Insert a question mark after “best”.
Brain’s best? Running for president, of course.
Chronos, another great singularity-orbiting-inside-the-planet sort of story is The Forge of God, by Greg Bear. Actually, there are two of them, and they’re going to collide…
Speaking of Bear, one of the most chilling mad-scientist books I know is his Blood Music. Spoiler ahead:
Mad Scientist creates an intelligent, sort-of-benevolent disease, which in turn creates so many microscopic observers that the Uncertainty Principle can no longer function properly. Poof goes the universe.
Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about Tycho’s history, but I’ve never heard of him referred to as a mad scientist. How does Tycho Brahe’s eccentricities make him so? He partied hard, but he helped advance the science of astronomy.
:rolleyes:
Personally, I think the whole mad scientist archetype is just a play on people’s fears of the unknown.
But on the other hand, I have to wonder about those who continue to develop weapons of mass destruction, the WWII Nazi medical scientists, etc.
Okay, from the thread referenced by Sofa King…
Diceman said:
I have to strongly disagree. From what I know about Kevorkian (which is, admittedly, limited to popular press coverage), I think you are wrong.
While I don’t know much about #2 (attempts at amateur organ transplants?), I don’t concede the other three.
Is your justification for #1 simply his efforts to help with suicides? If so, your charaterization greatly distorts his intent. He has devoted his life to ending suffering, and has backed that conviction (er, damn puns) with his own freedom. I believe he would maintain that he has the utmost regard for human life, if you include quality of life instead of just being alive. When your quality of life includes lying helpless in a bed, requiring nurses to change and bathe you and feed you, you cannot speak, and are in constant, high levels of pain, death is a blessing. To end suffering is sometimes the merciful thing to do. We do it all the time with pets - putting them out of their misery. That we don’t do it with humans shows a lack of compassion and caring, not a lack of regard for human life.[sup]1[/sup]
For #3, I think the above shows a different take on the situation that could explain Kevorkian’s position, and thus his rejection of the conventional notion that life should be maintained at all cost. Given this justification, I think it is healthy to think that people who think he’s off his rocker have not heard this explanation and motivation, and are relying purely on the arguments of those who say he wants to kill people. Saying it that way is a great distortion. A lot of people support capital punishment. You could say they want to kill people, too. What’s lost is the details that change the moral position.
For #4 you say he has (a)insulted most religious leaders, and (b) that he has little concern for morality/ethics. I believe I have just shown how his position can be supported by a strong concern for morality and ethics. Just because you do not agree with his position does not mean he has a good ethical argument. That leaves insulting religious leaders. I don’t know if he’s insulted religious leaders, but if that’s all it takes to qualify as “evil intent”, then I must be Satan’s spawn. The Pope is a load of Poop. Mother Theresa was a meglamaniacal, power and money hungry abuser of the weak and helpless.[sup]2[/sup] Reverend Jesse Jackson is a punk rap star with a lame band. The Dalai Lama can go suck monkey brains. I think they’re a bunch of deluded egoists bent on enslaving the world to their ridiculous superstitions. How does that make me evil?
Finally, Dr. Kevorkian was not a mad scientist. While you disagree with his beliefs, that is a far cry from proving him insane. He might have some qualifications by tinkering with inventions, but he does not have the drive to take over the world, and didn’t issue threats to destroy the world for money or power. At most he’s a guy with some strong convictions that are a little skewed and a willingness to cobble up equipment to aid his ventures.
[sup]1[/sup] Extreme example used to make the point. Obviously the situation is complex when applied to real life situations. How do we determine when it is ethical to end a life out of mercy and when it is unethical to terminate someone’s life simply because they are unhappy? But those distinctions are the gray areas that must be determined. The point still stands that there are times when it is more merciful, more caring and compassionate to end suffering than to maintain the life in unbearable conditions.
[sup]2[/sup] There have been a few exposes of Mother Theresa, her methods and work. I don’t have cites handy, but she amassed incredible amounts of funds that sat idle in bank accounts while she continued to demand donations and concessions and favors from influential people. She could have used that money to build elaborate, highly technologically and medically capable hospitals, but instead built shabby “clinic” for the purpose of letting the poor suffer and die. She believed suffering was good for the soul, that the poor deserved their pain. Okay, I realize I’m rambling and speaking ill of the dead, and since I’m not offering cites, I’ll shut up now.
Dr. Frankenstein (the movie version) is certainly recognized as the prototype for all later mad scientists. Frankenstein’s lab, his bungling assistant, his manic manner, all got copied repeatedly by later films.
Y’all are leaving out a couple of early literary “mad scientists,” though. There’s Dr. Jekyll, of course, and let’s not forget Dr. Moreau from the H.G. Wells classic The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Another prototypical “mad scientist” actually appeared in the comic books, in the person of Dr. Sivana, the arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel. (First appearance 1940, I believe.) He was just full of evil schemes to destroy the world.
