Spherical Bastard

Fritz Zwicky first identified dark matter back in the 1930s.

What Zwicky noticed in 1933 was that a cluster of galaxies called the Coma Cluster was moving too fast. It turns out that the observed mass simply couldn't account for the speed at which the cluster was revolving.

Using the mathematics of the time, the only explanation was that there was more mass—mass that was invisible to telescopes and thus, unaccounted for. With a boldness characteristic of him, Zwicky posited the existence of a mysterious and unseen form of matter called "dark matter."

That’s not the only term Zwicky coined.

In order to discover such profound fundamental truths about nature that everyone else had missed up until just now, you really need someone willing to defy convention. After all, if the same kind of thinking applied here, someone else would have already solved the conundrum.

Nonconformists like Zwicky tend to rub the scientific community the wrong way, but Zwicky had no patience for small-minded thinking. He spoke openly about “the useless trash in the bulging astronomical journals.”

Most famously, he said, “Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.”

Spherical bastards!

What a phrase. Of course, Zwicky himself was an astronomer, so that took some of the sting of the criticism out… but not all of it! Even better, the word spherical at the beginning implies geometrical precision. It is part of the language of astronomy.

Zwicky’s wordplay accomplishment isn’t as notable as his discovery that the universe is made up of five times more matter than we can see, but the two might be more connected than they first seem. People who change the world nearly always think differently, and that often means getting inhibitive, restrictive thoughts out of the way.

This was the most important aspect of Zwicky’s insult—it made everyone giggle just a bit. You weren’t supposed to say the B-word back then, and slapping a playful geometrical term on the front added absurdity to the mix. It was an effective insult insofar as it relieved tension, helping everyone to relax.

By staying playful, Zwicky was able to keep a very open mindset whenever he thought about important problems.

Of course, there was a little truth to the insult too. The scientific community really was stodgy and resistant to new ideas, even though a quantum revolution had already taken place by this time, and physics was busily being turned upside down by relativity and Einstein.

Zwicky practiced rational irreverence, leveraging the absurd to incite inspired thinking.