THE MYSTERY DATE OBSERVATION: THE UNLIKELY DATING HABITS OF EGGHEADS

In “The Mystery Date Observation,” Season 9, Episode 8, we begin to wonder about the dating lives of eggheads like Sheldon.

“Homer, in the second book of the Iliad, says with fine enthusiasm, ‘Give me masturbation or give me death.’ Caesar, in his Commentaries, says, ‘To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and to the impotent it is a benefactor. They that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion.’ In another place this experienced observer has said, ‘There are times when I prefer it to sodomy.’ Robinson Crusoe says, ‘I cannot describe what I owe to this gentle art.’ Queen Elizabeth said, ‘It is the bulwark of virginity.’ Cetewayo, the Zulu hero, remarked, ‘A jerk in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ The immortal Franklin has said, ‘Masturbation is the best policy.’ Michelangelo and all of the other old masters—‘old masters,’ I will remark, is an abbreviation, a contraction—have used similar language. Michelangelo said to Pope Julius II, ‘Self-negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse.’ Mr. Brown, here, in one of his latest and most graceful poems, refers to it in an eloquent line which is destined to live to the end of time—‘None knows it but to love it; none name it but to praise.’”

—Mark Twain, Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism (1879)

The Shakespeare of Science Fiction Smelled of Walnuts and Honey

“The Mystery Date Observation” episode, along with many others, really does make you wonder about the dating lives of eggheads like Sheldon. But to what extent is Sheldon’s love life representative of the scientific intelligentsia? Are the tales of Dr. Cooper too far-fetched, or does real life have stories up its sleeve that are stranger still? Consider three fascinating cases from the history of science. Not only do eggheads have tempestuous affairs, but their sexual predilections lead to surprising scientific results.

One of the world’s greatest sci-fi writers and science thinkers, H. G. Wells, was born over 150 years ago. He’s known as the author of such influential works as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, which blended popular tale telling with a sharp eye for emerging scientific trends. Wells’s books set the template for a century of the science fiction genre. He was also a major science guru of his time, writing more than one hundred books of essays, world history, and futurology. But what’s not so well known is that Wells was also a tireless practitioner of “free love.”

Wells’s written work on equality and human rights informed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations shortly after his death. And yet Wells also wrote, “I have done what I pleased, so that every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself. I am a very immoral person. I have preyed on people who loved me.” Wells lived the life of a futurist. Wells’s love-life must be seen against a backdrop of an Edwardian society, which held to the belief that people should know their place and be bound by it. But Wells seemed to have the smack of the Time Traveler from his Time Machine about him. A Time Traveler beamed into the present from a more permissive future to catalyze the course of a prudish society. “If the world does not please you, you can change it,” Wells declared in his novel The History of Mr. Polly, “determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether.”

The man who predicted, among other inventions, nuclear weapons, mass surveillance, and a worldwide web of knowledge (which would allow people to examine any document in their own homes) was equally forward-looking in his personal life. In a respectable Britain where careers could be ruined by mere rumors of promiscuity, Wells preached and practiced the kind of profligacy that wouldn’t become acceptable until the 1960s. His diaries show he had dreamed since adolescence of encounters with “free, ambitious, self-reliant women who would mate with me and go their way,” and, after a first marriage of sexual incompatibility, he set out to turn the dream into reality.

Describing himself in his diaries as “the Don Juan of the intelligentsia,” Wells had a string of affairs that came dangerously close to public scandal. They led to some close shaves with injured parties, including being beaten up at London Paddington train station, being stalked out of a gentleman’s club at the point of a loaded pistol, and engaging in such energetic sex it resulted in the breaking of a hotel bed, twice.

Known to lecture casual lovers on philology (no, it’s not a sexual act; look it up), and the dynamics of London’s Cockney dialect, while naked, Wells had some affairs that were more durable. For example, he had a lengthy entanglement with author Rebecca West. They met when Wells was in his midforties and West was a mere twenty-one. West later revealed her lover’s secret: “He smelt of walnuts, and frisked like a nice animal.” Late in life, Wells became obsessed with the mysterious Moura, Baroness Budberg, a Ukrainian adventuress, known to Lenin and Stalin, who may well have been a Soviet double agent. While it was possible that she was reporting on her literary lover to the Russians, she ascribed Wells’s attractiveness to the fact that his body smelled of honey. And yet, Wells was never ashamed by the sex rumors that swirled around his private life. He simply quipped that “sex is as necessary as fresh air, and moral indignation jealousy with a halo.”

The Professor and the Cabaret Dancer

Now consider the curious case of Wolfgang Pauli, an Austrian-born Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. At the age of twenty-one, Pauli wrote a review of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a review that is still a standard reference today. Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, which says that no two electrons in an atom can be at the same time in the same state, is the basis of the modern theory of the structure of matter. Pauli even postulated the existence of the neutrino, which was later confirmed in his lifetime. But Pauli also had a reputation for accidentally breaking experimental equipment, which was dubbed The Pauli Effect, and had a long correspondence with Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst, and given Pauli’s love life, maybe it’s easy to see why.