I’ve read a short story by Greg Bear called “Blood Music” in which each cell becomes “intelligent” and human beings slowly transform into huge masses of intelligent “protoplasm”. But there was nothing about the uncertainty principle. Was the short story later expanded into a novel?
How could you forget Josef Mengele? The Butcher of Auschwitz?
Of course, there’s always my favorite Mad Scientist: Dr. Clayton Forrestor from Deep 13…
LOVE that mustachse!
The Unabomber, if you want to call him a ‘scientist’.
Jack Parsons
American rocket scientist - and quite quite mad.
This is from his biography
Parsons’ chemistry, like its parent alchemy, is by nature a thing very different to physics. It has colour, smell and taste, and depends on character and relation rather than the push-me-pull-you of nuclear forces. Chemistr therefore is linked not to momentum, or gravity, the arriviste “objective” harpies, but to a gentler world of homeopathy and pharmacy, to herbs, colour-changes and smells. It has no need to reduce the world to a cartoon in order to make the equations work out. The old alchemical idea of “affinity” rather than “objectivity” between compounds and elements suggests the operation of forces that the world well understood before the so-called “enlightenment”. In all likelihood, Parsons used his somewhat cavalier attitude towards occultism to activate those sympathies which got his early fuel combinations right, astonishing colleagues such as Frank Malina. But he may have found out too late that magic, once summoned, is far more volatile than even the most dangerous rocket fuel. 
Rocket scientist, occultist, and died in a mysterious explosion.
Book available from http://www.feralhouse.com IIRC
The Unabomber was in no sense a scientist. Also, I was going to nominate Mengele; I’m surprised the thread went so long without a mention of him.
I must also question the picture of Tycho Brahe given above. IIRC, he did have his nose shot off in a duel and replaced with a metal one (I thought it was silver), but that was no more a sign of mental problems than were Washington’s wooden teeth. Prosthetics were not uncommon in the past or now, although we probably have better nose replacements these days.
It was also my understanding that he wasn’t known as a terrifically great mathematician, though competent perhaps, but was rather a first class meticulous observer. His protege Kepler was the math wiz and used Brahe’s observations to produce Kepler’s laws.
Tycho was, by all accounts I’ve heard, pretty obnoxious. Certainly, he and Kepler didn’t become bosom buddies; but then I’ve always heard that Kepler was a bit anal retentive, to put it mildly.
In any case, like most scientists they may not have been charmers, but could hardly be described as evil. Even madness in scientists (not uncommon, apparently) rarely leads to actual evil.
A couple of names that haven’t been mentioned:
Oliver Heaviside - Nutty as the hors d’oeuvres at a Planters corporation stockholder meeting.
Dr. Kellogg - of corn flakes fame. If you’ve seen the movie “The Road To Wellville” you’ll get an idea of the guy. (Okay, it’s a movie and not perfectly biographical. But a lot of the nuttiness in the character was a direct copy of the real thing.)
The literary and movie trope of the mad scientist has more to do with people’s unease with what they don’t understand, and mistrust of power being in the hands of individuals with no accountability, than it does with any real life model character.
It does however inspire some of us.
“…But reality can’t be observed to change. It has to change at some level not fixed by observation. So when our noocytes observed anything and everything to the smallest level, the universe was unable to flex, to change itself.”
Sounds like tripe to you physicists out there, maybe, but to a guy who can’t figure out the dimensions of a widescreen TV given the diagonal and the ratio, it’s intriguing. Particularly when Hubble’s Constant is batted around like a cat with a ball of yarn and tuataras are still walking the earth.
Arnold, it (Blood Music) certainly was a really good novel, basically picking up from the end of the novelette (it’s a long, long time since I’ve read that one) and going on to describe in a sort of Tom Clancy-esque multi-character narration of the ascendancy of humankind to… well, something pretty freaking weird.
I’ll go with Ishii, Mengele, and also the fellow whose name was mentioned this week on the History Channel (and which I’ve forgetten): A Canadian Psychiatrist who believed he could cure just about all of what ills people’s heads by completely erasing their identities, memories, etc. via massive amounts of electroconvulsive therapy, LSD, and drug-induced extended comas. While in the comas, he’d play tapes of what he wanted the patients/victims to be reprogrammed as. Of course, the CIA paid to get access to his research and so ended up allowing the atrocities to continue.
Also, I have to nominate the Soviets who thought up the real doomsday bomb. It was not built, but would have been a ship-sized nuclear bomb moved around (in a ship, naturally)in protected Soviet waters. At the first sign that the balloon had gone up, they’d blow the thing and ensure no life on earth could survive. Similarly, I’d refer you all to “Biohazard” by Ken Abilek (misspelled) —he used to head the Soviet biowar program. They still have a combined smallpox and ebola thing ready to go. Contagious as smallpox, lethal as ebola —lovely.
