Voting Station

Frederick Lindemann

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Scientist

The Resume

    (April 5, 1886-July 3, 1957)
    Born in Baden Baden, Germany
    Physicist
    Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Oxford (1919-57)
    Scientific advisor to Winston Churchill
    Named Baron Cherwell of Oxford (1941) and Viscount Cherwell of Oxford (1956)

Why he might be annoying:

    He was a vegetarian.
    He felt the world should be run by a group of intellectuals and aristocrats, producing a stable society 'led by supermen and served by helots.'
    He hoped that scientific breeding would produce a working class that lacked ambition, which would eliminate the 'fetish for equality.'
    Part of his praise of Einstein was to note that he 'has not got a Jewish nose.'
    He dismissed early reports about Germany's V-2 rocket as 'a great hoax to distract our attention from some other weapon.'

Why he might not be annoying:

    During World War I, he determined how an airplane could recover from a spin -- previously and almost inevitably fatal event -- and learned to fly in order to test his ideas himself.
    He arranged for a number of Jewish physicists to emigrate from Nazi Germany to the UK by offering them positions at Oxford.
    Churchill said he could 'decipher the signals from the experts on the far horizons and explain to me in lucid homely terms what the issues were.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 4 Votes: 25.00% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying