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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

Many more ideas in science have been discovered sober than on drugs. In fact I would probably say it's one of the disciplines with the least drug use in my own experience. That's why I'm confused about what the connection is. I'm a physicist and I know very few colleagues who take drugs.

EDIT: honestly, looking at the user's other comment doesn't fill me with confidence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756514

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I don't know, man. The last time they tested my IQ, they wanted me to come back and take the test again, because I was "out of bounds" for the test they gave me. My parents refused, because none of us cared enough to spend another $800.

And I took a _lot_ of shrooms.

Unfortunately, I majored in Philosophy. So, I'll never find the right answer to life's great mysteries. I did get fairly good at pointing out the wrong ones, though.

IQ is totally irrelevant to this discussion

The point is that some ideas may never be discovered without the use of mind expanding drugs, and some notable discoveries in physics have come from the use of mind expanding drugs, and possibly more than in other disciplines, so there is a notable link, if even in jest, between physicists and mind expanding drug use.

Yes but you can say this about literally any idea in any field ever. Surely arts and music have a much stronger connection with drugs than physics? In fact, we are on Hacker News, so surely software development has a far stronger connection. I'm just failing to see how physics is in any way especially connected to drugs compared to pretty much any other human activity. In fact, it seems almost the bottom of the list to me

> Yes but you can say this about literally any idea in any field ever.

Great! That's why it's fun to say.

I do find the prospect of scientists using a bit more amusing than the average employee, however, as the public expects them to be holy.

In mathematics, there is a certain prestige in having a low Erdős number. Paul Erdős was famous for his (ab)use of amphetamines. The role which stimulants played in the sheer volume of papers he published over his life is up for debate.

"You shouldn't have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine. It's not that you got it wrong. It's just that I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed."

-Paul Erdős responding to the author of a 1987 Atlantic Monthly article profiling his work (as well as his use of benzedrine).

I agree 100%. I should have mentioned this in. My first post.

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