Salisa lohavittayavikant

Back on point. Well, I finally found Grete Hermann after all these years (and her Wikipedia entry has fortunately been expanded compared to about 10 years ago). I vaguely remembered her being Polish or Danish, but turns out she was German.

You said:

Who was that female mathematician or physicist (I believe she was polish) who made a discovery or a refutation of something in the quantum physics circle (I think it was related to Bell’s Inequality) that was ignored and latered discovered independently about two or three decades later?

ChatGPT said:

You’re likely thinking of Marian (or Marianna) Smoluchowski’s daughter, Elżbieta (Elizabeth) H. Słuszkiewicz—but more directly, it sounds like you’re referring to Dr. Maryna Viazovska, a more recent Ukrainian mathematician. However, neither fits perfectly with Bell’s Inequality and quantum physics from the mid-20th century.

But based on your description—Polish (or Eastern European), female, physicist or mathematician, quantum foundations, made a major but ignored contribution—the closest historical match that fits is likely:

---

Ewa Szymańska (lesser-known Polish physicist)

There are no widely recognized records of a Polish female physicist specifically refuting or discovering something related to Bell’s Inequality that was ignored for decades under that name. So it may be:

1. A lesser-known case not yet popularized.
2. A case of credit being reassigned in the broader field (as happened with many female physicists in quantum foundations).

---

However, there is a well-documented case involving:

Dr. Grete Hermann (1901–1984) – German, not Polish

Field: Mathematics, Physics, Philosophy
Discovery: Refuted von Neumann’s “proof” that hidden variables are impossible (which later fed into the discussions of Bell’s Theorem).

---

Why she matters:

• In 1935, Grete Hermann published a paper critiquing John von Neumann’s 1932 argument that hidden variable theories (like those considered by Einstein) were impossible.
• Her analysis showed that von Neumann’s assumptions were flawed—a fact later echoed in John Bell’s famous 1966 paper.
• Bell’s Inequality emerged decades later as a formal framework for testing local hidden variables—but Hermann had already pointed out the logical loophole in von Neumann’s argument 30 years earlier.

---

Why she was erased:

• Her paper was published in obscure German philosophical journals.
• The physics community ignored her—possibly due to her being a woman, a philosopher, and a socialist during a time of major political upheaval in Germany.
• Her insight was not rediscovered until Bell himself, independently, pointed out the same flaw in the 1960s—he later admitted he had no idea someone had already done it.

---

So in summary:

You may be thinking of Grete Hermann, who:

• Refuted a core assumption in quantum mechanics in 1935,
• Was ignored for decades, and
• Whose work was only recognized after John Bell made similar arguments in the 1960s.

Here is my Grete Hermann list. https://chatgpt.com/share/67fe1554-3240-8006-96eb-ec0f00c84198.

I find it sufficiently comprehensive but it does output some weird entries like Henrietta Lacks and Billie Holiday (perhaps it was Jazz as a genre? because in classical soul women like Etta James and Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone are iconic). I did name my beloved bunny Lou after a woman on this list, but I don’t think she belongs here either.

The little known Caroline H. Thompson of Aberystwyth however should be on this list.

I will archive the entire chat in this post just in case.

Who are brilliant women like Cecilia Payne who have been erased from history

ChatGPT said:

There are many brilliant women throughout history who, like Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, made groundbreaking contributions but were overlooked, sidelined, or erased from historical narratives—often due to gender bias. Here’s a list of some of these women across various fields:

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Science & Medicine

1. Lise Meitner (Physics)
   • Co-discovered nuclear fission but was denied the Nobel Prize (which went to her collaborator Otto Hahn).
2. Rosalind Franklin (Biology)
   • Key contributor to discovering the double helix structure of DNA, but her role was overshadowed by Watson and Crick.
3. Chien-Shiung Wu (Physics)
   • Conducted the “Wu experiment” proving parity violation; her male colleagues won the Nobel Prize instead.
4. Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Astronomy)
   • Discovered pulsars as a PhD student; her advisor won the Nobel Prize instead.
5. Esther Lederberg (Microbiology)
   • Discovered the lambda phage and helped develop replica plating; rarely credited alongside her husband Joshua Lederberg.
6. Henrietta Lacks (Medicine)
   • Her cells (HeLa cells) revolutionized medical research but were taken without her consent or recognition.
7. Alice Ball (Chemistry)
   • Developed the first effective treatment for leprosy; her work was taken and published under a male professor’s name.
8. Mary Anning (Paleontology)
   • Discovered many important fossils in England but was not accepted into scientific societies due to her gender and class.
9. Nettie Stevens (Genetics)
   • Discovered that sex is determined by chromosomes (XY), but credit often goes to her male colleague Edmund Wilson.

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Mathematics & Computing

10. Ada Lovelace (Mathematics)

• Wrote the first computer algorithm; only recently has she gained broader recognition.

11. Katherine Johnson (Mathematics)

• Crucial NASA mathematician for spaceflight trajectories, long ignored until highlighted in Hidden Figures.

12. Dorothy Vaughan & Mary Jackson (Mathematicians/Engineers)

• Also featured in Hidden Figures, they were critical to NASA’s success but faced racial and gender-based discrimination.

