Alfred Bester - The Men Who Murdered Mohammed

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THE MEN WHO

MURDERED

MOHAMMED

Alfred Bester

There was a man who mutilated history. He toppled empires

and uprooted dynasties. Because of him, Mount Vernon should not

be a national shrine, and Columbus, Ohio, should be called Cabot,

Ohio. Because of him the name Marie Curie should be cursed in

France, and no one should swear by the beard of the Prophet.

Actually, these realities did not happen, because he was a mad

professor; or, to put it another way, he only succeeded in making

them unreal for himself.

Now, the patient reader is too familiar with the conventional

mad professor, undersized and overbrowed, creating monsters in

his laboratory which invariably turn on their maker and menace his

lovely daughter. This story isn’t about that sort of make-believe

man. It’s about Henry Hassel, a genuine mad professor in a class

with such better-known men as Ludwig Boltzmann (see Ideal Gas

Law), Jacques Charles, and André Marie Ampère (1775-1836).

Everyone ought to know that the electrical ampere was so

named in honor of Ampère. Ludwig Boltzmann was a

distinguished Austrian physicist, as famous for his research on

black-body radiation as on Ideal Gases. You can look him up in

Volume Three of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, BALT to BRAI.

Jacques Alexandre César Charles was the first mathematician to

become interested in flight, and he invented the hydrogen balloon.

These were real men.

They were also real mad professors. Ampère, for example,

was on his way to an important meeting of scientists in Paris. In

his taxi he got a brilliant idea (of an electrical nature, I assume) and

whipped out a pencil and jotted the equation on the wall of the

hansom cab. Roughly, it was: dH = ipdl/r2 in which p is the

perpendicular distance from Ñ to the line of the element dl; or dH

= i sin è dl/r2. This is sometimes known as Laplace’s Law,

although he wasn’t at the meeting.

Anyway, the cab arrived at the Académie. Ampère jumped

out, paid the driver and rushed into the meeting to tell everybody

about his idea. Then he realized he didn’t have the note on him,

remembered where he’d left it, and had to chase through the streets

of Paris after the taxi to recover his runaway equation. Sometimes I

imagine that’s how Fermat lost his famous “Last Theorem,”

although Fermat wasn’t at the meeting either, having died some

two hundred years earlier.

Or take Boltzmann. Giving a course in Advanced Ideal

Gases, he peppered his lectures with involved calculus, which he

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Alfred Bester - The Men Who Murdered Mohammed

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