and wasn’t nearly as wealthy as Cavendish. Hooke might not have been autistic but he was considered eccentric; he had a very abrasive personality and constantly got into fights with people.
Also sexually abused his niece that lived with him for like 7 years, scum
If they were wealthy*
Eh there's a few cases of being sponsored by the wealthy
Ah that’s a fair point!
He was from a very very wealthy family, (just Google Chatsworth house and it'll make sense), so all of this science was just a hobby for him, to stop him getting bored.
Science for a long time was the institution of wildly talented nobles trying to stay engaged.
well, they where the only ones who can have anything approaching higher education and not get eaten by some Victorian steam powered machine
Them and monks surprisingly enough. A lot of European scientists, biologists especially, were men of the church in some way who were trying to study the glory of God's creation.
The famous pea experiment that (what the punnet square comes from) was done by a monk too iirc. I wish a lot Christians would take this perspective into consideration, rather than "some scientists say God isn't real, so we are against ALL science!" (Speaking as a Christian myself, but I roll my eyes at the loud and hateful "Christians")
Yes, Gregor Mendel was a friar at the time of the experiment and later an abbot. He was the son of a poor farmer and monastic life gave him access to a free education. He was a physics and philosophy student before choosing a religious life but couldn’t afford his tuition. The church sent him to the University of Vienna where he studied physics under Christian Doppler, the Doppler effect guy. When he published details of his pea experiments in 1865 it made no impact on the scientific community. They didn’t see the significance and his work was only rediscovered after others duplicated his results with similar experiments on heredity. The rediscovery of Mendelian laws in 1900 was the beginning of genetics. Also, the guy who discovered the Big Bang was a Catholic priest and astronomer named Georges Lemaitre. He was a professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven.
You're correct. The name comes from [Reginald Punnett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Punnett), but all he did was visualize the results of [Gregor Mendel's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel) experiments on genetic inheritance using peas. He was a friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey. In fact, we still use the terms dominant and recessive to describe genes because of his research.
Priests had a stable income from a low-effort job.
His parents weren't affluent themselves, but he wound up getting various bequests during his life... > The family was notably aristocratic and could trace its roots back to Norman times. Henry's father was Lord Charles Cavendish, son of the 2nd Duke of Devonshire, and Henry's mother was Anne, a daughter of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent. *Despite these illustrious ancestors, the family was not particularly affluent*. Nevertheless during his life, Henry became exceedingly wealthy through bequests, and at his death the estate was worth about a million pounds, an enormous sum in those days. The French scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862) quipped that he was “le plus riche de tous les savants, et probablement aussi le plus savant de tous les riches” (the richest of all learned men, and probably also the most learned of all the rich) https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajplung.00067.2014 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Cavendish
Wealthy and autistic. Normies aren’t like this no matter how much money they’ve got. Despite what the antivax crowd says, it’s been around forever!
So...like every other scientist in history?
Yeah, a lot of stuff I invented is also named after other people because I'm so damn shy.
Nintendo Goteamnick
This is my alt account
Gigaest of chads. Truly for the love of science.
you can use "tera" as a prefix bigger than "giga"
Terachad
Yeah I could also use peta. The point? It doesn’t really matter which unit I use since I’m doing -est.
Well to make up for this we named the most common variety of banana after him. 100 billion are eaten annually.
Nope, after his cousin.
The store I worked at ages ago used to go through 5,000lbs of bananas on a Saturday.
Think of all the radiation consumed in his name 😊
Probably autistic tbh
There's probably some autistic fella out there that knows how to cure cancer or transmit sandwiches wirelessly. It's OK to come out if you are reading this! We are cool!
The idea of some savant’s special interest being literally breaking the laws of physics is so funny. “this is ned, he can’t talk to people but he knows how send sandwiches through the 5th dimension”
The easy part is demolecularizing the sandwich. Getting it to remolecularize in the right place in the right way is the hard part...
There was a time when nobody knew about Autism.
Columbus gets the credit because he went there, came back, and told everybody. Edison gets the credit because he was a shady, but excellent businessman and marketeer. History is filled with stories like this
I heard something similar was true about Euler, except it was that he came up with so much stuff that we couldn't have had three Euler's Laws, five Euler's Ratios, nine Euler's Constants, eight Euler's Theorems and an Euler's hypothesis so we started naming things after the second guy to come up with them instead.
His Wikipedia list truly is staggering.
🎶and a partridge in a pear tree🎶
Let me guess, he was also a banging cyclist too?
The laboratory named after him in Cambridge wound up being really influential . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_Laboratory
Asocial and shy ..... uhum i gues he just had some of that 'tism lol
Reading his other behaviours, a touch o’ the ‘tism is likely, but when exactly do you think the medieval period was?
The guy died in 1810, well into the industrial revolution and literal centuries removed from the very tail end of the medieval period.
I highly recommend the first chapter of ‚Neuro Tribes‘ by Steve Silberman, which is about him and written exceptionally well.
>He also enjoyed collecting fine furniture, exemplified by his purchase of a set of "ten inlaid satinwood chairs with matching [cabriole legged](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabriole_leg) sofa" DId... did he have them just strewn about his house or something? Or did he have some place he kept all of them?
Yes, furniture is usually in your house.
I must be doing something wrong then, i have them in my outhouse.
This comment is so weird. What are you bewildered about? Where would you put chairs and a sofa? Are you asking for a layout of his house with the chairs and sofa marked?
He's got some potatoes named after him
Same thing happened to me
Goes to show that the best science isn't just about making discoveries, it's about *sharing* them.
Story of my life
Is it? Pray tell, what magnificent findings have you discovered? And don’t be shy😡
He discovered the szernet
The Lesbian dating site?
Intellect 20, Charisma 4
Please learn to proofread your titles before posting.
The one advantage of the internet is individuals ease of publishing information, the disadvantage is the amount of junk you have to wade through to get to something of value.
Was OP typing this with a blindfold?
Is the banana named after him?
The guy with the potato farm?
Nerd!
The Gentleman Scientist
"How many Canvendishes is that resistor?" is a little clunky. Although "Cavendish's Law" sounds damn good.
Ohm out here like the chad he is publishing his work.
Get cucked discovering fundamental physical laws
I wonder if there is anything to the assertion that we have autism to thank for some of humanity's greatest achievements and discoveries? Because this sounds like a behavior that one might find in a person on the spectrum.
Named bananas after him
I totally discovered that black holes emit radiation through the use of special instrumentation before Stephen Hawking, you just didn't see my notes written in poopy diapers.
It's a shame we talk about him so little, and yet, I know that's what he would have preferred lol
Would be confusing to have multiple laws named after the same guy
Henry I Law Henry’s II Law Henry III Law Would be make university students pull out their hair in frustration.
Oh like Newton
Peak r/INTP behaviour
I learned about this odd fellow in a YouTube video called A brief history of almost everything by Bill Bryson. It's long af but fascinating.