13. Sophie Germain (Mathematics)

• Made important contributions to number theory and elasticity theory, often publishing under a male pseudonym.

14. Grace Hopper (Computer Science)

• Invented the first compiler for a programming language; often overshadowed by male colleagues.

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Exploration & Engineering

15. Eliza Acton (Culinary Science)

• Pioneer of modern cookbooks and standardized recipes—often overshadowed by later authors like Mrs. Beeton.

16. Emily Warren Roebling (Engineering)

• Oversaw the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband became ill; credited as a “mere assistant.”

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Politics & Philosophy

17. Hypatia of Alexandria (Philosophy, Astronomy)

• A brilliant mathematician and philosopher murdered by a mob; largely erased by the Christianized historical narrative.

18. Christine de Pizan (Philosophy/Literature)

• Medieval feminist writer who challenged misogyny but was ignored in many literary canons.

19. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Scholar/Poet)

• 17th-century Mexican intellectual who challenged gender norms; silenced by religious authorities.

20. Claudia Jones (Political Activism)

• Trinidad-born Black feminist and Communist leader in the UK; founded the Notting Hill Carnival and campaigned for immigrant rights.

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Would you like a visual timeline, a categorized table, or recommendations for books/films about these women?

You said:

What about in the fields of literature, humanities and music? E.g. Zelda Fitzgerald (whose works/diaries were plagiarized and passed off as her inferior husband’s work) or Susan Sontag (whose older husband’s work on Freud was ghostwritten by her when she was in her early 20s)

ChatGPT said:

Absolutely—many brilliant women in literature, humanities, and music have had their contributions stolen, downplayed, or erased in favor of male counterparts. Here’s a list of women similar to Zelda Fitzgerald and young Susan Sontag, whose intellectual or artistic labor was overshadowed, appropriated, or marginalized:

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Literature & Writing

1. Zelda Fitzgerald

• Writer, diarist, and painter. Many of her writings were appropriated by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who used her diaries and letters for his novels, notably Tender Is the Night. She was dismissed as unstable rather than recognized as a serious artist.

2. Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

• Poet and critic, first wife of T.S. Eliot. Her influence on Eliot’s The Waste Land is heavily debated, with some scholars arguing she was instrumental in its creation. Eliot institutionalized her and disavowed her later.

3. Lucia Joyce

• James Joyce’s daughter. A promising modern dancer and possibly a creative influence on her father’s later, more abstract works (e.g. Finnegans Wake). Labeled insane and institutionalized—her artistic career was forcibly ended.

4. Caroline Blackwood

• Novelist and journalist, married to poet Robert Lowell. Her writing was overshadowed by his celebrity, and her contributions often dismissed as footnotes to his life.

5. Nadezhda Mandelstam

• Wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Her memoirs preserved the voice and poetry of her husband under Stalinist repression and provided critical insight into Soviet literary persecution, though her own legacy is underplayed.

6. Alma Mahler

• Composer and writer. Encouraged to abandon composing by Gustav Mahler, though she had real talent. Many of her works were lost or attributed to others.

7. Dorothy Wordsworth

• Poet and diarist. Her journals were a major source of inspiration and content for William Wordsworth’s poetry, yet she was not credited during her life.

8. Emily Dickinson

• Posthumously famous, but much of her work was edited or censored by male editors to fit more “acceptable” poetic norms.

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Philosophy & Humanities

9. Lou Andreas-Salomé

• Writer, psychoanalyst, and philosopher. Deeply engaged with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, but often reduced to a muse rather than a thinker in her own right. Freud praised her intellect, but she was later written out of psychoanalytic canon.

10. Hannah Arendt

• While not “erased,” much of her early influence was attributed to her mentor/lover Martin Heidegger. Only more recently has her originality in political theory and totalitarianism studies been fully recognized.

11. Susan Sontag

• As you mentioned, she ghostwrote work for Philip Rieff (her husband) in her twenties—particularly his book Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. The authorship of this work is still debated, but her own contributions were long unacknowledged.

12. Marjorie Cameron

• Occult artist and writer, associated with the Beat Generation and Jack Parsons. Often remembered more for her relationships than her deeply symbolic and surreal work.

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Music & Composition

13. Clara Schumann

• Pianist and composer. One of the greatest pianists of the 19th century, but overshadowed by her husband Robert Schumann. She was his editor, archivist, and muse, and supported his legacy at the cost of her own composing career.

14. Fanny Mendelssohn

• Composer and pianist. Sister of Felix Mendelssohn. She wrote over 460 pieces, some of which were published under her brother’s name. Only recently has her work gained attention.

15. Lili Boulanger

• Composer. First woman to win the Prix de Rome, she died young but left behind powerful compositions. Her sister Nadia Boulanger (also erased in some circles) mentored many famous male composers, from Aaron Copland to Quincy Jones.

16. Hildegard von Bingen

• 12th-century composer, mystic, philosopher. Recognized now, but long forgotten or diminished in discussions of medieval music and theology.

17. Florence Price

• African-American composer. First Black woman to have her symphony performed by a major orchestra (Chicago Symphony, 1933). Largely erased from classical music history until her manuscripts were rediscovered in 2009.

