Happybomb

-You'll never be content!

The buddies sat on a park bench.

Stan, Leo's friend, looked at him sadly and took a sip of beer. Leo slowly sipped the foam while his friend passionately chugged a dried twig in the sandy soil. Then he tilted the mug, and the golden nectar began to spill onto the sand. Leo looked at his friend in reprimand. His friend gazed at the liquid soaking into the sand in a flash and started a monologue:

- See how this happiness-giving drink disappears, unable to fill the hole in the sand even for a moment. It's like with your sense of happiness. All happiness has only a negative dimension; positively you feel pain and suffering. We feel pain but not painlessness, we feel concern but not lack of concern, we feel unfulfillment but not fulfillment. We perceive happy days only when they give way to unhappy ones. The hours pass the faster the more pleasant they are, for pain rather than pleasure is something positive whose presence is felt. Life is most delightful when one feels it least - as neurasthenics and artists like you, my dear, well know.

Maybe it is an answer to the old dilemma: "Theology makes a man bad, medicine - ill, and mathematics - sad".

-Do you remember Vera?

How could he not remember? Ever since he was a child, Leo dreamed of the perfect love, the perfect relationship and connection, about true other half of his soul, the woman with whom you can feel that mythical evangelical unity. And he met such a woman. He received in an instant everything he dreamed of. And it turned out that when he reached the finish line, when his dream was realized, he didn't know what to do with himself, his life, goals, and.. love. The purpose and drive to achieve the dream disappeared when it came true.

It's been almost a decade since he parted with Vera, with his dream. And with his happiness.

Leo smiled bitterly and looked in front of him.

- As we know, some insects die at the moment of fertilization. The same is true with every joy. The moment of life's highest delight comes in the company of death.

The friends sat silent for a while and unhurriedly rose from the park bench.

They walked along streets filled with the bustle of an afternoon shopping day. They entered a vast prospect where groups of grandpas played chess, checkers, and cards at stone tables. Children indulged in variously passionate, but for them, games.

- A royal game for the mind! Leo glanced at his friend.

- Classes, frisky, cymbergaj, checkers? The friend looked around and collected possible options. And, of course, he didn't miss adding a dash of humor to this enumeration. Humor, including black humor, is often the only thing that saves a person from despair. Including his unhappy friend.

Leo smiled mockingly.

- Only Go is more fascinating than chess. But in our country, there are no opponents to play Go. Yes, my dear, chess! That's the only thing left.

He hesitated. In any case, when one can no longer live with the heart, one is left with a life devoted entirely to the mind.

- Let's join a game of pyramid at Viennese. What do you think?

- As far as I know, there are no pyramid tables there anymore, they have introduced this American novelty - with shells and colored balls, more than dozen.

- What the heck? We'll see.

On Svobody Avenue, in the Vienna Café, on the ground floor, there are now, in the XXI century, token billiard tables. When a token is thrown, colored balls needed for the game are released from a tray in the center of the table. As players knock them into the shells, they disappear from the table in the game. However, it may happen that the white ball falls into the pocket, which is always necessary to continue the game because it is the ball that the player plays with the cue stick. For the automatic mechanism of the token billiard to recognize the white ball and return it to the table after each accidental pocketing, the white ball is usually larger and heavier than the colored balls. This makes token billiards unsuitable for more discerning players. They know that the white ball, with its altered parameters, is much more difficult to crank up, and thus to give it the proper rotation by hitting a specific point on it. The key to success in the billiard game is not to hit the colored balls but to position the white ball so that each subsequent hit is easy.

 So you have to think, first of all, where, in the next move, the white ball you are hitting will be, and whether it has a straight path to pocket the next numbered ball, in the order of play.

A game based on training oneself to hit the most complicated hands, when the balls are covered, etc. - gives, perhaps, occasional fireworks rewarded by a gaping mouth by the spectators, but nothing else.

Predicting future movement.

Leo's thoughts circulated around the game's geometry, movement, and future predictions.

Leo with his friend played a new-fashioned American eight-ball pool game, croaking at its simplistic rules and the ease and banality of the game itself. Later they moved to another cafe, drank coffee after coffee, and then vodka after vodka until they were joined by friends and colleagues from the university. Thus began another night of mathematicians, where drunkenness did not serve the purpose of coarse antics or unwarranted rubbishness but loosened the bonds of logic and rigor to give vent to fantasy. The most original and astonishing mathematical and physical problems, formulas, puzzles, and theorems were created in this fantasy. Much later, Einstein said that fantasy is most important for discovering nature secrets.

And..., no - not proofs. Mathematical proofs required a sober head. Proofs were dealt with by comrades in the morning.

As the clocks struck midnight, from above the ever bustling table, where fellow mathematicians and physicists did not stop talking, and more than one was scribbling on pieces of paper, café tissues, or straight on the marble table tops, Leo suddenly broke off in some wild, crazy gusto and ran out into the middle of the premises. Before anyone had time to interrupt him, he hurled himself at the clock beating the hour of spirits, and smashed it with the impact of the bottle he held in his hand.

- Death to Time! Destroy time! Stop time! Stop motion! Bring in stillness! Time is to blame for everything.

When the staff and colleagues dragged him away from the broken furniture, he was still mumbling to himself in a drunken stupor:

-When time stands still, a dream can last forever! Carried out of the room, he was already whispering to himself: If the world would stop... When time stands, the idea lasts forever.

- He'll be fine; I'll stop by tomorrow to see if he woke up in shape, said Stan.

It was not the first time, not the last, the excess of alcohol caused similar excesses, and neither mathematics nor the respectability of those gathered could prevent it.

Only the quiet, aged bartender, old Jews, abstemious, looked seriously from above the marble bar and iridescent glasses. He repeated in thoughtfulness, with anxiety, even fear, the words that a moment ago tore through even the café bustle: Stop time. Stop time.

- And yet, he thoughtfully muttered under his breath, movement is life, stillness is death. This is death. Shod.

The next day, Stan called early at Leo's mansard in the suburbs. He was opened by a sleepy but already sober friend.

From the threshold, Stach pressed frantically:

- Do you remember what you were ranting about yesterday? It's about time. About stillness. About detention. Later, as they carried you out, you began to improvise formulas. Here, write, tell. I won't let you go before you describe it in detail. Oh, and you have curdled milk here.

***

Lviv's intellectual life in the early XX century was concentrated in cafés. Some representatives of the excellent mathematical school of Lviv liked especially the Scottish Cafe as a meeting place. There they kept a famous notebook in which they wrote down the more original mathematical problems and the solutions that arose during their discussions at the café. The notebook was published in the United States under the name "The Scottish Book: A Collection of Problems" in Los Alamos in 1957.

Two friends, Stan Ulam and Leon Dunin, belonged to this company.

Stan recalled many years later in Los Alamos: "It is a source of constant amazement to me, that a few marks scribbled on a blackboard can change the course of human affairs".

Oppenheimer noted in his notebook: "And I became death, the destroyer of worlds".

This was made possible by the incidental application of a brilliant mathematical and physical formula, born in a cockeyed spree of Leo, Stan's friend from pre-war Poland, who lived and died unhappily.