Getting physical: Einstein, Feynman and other famous swingers

It's kind of a clueless article, it talks about how science has lost its 'machismo' because the great scientists of our day aren't attempting to bed women, seemingly as a competition. However, the author obviously failed to realise that at the time about a dozen of the best scientists of our time were essentially locked in Los Alamos with a large compliment of female staff and were rarely allowed off of base.

If the author had read Feynman's biographies, he would have released that the man did essentially anything for fun. Most of which seemed to be an endless one-up game with his friends and colleagues.

The simple fact is that people have lost interest in scientists and people with brilliant minds. Who cares what scientist came up with what, Jon & Kate broke up, Brangelina went to the toilet five minutes ago . . . pop culture has degraded so far, the antics of a scientist are tame by the standards of whomever the media has decided to follow. Which starlet purposefully forgot to wear underwear this week, or what female tennis player had some creep ass photographer take a photo up her skirt while she was playing.

Successful physicists were once seen as celebrities, not entirely unlike renowned athletes. Thus it was possible for them to attract similar attention from the opposite sex. The public's respect for physics and other cutting-edge intellectual pursuits has waned, however, and it is unlikely that we will be seeing this again.

I did Physics at university. 'Swingers' wouldn't have been the first word that sprung to mind if you had looked around my lecture theatre.

I think as perceptions of relationships change - affairs being considered a much greater scandal rather than an occasional fact of married life, and polyamory, open relationships and other assorted variant approaches coming more out into the open - people with a high libido as well as a high functioning brain are more and more taking a structured approach to the problem and one that doesn't require them to bother keeping track of more than one version of reality.

I certainly count myself in that category - I'm happily open/poly and so are a noticeable number of the open source geeks I interact with on a day to day basis. And from the ranks of my local friends, the other two who've followed this approach for some time are a chemist and a physicist.

I kind of pity anybody stuck in a situation where they end up cheating because they're unable to have the conversation with their partner that would allow them to either change approach or to understand that their choices are circumscribed if they want to retain the relationship - or worse still simply unaware that alternative approaches can and do successfuly exist.

Though I do still keep a small notebook and a pen on me for when what meager inspiration my brain is capable of strikes me when I'm out having fun ...