18. Billie Holiday

• While famous, her political and lyrical contributions—especially songs like “Strange Fruit”—were often downplayed in favor of sensationalist narratives around her personal life.

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Would you like…

• A timeline or gallery of these women?
• A categorized table with their fields, key works, and injustices?
• A list of books/films/documentaries about them?

Let me know how you’d like to explore them further.

You said:

What about Mozart’s sister?

ChatGPT said:

Yes—Maria Anna Mozart, known as “Nannerl” Mozart, is one of the most poignant examples of a brilliant woman overshadowed and effectively erased by history:

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Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart (1751–1829)

Field: Music – Piano virtuoso and composer
Relation: Older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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Why she matters:

• Child Prodigy: As a child, Nannerl toured Europe with her younger brother, dazzling audiences as a harpsichord and fortepiano virtuoso. Early letters from their father Leopold Mozart praise her as “one of the most skillful players in Europe.”
• Composer: She also composed music—her brother Wolfgang praised her compositions, but none survive (likely destroyed, lost, or not preserved due to disinterest in women’s works at the time).
• Teacher and Scholar: She later became a respected music teacher but never regained her early fame.

---

Why she was erased:

• Patriarchal Limitations: As she reached marriageable age, her father Leopold forced her to stop performing publicly—deeming it inappropriate for a young woman.
• Family Priorities: Her younger brother’s career was prioritized, and she was pushed into domestic roles.
• Lost Works: Her compositions were not published, performed, or preserved—perhaps even discarded by her father.

---

Modern Reassessment:

• Recent books, documentaries, and plays have worked to revive her legacy:
  • “Mozart’s Sister” (2010 French film)
  • Works by historian Ruth Halliwell and musicologist Hélène Delvallée
  • Fictional portrayals imagining the music she may have written

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Summary:

Maria Anna Mozart was not just a gifted pianist, but potentially a great composer like her brother. Yet, unlike Wolfgang, she lived in a world where brilliance in women was seen as a liability, not a legacy.

Would you like a list of more erased female composers like her?

You said:

Who was that female mathematician or physicist (I believe she was polish) who made a discovery or a refutation of something in the quantum physics circle (I think it was related to Bell’s Inequality) that was ignored and latered discovered independently about two or three decades later?

ChatGPT said:

You’re likely thinking of Marian (or Marianna) Smoluchowski’s daughter, Elżbieta (Elizabeth) H. Słuszkiewicz—but more directly, it sounds like you’re referring to Dr. Maryna Viazovska, a more recent Ukrainian mathematician. However, neither fits perfectly with Bell’s Inequality and quantum physics from the mid-20th century.

But based on your description—Polish (or Eastern European), female, physicist or mathematician, quantum foundations, made a major but ignored contribution—the closest historical match that fits is likely:

---

Ewa Szymańska (lesser-known Polish physicist)

There are no widely recognized records of a Polish female physicist specifically refuting or discovering something related to Bell’s Inequality that was ignored for decades under that name. So it may be:

1. A lesser-known case not yet popularized.
2. A case of credit being reassigned in the broader field (as happened with many female physicists in quantum foundations).

---

However, there is a well-documented case involving:

Dr. Grete Hermann (1901–1984) – German, not Polish

Field: Mathematics, Physics, Philosophy
Discovery: Refuted von Neumann’s “proof” that hidden variables are impossible (which later fed into the discussions of Bell’s Theorem).

---

Why she matters:

• In 1935, Grete Hermann published a paper critiquing John von Neumann’s 1932 argument that hidden variable theories (like those considered by Einstein) were impossible.
• Her analysis showed that von Neumann’s assumptions were flawed—a fact later echoed in John Bell’s famous 1966 paper.
• Bell’s Inequality emerged decades later as a formal framework for testing local hidden variables—but Hermann had already pointed out the logical loophole in von Neumann’s argument 30 years earlier.

---

Why she was erased:

• Her paper was published in obscure German philosophical journals.
• The physics community ignored her—possibly due to her being a woman, a philosopher, and a socialist during a time of major political upheaval in Germany.
• Her insight was not rediscovered until Bell himself, independently, pointed out the same flaw in the 1960s—he later admitted he had no idea someone had already done it.

---

So in summary:

You may be thinking of Grete Hermann, who:

• Refuted a core assumption in quantum mechanics in 1935,
• Was ignored for decades, and
• Whose work was only recognized after John Bell made similar arguments in the 1960s.

Let me know if you want a detailed comparison between her 1935 arguments and Bell’s 1966 paper—or a list of other women in early quantum theory who were overlooked.

In the same way Pablo Casals has credited humanity with one of Bach’s most divine works, ChatGPT has helped me re-discover Grete Hermann.