Before the loss of his nose Tycho may have been merely eccentric. Afterwards he lost his grip on reality. Read up on him if you doubt me. I think wearing a bronze nose strapped to your face is enough evidence that he wasn’t too stable. It was a long time ago and the people of the time were not as up on mental illness as we are now so the social set’s diagnosis may not be accurate but it’s all we have. My point is that he was percieved as crazy. Many people with new ideas were and still are perceived as crazy, which is my point about the other astronomers of the time. And new ideas combined with a strange isolated lifestyle make it myserious. Parents did not want there children to be like the strange man in the tower even if that man were kind, and fun, and interesting. So, they probably made up stories to scare their children away from that. And children passed those stories around and embellished.
Admittedly, I am guessing and extrapolating a lot here, but I think it sounds fairly reasonble and I bet it happened like this in at least one place.
Phobos - I REALLY hate it when people roll their eyes at me. especially when they give no particular reason why they are so disrespecting my post. You could have flamed me with profanity and gotten less reaction from me. I am using every bit of restraint I have to keep this civil. I want an apology and/or an explanation of why my post has no bearing on the subject at hand or some evidence that the smiley you used means something other than complete disrespect.
I think a biography of Tycho Brahe would be a great film.
Quoth JCHeckler:
Ah, yes, the cobolt bomb. It’s basically a dirty H-bomb designed to produce large amounts of Cobolt-60 fallout. Survivable, but not easily. Are you sure that it was the Soviets who first got the idea, though?
As to Ted Kazinski, he was a mathematician by trade, so I suppose you can call him a scientist. On the other hand, his M. O. didn’t involve his scientific training in any way, so I don’t think he qualifies.
Does Dr. Henry Holmes count? I think so. Bona fide grade A nucking futz psychotic, straight from Cecil’s file. Murdered dozens or more at a macabre death castle in the 1890’s.
Personally I think this would make a really bad ass video game.
I just read The Cult at the End of the World, which is about the Japanese doomsday cult Aum; you remember them, they’re the ones who released sarin in a Tokyo subway a few years ago. Anyway, they didn’t buy that sarin, they made it. A number of Aum members were very well-educated scientists who left their posts at universities, hospitals, and R&D departments to work on creating nerve gasses, death rays, and nuclear bombs. Most definitely mad.
I’m currently reading Coming of Age in the Milky Way, an excellent history of cosmology by Timothy Ferris, and judging by the description of Tycho Brahe’s and Johannes Kepler’s relationship, they were both off their rockers a wee bit, but Kepler is the one who comes off looking the crazier.
BTW, Tycho was dug up a year or so (? I remember reading about it in the paper) ago and his nose had rusted through - he probably thought it was silver, but it seems to have been a metal alloy.
Phobos, I can’t even see from the context why you used a Rolleyes in your post. Perhaps you could enlighten us?
Since Irishman insists on bringing up my old Kervorkian post, I’ll defend it.
Yes, ameteur organ transplants. He removed the heart and liver from one of his “patients” and stored them in a beer cooler in his lawyer’s office (yes, a beer cooler) while he tried to get a hospital to use them in a transplant operation. How many things are wrong with this scenario? Nevertheless, he seemed to be genuinely surprised that no hospital would touch the organs. This pretty well proves points #2 and #3. The man has a few circuits that are not wired correctly.
As for #1 and #4, you admit that you don’t know much about Kervorkian. Believe me, I am very confident when I say that he is evil and has no regard for human life. Perhaps his motivation really was to end suffering, but his methods were unjustifiable. He sought out mostly elderly, weak-minded people who could be manipulated easily and looked really pitiful on a video tape. Plus, there was more than one case where the victim’s relatives were accused of having the person “put down,” against their will. Maintaining human dignity? Please :rolleyes:. After most of the latter suicides, he just dumped the body outside a hospital. Sometimes it was left in a car, sometimes on the street. This is a dignified death? This is why I say he has no regard for human life. He may have said he does, but actions speak louder than words.
As for being evil, this is the impression I got from listening to his comments. I live in Michigan, and I had to endure hearing every little thing this man said on the evening news. I am convinced that he was more concerned with making a political statement than anything else. He has nothing but contempt for any kind of belief system (he’s said as much himself) and if someone said they thought suicide was wrong, he wouldn’t debate them; more likely he would mock them, calling them weak-minded or stupid or somesuch. His comments to the news media made it adequately clear that he thought that ethics and morality were for other people. He should be able to do anything he wants, and how dare you question his judgement? Yes I think Jack Kervorkian is an evil creep.
So, in summary, I still think that Dr. Kervorkian fits most of the qualifications of a “mad scientist.”