In the 1920s, Pauli had first come up with his famous principle while in Hamburg, as a night owl, visiting the red-light district and having all kinds of hijinks, then showing up very late in the lab in the mornings and thinking very deeply about electron jumps. Tired of loveless sex, Pauli then married Käthe Deppner, his stunning new cabaret dancer wife. But the marriage didn’t last. Pauli’s days of pleasure were abruptly halted. Deppner had been seeing someone when she and Pauli had met and continued the affair after the marriage. Within a year, the couple divorced. Deppner ran off with the other guy. But Pauli’s famous quoted reaction to the episode reflects the antagonism between different fields of science. Pauli was not just hurt by the fact that his marriage had fallen apart (he jokingly admitted he was married only in a “loose way”), but by his ex-wife’s choice of man. Deppner had left Pauli for a chemist, of all things, and not a very good one at that. Pauli loudly protested to his friends, “Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood—with such a man I could not compete—but a chemist—such an average chemist!”

Love Thyself

We have to travel back to the “anything goes” days of medieval science to find the most exceptional surprises. Englishman Robert Hooke was an architect, a polymath, and a physicist rivaling the stature of Isaac Newton. History allowed Hooke a reputation for scrupulous honesty and hard work, which included being the Surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666.

As Hooke was a bachelor-academic who lived an allegedly cerebral and monastic life in his lodgings at London’s Gresham College, it was always assumed he had few emotional or physical interests. Until, that is, his diaries were finally published in the 1930s and shined a dramatically different light on Hooke’s private life. The diaries revealed, with his customary scrupulous honesty and reasonably hard work, that this private man regularly had sex with a series of servant girls at the College. Not only that, but Hooke recorded the details of lovers (Doll Lord, Nell Young, Betty Orchard, and so on) in his “warts and all” diary, so that a pretty typical entry would read, “Played with Nell - . Hurt small of back.” ( was the symbol Hooke used in his diary to signify one or more orgasms. While the symbol may not have actually been , I hope you get the drift.) Hooke also regularly had sessions with Grace Hooke, his teenage niece and ward (witness the enigmatic diary entry for January 16, 1677, “Grace , paid me 1sh.”). Indeed, Hooke’s diary develops into an archive of his masturbations, unless his diligent recording of every orgasm failed to include a partner on each and every occasion. The story of Hooke’s hidden diary for hundreds of years shows the danger of assuming that the outward public demeanor of eggheads implies an absence of private passions.

And yet Hooke’s tale doesn’t end there. Semen research was in the ether, in a manner of speaking. The contemporary enthusiasm for masturbation was taken one step further by Dutch businessman and scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. In this golden age of Dutch science and technology, Leeuwenhoek became best known for his pioneering work in microscopy and for his contributions toward the establishment of microbiology. He was famously recognized in the 1670s for his explorations of microbial life with the microscope. Blood cells, capillary circulation, single-celled creatures, bacteria, microscopic worms: Leeuwenhoek found them all. Most famously, and potentially perhaps most scandalously, was what our Dutch diviner discovered in his own ejaculate in 1677.

Leeuwenhoek described the human spermatozoon. In a letter dated November 1677, and addressed to Lord Brounker, secretary of The Royal Society in London, Leeuwenhoek mentioned that he had observed a multitude of “small animals,” which he named “animalcules”: “I had observed enough material coming from a sick person . . . but also from a healthy one, immediately after ejaculation.” Yes, Leeuwenhoek became the first to spy those vital little swimmers live, and in action. What’s more, he came up with the fertilization theory of reproduction: a revolution from the commonly held theory of the time, which held that life merely sort of happened if the conditions were right. It seems that the countless little creatures beneath his lens worried Leeuwenhoek. With considerable courage, he recorded his observations and presented his findings to the Royal Society, with the following disclaimer: “What I investigate is only what, without sinfully defiling myself, remains as a residue after conjugal coitus. If your Lordship should consider that these observations may disgust or scandalize, regard them as private and to publish or destroy them as your Lordship thinks fit.”

Leeuwenhoek changed the opinion of the feeble-minded. The church’s position on procreation at the time was naturally entrenched in the so-called “spontaneous generation of life” camp. The pious Leeuwenhoek avoided direct confrontation with the church, always wise in those days, by saying sperm was just another example of God’s glory, though admittedly prudes could easily have taken this proclamation badly. And yet the church accepted this compromise and adopted the concept that every living thing comes from another living thing.

Leeuwenhoek’s Royal Society disclaimer and negotiation with the church notwithstanding, analyses of ejaculates became the order of the day. Rather than the Royal Society considering the matter repugnant or scandalous, they positively encouraged Leeuwenhoek to carry out more research. Secretary Brounker told him to repeat his observations on the sperm of various quadrupeds. On March 18, 1678, Leeuwenhoek told his correspondent that he had noticed a number of “animalcules” in the semen of dogs and rabbits and he was expecting to find them in all male animals. Leeuwenhoek’s “animalcule” became so fashionable that those in high society, wealthy enough to buy the necessary equipment, found great amusement in observing their own “animalcules” under the microscope.

One final word on his famous “animalcules” from Leeuwenhoek himself: “Several times, already, disputations were made to me regarding the fact that it is my imagination that extraordinarily small living beings exist, which are invisible to the bare eye and which can only be seen with the help of special magnifiers or telescopes. . . . For my part, although I have conducted research in this direction, it was not possible to see animalcules moving in air so large as to observe them with bare eyes.” Perhaps that’s just as well.