There was very little on her back then and perhaps still now on Wikipedia. I remember coming across her name in one of the Google’s Headquarter talks that span a range of STEM topics that was uploaded to Youtube in around 2016-2017. The topic was Quantum Physics/Mechanics. The video was removed or made undiscoverable just a few years later and she has been lost to me ever since. Googling her context and her keywords turned up nothing due to all odds against it for the recommendation engine (“female physicist”, “female mathematician”, “1950s”, “quantum mechanics”, “Bell’s inequality”). This proved frustrating at the time as I was compiling my own list of names including the likes of Jocelyn Bell and Elena Cornaro which has since then been lost to me as well as I was playing too fast and loose with all the digital tools and printouts and papers. I should have gotten myself a proper notebook.

---

My partner told me recently that he had been reading biographies of women whose greatest crimes were their brilliance and thus were subsequently erased from history. It is such a sad and painful topic — wrathful of course at the time I was younger and unbelievable in its extent of monstrosity. I told him simply that I knew about them. I might have been one of the first on that wagon since I was an early Reddit user. I remember coming across Emmy Noether (in association with Neumann) probably in the early 2010s before the internet discovered her, as well as Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. I believe, in fact, that Lovelace and Hopper, the former having an entire programming language named after her, are obligated mentions in computer science textbooks and basic course materials. My professors acknowledged and taught them in my classes, but again, they were brilliant men and brilliant men almost always had remarkable mothers. So they were mostly defending their mothers — or being exceptionally intelligent themselves they appreciate that quality in others regardless of conventional biases. But I like the former explanation better.

I started noticing this trend when without exception the mothers of all my boyfriends turned up remarkable whereas the fathers were barely distinguished which seemed counter intuitive to me at the time. Two of them did not have a formal education at all being Western and from a much older generation. The other was one of the most remarkable Thai women I’ve met and her son was a prodigy. At my university, our advanced math class — I believe it was Calculus II — was taught by an aging woman of small and fragile frame who walked with a stoop and spoke very little. She was probably born in the 1950s but had a math PhD and taught classes in English. We later learned that she was the mother of one of our professors in the department. Our star professor in fact — a double-major computer science and math graduate from Carnegie Mellon with a perfect 4.0 GPA — in a small star-studded department full of former math and physics Olympiads who had to leave their posts working at Google and IBM as per their full ride governmental scholarship contracts.

The other was a physics PhD from Caltech who, if I remember correctly, was speculated to have made a massive fortune from writing his own stock trading algorithm in the 2000s and had only been teaching university classes out of boredom and occasionally took on irrelevant coursework like machine learning and IoT probably because he got fed up teaching projectile motions for the umpteenth time. I walked into the computer science lab once in my third or fourth year and he stocked the table full of electronic components. He wanted the computer science kids to build an electronic circuitry from scratch. Another professor taking on a first year programming class had us program LEGO robots for a sumo fight. We named our prize fighter robot “Beastie” and spent many hours designing and perfecting and programming him. I believe our team won in the championship bracket, but with everyone having so much fun and cheering and enthusiastically having re-matches it stopped mattering.

I forgot what my point was in all this. Ah, the intelligent men. Well ironically enough, the professors who sparked my interest in the history of physics were two humanities professors. It was first the philosophy professor (a European intellectual and a classical pianist who once called Marx and Kant boring and recommended me Husserl instead) from my first-semester in college who explained quantum entanglement to me after class and this probably culminated in me doing a silly two hour presentation on Quantum Gravity for my astronomy class in my third year (I wrote a blog post on this topic which I may revive). The second was a sociology professor who used to teach at the University of Chicago — a home to the great George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, and Martha Nussbaum — most likely in the 80s and defected to Thailand after his disillusionment with the academic establishment. He devoted his first lecture of his Social Science 101 course to the history of quantum revolution in the early 1900s and its key figures. He later lent me his personal copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

After having paid my dues to all the great and bright men in my life, I will say two things on this topic. First, the truly intelligent, high IQ people in my personal experience regardless of gender are more emotionally intelligent than the seemingly emotionally intelligent people with low and average IQs. Much worst than them are the 50th to the 94th percentile. They are adequately smart to merit some form of recognition and success in life, but undoubtedly insecure and low-minded enough to make the lives of others better than them miserable. The 95th percentilers, on the other hand, are magnificent people and it is within this range that their IQs and EQs scale up in direct correlation. Below this, it is inverse correlation all the way through. This fact may have eluded people who mistake emotional expressivity with emotional intelligence.

Here is a good portrait of the 50-ers to 94-ers by one 95th percentiler:

A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks of the average business man, or even of the average professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men—I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures—without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense.

H.L. Mencken

A second thing I would like to say. I know there are articles and op-eds being hawked off about sexism in the tech sector, but I believe people in the traditional academic institutions have heard of Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. But what about in literature, music, journalism, broadcasting, entertainment, finance, business, academics and government? In my personal observation the tech circles are extremely culturally and socially progressive, being intolerant of inefficiency and authority in general, as opposed to medicine or law or engineering. The best of them are cross-grained and recalcitrant at heart despite having diverse temperaments (hence the proliferation of programming languages and endless new implementations of libraries and frameworks). You could almost call a lot of them libertarians (hence the “flat hierarchy” buzzword in job listings). There is a high rate of 95th percentilers in the field, coupled with the fact that you can’t bullshit in this job as with other traditionally “smart people” fields.

