[Icarus]

Gents,

You may enjoy reading this article on famous theoretical physicists who were players: Einstein, Feynman and other famous swingers (2006).

An excerpt:

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Schrödinger, Curie, Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer… the finest names of pre-Cold War 20th-century physics, some of whom gave us the most concise theories ever posited, form a roster of lamentable philanderers. Albert Einstein was completely “given to flirtation” and had legions of affairs. Caltech professor and bestselling raconteur Richard Feynman was probably the only Nobel Prize winner to befriend porn stars, claim a foolproof manner for bedding women and do his calculations on napkins in strip clubs. And it wasn’t just the guys: Marie Curie was relentlessly hounded by the press for seducing away her late-husband’s former student from his wife and kids.

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The most shameless cad of the group was Richard Feynman. When he once nearly crashed his car while eyeing a passing beauty, his only excuse was, “I only see the women, the rest is all a blur.” He even kept a picture in his office of one acquaintance, buxom adult film star Candi Samples, signed, “To Big Dick, Love from Candi.”

Remarkably, some physicists’ trysts seem to have actually led to physical insight: While once floundering on a problem, Erwin Schrödinger shacked up in an alpine villa for an extended holiday with “an old girlfriend” and, in the “late erotic outburst” that followed, produced the eponymous equation that would net him the Nobel.

At the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, the assembled brain trust was as hard-partying as a troop of college kids on spring break. Weekends with the physicists were “big and brassy,” replete with poker and booze. They played so hard that the program tried to quarantine the women’s dorms; as one boss euphemized, “The girls had been doing a flourishing business of requiting the needs of our young men.” So many babies resulted that Robert Oppenheimer (or his boss, nobody’s really sure), himself having tried to run off with the wife of Linus Pauling and bed the wife of another colleague, was told to halt the extracurricular activities. (Oppenheimer didn’t.)