Additionally, tech shouldn’t be lumped with other STEM fields. In fact, it could be placed at a diametrically opposed pole to research and academia. There reigned an insidious pecking order and myth-making and one hit wonders who think they are more intelligent than they actually are. Tech superstars can’t steal other people’s work and appropriate them as their own as there is a lot of novelties and domain-specific considerations to each given issue at any given time (from framework and language to the feature of a software to a specific behaviour on a page to the platform that runs them to the libraries that power them to the module that compiles and deploys them — think Docker and Babel and TypeScript support). It has become minute engineering on the grandest scale. Your ability to tackle these issues from day to day or even from hour to hour determines your progress in this field. It embodies the most extreme form of what in psychology is called “fluid intelligence,” as opposed to “crystallised intelligence.” Highly crystallised intelligence people can dominate other fields. In fact, they tend to rise to the top, passing off their intelligence as “fluid” when they simply look good on paper or are perhaps a little more articulate and diligent and a little more socially dominant than most of their peers. Hence, the gate-keeping and the politicking. Hence, they can do real harm to women.

Before I blast off the list which is the point of this post, I’d like to publicly state that I hate International Women’s Day. It has now been appropriated by corporations to appear hip and to increase esprit de corps. Its underpinning philosophy is that it’s supposed to be a feel good day because women have come far and they are now achieving recognitions. But the stock of women has been the same since the dawn of history, as well as their contributions and participations in the social, economic and intellectual spheres. Are we celebrating the fact that we now recognise women’s achievements when we have previously dismissed and disregarded them for over a millennium before? Are we simply celebrating as a way to appease half of the professional workforce which is now made up of women? Are we simply that ignorant of history and its treatment of women that we should be feeling inspired on this day rather than outraged or sad? If you actually care about the achievement of womenkind, publicise and educate the public on each and every single woman on this list (I shall call it my “Grete Hermann list” which I will get to) because their achievements are remarkable and they have actually contributed something to the world rather than being endowed a randomly assigned attribute at birth which is no predetermination of anything worth celebrating.

What struck me personally during that time of early intellectual growth, as far as I can recall, were in this order:

1. The Susan Sontag question. Her story has puzzled me for years. You could call her a success. I consider her a failure, as she was obviously destined to be a thinker of a much higher order and yet all she could achieve in life was being some dazzling American essayist. I have come to the conclusion in the past couple of years that her intellectual development was arrested by the birth of her son and that dismal marriage. Her husband, her college professor at the time, was much less intelligent than she was which would not be an issue if he wasn’t also malevolent and passed off her work on Freud as his own. “His” book on Freud achieved him a career breakthrough. He profited directly off her gift and talent and he legally gagged her up using their later divorce proceedings.

2. Zelda Fitzgerald’s diaries. The so-called “brilliant” writer stole his work from a woman, yet again.

3. Mozart’s sister, of course. Who hasn’t heard of her extraordinary talents. The great musical genius was overshadowed by his own sister.

4. There were some recordings of Fanny Mendelssohn that made its way onto Youtube around 2020. I remember being quite taken by them. I think her musical sensibility and raw innate talent much surpasses her brother.

5. Derrida praising and taken in by Hélène Cixous. I quoted Hélène Cixous in one of my college essays.

6. For everyone else, it was Frida Kahlo. For me, the little known Camille Claudel. It was obvious she was more gifted than Rodin, so he ruined her.

7. Of course everyone knew about Jocelyn Bell and Rosalind Franklin these days, but I raise you Grete Hermann. Nobody has truly re-discovered her yet. I have yet to see her bandied about in internet discourses about forgotten women.

8. I’ve come around to the theory that Shakespeare was probably a woman. That’s perhaps why there are no compelling candidates given the whole field of study around it, whether historical or literary. It was obviously not Francis Bacon. The fact that they reached for him was laughable to begin with. They fumbled badly because they didn’t know where to look.

It was only in 1986 that all Oxford colleges finally lifted its last ban to refuse entry to women. Nineteen eighty six. The Polgár sisters and Hou Yifan were way ahead of their times of course and that made their achievements even more marvelous. Anna Cramling often features her GM mother in her channel. A lot of brilliant women in chess despite drawing from a much smaller stock, probably at least twenty times smaller. Do the math.

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Lastly, having bored and put everyone off by this point, I will cite the Monty Hall problem. We learned about it in one of our computer science classes and any relatively smart person would have heard of it. What I didn’t know was that the Monty Hall problem was solved by a woman: Marilyn vos Savant. I had to come across this little factoid on Reddit a few months ago. She was listed as the world’s highest IQ by the Guinness World Records.

There are scientific studies done in the area of genetic inheritance of intelligence and I often heard more than its contrary claims, although perhaps more eye-popping if not actually true, that we inherit our IQs more from our mother’s side than our father’s. The first I heard about it was probably 15 years ago. The last I heard about it, being a recent study, was a few months ago. But the lack of scientific consensus aside, I will quote this:

Even the old and popular expression “mother-wit” shows the early recognition of this second truth, which depends upon the experience both with regard to small and great intellectual endowments, that they are the possession of those whose mothers proportionately distinguished themselves by their intelligence. That, on the other hand, the intellectual qualities of the father are not transmitted to the son is proved both by the fathers and the sons of men distinguished by the most eminent faculties, for, as a rule, they are quite ordinary men, without a trace of the paternal mental gifts. But if now an isolated exception to this experience, so often confirmed, should appear; such, for example, as is presented by Pitt and his father, Lord Chatham, we are warranted in ascribing it to accident, nay, obliged to do so, although, on account of the exceptional rarity of great talents, it is certainly an accident of a most extraordinary kind. Here, however, the rule holds good: it is improbable that the improbable never happens. Besides, great statesmen (as was already mentioned in chapter 22) are so just as much through the qualities of their character, thus through what is inherited from the father, as through the superiority of their mind. On the other hand, among artists, poets, and philosophers, to whose works alone genius is properly ascribed, I know of no case analogous to that. Raphael’s father was certainly a painter, but not a great one; Mozart’s father, and also his son, were musicians, but not great ones. However, it is indeed wonderful that the fate which had destined a very short life to both of these men, each the greatest in his own sphere, as it were by way of compensation, took care, by letting them be born already in their workshop, that, without suffering the loss of time in youth which for the most part occurs in the case of other men of genius, they received even from childhood, through paternal example and instruction, the necessary introduction into the art to which they were exclusively destined. This secret and mysterious power which seems to guide the individual life I have made the subject of special investigations, which I have communicated in the essay, “Ueber die scheinbare Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen” (Parerga, vol. i.). It is further to be observed here that there are certain scientific occupations which certainly presuppose good native faculties, yet not those which are really rare and extraordinary; while the principal requirements are zealous efforts, diligence, patience, early instruction, sustained study, and much practice. From this, and not from the inheritance of the intellect of the father, the fact is to be explained that, since the son always willingly follows the path that has been opened up by the father, and almost all businesses are hereditary in certain families, in some sciences also, which before everything demand diligence and persistence, individual families can show a succession of men of merit; such are the Scaligers, the Bernouillis, the Cassinis, the Herschels.

The number of proofs of the actual inheritance of the intellect of the mother would be much greater than it appears if it were not that the character and disposition of the female sex is such that women rarely give public proof of their mental faculties; and therefore these do not become historical, and thus known to posterity. Besides, on account of the weaker nature in general of the female sex, these faculties themselves can never reach the grade in them to which they may afterwards rise in the son; thus, with reference to themselves, we have to estimate their achievements higher in this proportion. Accordingly, in the first instance, only the following examples present themselves as proofs of our truth. Joseph II. was the son of Maria Theresia. Cardanus says in the third chapter, “De vita propria:” “Mater mea fuit memoria et ingenio pollens.” J. J. Rousseau says in the first book of the “Confessions:” “La beauté de ma mère, son [pg 326]esprit, ses talents,—elle en avait de trop brillans pour son état,” &c., and then quotes some delightful lines of hers. D’Alembert was the illegitimate son of Claudine de Tencin, a woman of superior mind, and the author of several romances and similar works, which met with great approbation in her day, and should even still be enjoyable (see her biography in the “Blätter für litterarische Unterhaltung,” March 1845, Nos. 71-73). That Buffon’s mother was a remarkable woman is shown by the following passage from the “Voyage à Montbar, par Hérault de Sechelles,” which Flourens quotes in his “Histoire des travaux de Buffon,” p. 288: “Buffon avait ce principe qu’en général les enfants tenaient de leur mère leurs qualités intellectuelles et morales: et lorsqu’il l’avait développé dans la conversation, il en faisait sur-le-champ l’application à lui-même, en faisant un éloge pompeux de sa mère, qui avait en effet, beaucoup d’esprit, des connaissances étandues, et une tête très bien organisée.” That he includes the moral qualities is an error which is either committed by the reporter, or depends upon the fact that his mother had accidentally the same character as himself and his father… Hume says in his short autobiography: “Our mother was a woman of singular merit.” It is said of Kant’s mother in the most recent biography by F. W. Schubert: “According to the judgment of her son himself, she was a woman of great natural understanding. For that time, when there was so little opportunity for the education of girls, she was exceptionally well instructed, and she also continued later to care for her further education by herself. In the course of walks she drew the attention of her son to all kinds of natural phenomena, and tried to explain to him through them the power of God.” What a remarkably able, clever, and superior woman Goethe’s mother was is now universally known. How much she has been spoken of in literature! while his father has not been spoken of at all; Goethe himself describes him as a man of subordinate faculties. Schiller’s mother was susceptible to poetry, and made verses herself, a fragment of which will be found in his biography by Schwab. Bürger, that genuine poetic genius, to whom perhaps the first place after Goethe among German poets belongs—for compared with his ballads those of Schiller seem cold and laboured—has given an account of his parents which for us is significant, and which his friend and physician, Althof repeats in his biography which appeared in 1798, in these words: “Bürger’s father was certainly provided with a variety of knowledge after the manner of study prevalent at the time, and was also a good, honourable man; but he loved his quiet comfort and his pipe of tobacco so much, that, as my friend used to say, he had always first to pull himself together if he was going to apply himself for a quarter of an hour or so to the instruction of his son. His wife was a woman of extraordinary mental endowments, which, however, were so little cultivated that she had scarcely learnt to write legibly. Bürger thought that with proper culture his mother would have been the most famous of her sex, although he several times expressed a strong disapproval of different traits of her moral character. However, he believed that he inherited from his mother some mental gifts, and from his father an agreement with his moral character.” Walter Scott’s mother was a poetess, and was in communication with the wits of her time, as we learn from the obituary notice of Walter Scott in the Globe of 24th September 1832. That poems of hers appeared in print in 1789 I find from an article entitled “Mother-wit,” in the Blätter für litterarische Unterhaltung of 4th October 1841, published by Brockhaus, which gives a long list of clever mothers of distinguished men, from which I shall only take two: “Bacon’s mother was a distinguished linguist, wrote and translated several works, and in all of them showed learning, acuteness, and taste. Boerhave’s mother distinguished herself through medical knowledge.” On the other hand, Haller has preserved for us a strong proof of the inheritance of the mental weakness of the mother, for he says: “E duabus patriciis sororibus, ob divitias maritos nactis, quum tamen fatuis essent proximæ, novimus in nobilissimas gentes nunc a seculo retro ejus morbi manasse semina, ut etiam in quarta generatione, quintave, omnium posterorum aliqui fatui supersint” (Elementa physiol., Lib. xxix. § 8). Also, according to Esquirol, madness is more frequently inherited from the mother than the father. If, however, it is inherited from the father, I attribute this to the disposition of the character whose influence occasions it.

…

If single cases should be found in which a highly gifted son had a mother who was not mentally distinguished at all, this may be explained from the fact that this mother herself had a phlegmatic father, and on this account her more than ordinarily developed brain was not adequately excited by a corresponding energy of the circulation—a necessary condition, as I have explained [pg 330]above in chapter 31. Nevertheless, her highly perfected nervous and cerebral system was transmitted to the son, in whose case a father with a lively and passionate disposition and an energetic action of the heart was added, and thus the other physical condition of great mental power first appeared here. Perhaps this was Byron’s case, since we nowhere find the mental advantages of his mother mentioned. The same explanation is also to be applied to the case in which the mother of a son of genius who was herself distinguished for mental gifts had a mother who was by no means clever, for the father of the latter has been a man of a phlegmatic disposition.

The inharmonious, disproportionate, ambiguous element in the character of most men might perhaps be referred to the fact that the individual has not a simple origin, but derives the will from the father and the intellect from the mother. The more heterogeneous and ill-adapted to each other the two parents were, the greater will that want of harmony, that inner variance, be. While some excel through their heart and others through their head, there are still others whose excellence lies in a certain harmony and unity of the whole nature, which arises from the fact that in them heart and head are so thoroughly adapted that they mutually support and advance each other; which leads us to assume that the parents were peculiarly suited to each other, and agreed in an exceptional measure.

Schopenhauer

One thing I will tell you about the earthquake that shook Bangkok on 28 March 2025 is that most people underestimate how bad the quake actually was.

In most video clips you see circulating online, the camera is either attached to the person (being a camera phone) or the building itself (being a surveillance camera or a nanny cam). This means that when the ground sways, the camera sways along with it. It tells you nothing about how much the ground itself actually sways.

Notice the word “sway” here. The ground did not shake or vibrate, being a low-frequency, high-amplitude oscillation with a period that was strangely more regular than most instances of earthquake (but I’m not an expert, although I was situated directly on the ground when it happened and so I’d wager that my perception of the magnitude of the quake is far more accurate than most people especially those in higher structures, but more on that).

There is a reason the majority of the people in Bangkok were not aware that they were experiencing an earthquake or even the aftermath tremors of an earthquake (perhaps the soft clay aka jellybowl effect did amplify the traversing wave so we could escalate the event and call it a bona fide earthquake). With a typical earthquake, you would feel an intense, irregular shaking of the ground. It may come in bouts of 10-15 second interval that may last longer in total duration. But with this particular earthquake, the building sways from side to side relentlessly for 60-90 seconds. If the teetering skyscrapers is any rough indication, it would put the frequency of the earthquake at around 0.5 Hz when it hit Bangkok (resonance frequency). This means the wall leans left, then right, then left and on it goes. The period between the leftmost sway and the rightmost sway would be one full second to two full seconds. This matched my experience well and has been confirmed by a seismograph:

Note: The instrument detected a period cycle of approximate 2.5 – 3 seconds.

Being a low-frequency, wavy oscillation, items and knickknacks remained pristinely intact on the surface. The high regularity and lengthy period of the wave cycle didn’t put anyone’s survival mechanism on a hair trigger. In fact, people thought they were in a swoon and many did not realise that they just experienced a series of very pronounced tremors. Adding to this fact is that everyone’s vestibular system (inner ear locomotion) was all shot and unreliable due to the swaying ground beneath their feet. There was no independent frame of reference proper, whether external i.e. a visual input (things being knocked off the shelves or the tables as the phase of oscillation was unusually long) or internal i.e. a vestibular input (the inner ears cannot reliably interpret horizontal or vertical orientation or movement in such a case).

I was in the living room on the first floor of my townhome when the waves hit. Initially, I thought I was experiencing a medical event, perhaps a stroke or an onset of epilepsy. I turned to my left and looked outside onto my backdoor garden and nothing was deemed out of the ordinary. Even the sprawling, two-meter hedge trees I cultivate that fan a rather wide-spanning foliage which I do not trim and as such are highly sensitive to the lightest breeze of wind remained completely intact. There was no single shake of any shoot. The underground oscillation with this type of signature (a slow, low-crest wave i.e. crest-to-cycle ratio) would not move a single tree — the tree will remain fastened onto the ground, it will not sway or shake, and the leaves will not visibly be disturbed.

I then turned to my right and while none of the furniture or its items were displaced or shaking, the floor lamp three feet away from me was swinging from side to side like a bobo doll (granted it was a top-heavy lamp with weak frame). It took full 15 seconds since the start of the event to register that it was in fact an earthquake. I looked further on to the other side of the room and noticed another floor lamp; an IKEA lamp with double arms on which I hung a tote bag — this bag having no content in it and as such no weight to be subjected to any kind of rotation on its axis given the impetus, yet swung with such a momentum that I’d reckon was sweeping at a 60-90 degree angle at its most intense, busiest cycle (only 60 degrees on its rotational axis or what is called an angular sweep, if taken into account the perceptual width of the bag it would be sweeping a 120-150 degree physical arc). The adrenaline pump could indeed make me exaggerate and the bag was probably heavier than it looks being woven linen (or cotton) with a zipper, yet it would not have weighed more than 200-300 grams.

Why is this remarkably tedious detail important? Because these two floor lamps of mine (and one tote bag), cheap though they may be and precisely because they are cheap and flimsy and unweighted, moved out of sync with the ground motion and as such prove to be the only objective, independent frame of reference that established how massive the oscillation actually was. If the lamps weren’t there or I failed to notice them, I would have thought the tremors were quite minor. My body would have registered only the difference in arc traversal where my sway did not match up with the ground’s (ChatGPT tells me this is called reduced amplitude or amplitude difference leading to a phase lag). Subjective perception is also unreliable as it would always be attenuated. If you are on the ground during the quake and your body was swaying back and forth a certain amount, the actual ground would be swaying at least 5 times that amount — would be my best guess and most conservative estimate.

Many shopping malls and office high rises often have basement parking lots and so I’d venture that they were built with greater seismic regulations and had already dampened some earthquake effects by the time the waves were transmitted to its upstairs inhabitants. Many condo high rises didn’t sway as much or at all relative to the moving ground and some hitting the resonance frequency kept waving. The experience varied from building to building but what the people in those buildings would feel, assuming the lack of resonance which would be the case for nearly all buildings in the area, would be ground oscillation minus building oscillation minus body oscillation. I did notice minor, irregular vibrations in some video clips in a shopping mall or on an elevated roadway for example, but those minor trembles most likely came from the infrastructure counteracting or dissipating the energy coming off ground. They would be the byproduct of the inertial forces of the structure (building, bridge) resisting ground motion. They did not represent the ground motion itself.

Another great perceptual aid to help visualise how the ground actually behaved during that time is the behaviour of this sloshing water in a pond that was built into the ground and so situated at the ground level (a rooftop level would not be an accurate representation of the quake). This video was taken during the throes of the quake in the Nonthaburi region which is located mere 10-20km away from the collapsed building near Chatuchak: https://www.facebook.com/reel/633329249499577/

The frequency of the quake (note that I use “frequency” and not necessarily magnitude or strength) combined with the shallowness of origin was extremely hazardous. I do sympathise greatly with the dozens if not hundreds of high rises with reported extensive damages from collapsed ceilings to massive diagonal tears to deep cracks on the concrete floor you could peer directly into. Those buildings may be quite well-built, but the waving and twisting and shearing motion from the ground lasted over a full minute and would undoubtedly put undue stress on buildings of certain size and height, if not for most. We don’t know how extensive the damages are to the foundations of those buildings, with or without visible damages, and some newer ones are using precast walls in a load-bearing capacity (not that precast walls themselves are unsafe, if anything these walls that section off each unit of my townhome block serve as a very sturdy lateral support across the entire section and with a shared foundation underneath makes my place rather immune, given the low vertical height, wide foundation and pre-cast load bearers as opposed to extreme vertical height, limited foundation and pre-cast load bearers — though this is just my armchair intuition).

I think it could be safely said that many if not most high rises (20-30+ floors) — or even perhaps basic infrastructures (low rises, tenements, bridges, tunnels, malls) — are structurally compromised in some way, although they are not going to topple over from strong winds whence comes the stormy season and whatever leftover safety factor may at the end of the day remains within the “safe” margin. The building owners and building companies are never going to allow independent inspection with proper sensing equipments (radar, etc). This slate-thin building that teetered back and forth and in the middle section dispensing a cloud of concrete dust while bellowing out extremely loud creaking and snapping noises is most likely going to be declared safe for use unfortunately: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BWJTY8Q6t/