Mad scientists of Stanisław Lem | Wikipedia audio article
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Date: 27/03/2019

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"I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think."
- Socrates


SUMMARY
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Mad scientists  appear in fiction of Stanisław Lem in the memoirs of Lem's starfaring vagabond Ijon Tichy, collected in The Star Diaries and Memoirs of a Space Traveller. They include professors Corcoran, who created several artificial universes in isolated lockers; Decantor, who created an immortal soul, Zazul, who cloned himself and was apparently killed by the clone who took his place; Diagoras, who created progressing makes of an "independent and self-perfecting device that is capable of spontaneous thought" and was unwittingly used by the two of them as a communication medium; doctor Vliperdius, a robot doctor who runs an asylum for mentally ill robots; and professor A. Dońda. Dońda catastrophically succeeded in his quest to prove mass-information equivalence, analogous to mass–energy equivalence: by accumulating a huge amount of useless information in a supercomputer, Donda made the total amount of information accumulated by the humanity to cross a certain threshold, after which it all converted into a new universe, leaving the humanity without any knowledge.Some of these professors and some more unnamed ones, in words of Peter Swirski, strove to "inflict social panacea on entire populations", a part of Lem's philosophical analysis of social engineering.Professor Farragus from Lem's early novelette Koniec świata o ósmej (End of the World at Eight O'Clock) irritated by a non-recognition of his fundamental discovery decides to prove he is right by destructing the Universe. It was one of the earlier Lem's stories, first printed in Co Tydzień Powieść, Katowice, 1947, no.67, p. 2-12. The collection Dzienniki gwiazdowe (The Star Diaries), Warszawa, Iskry, 1957, includes a revised version. The early version was reprinted in Lem's selection of early works  Lata czterdzieste / Dyktanda (2005, ISBN 83-08-03755-0). In May 2015, Polish TV broadcast the play Koniec świata o ósmej created by theatre "Sfinks" (an attempt of the revival of the scene "Sfinks" of the Theatre of Sensation and Science Fiction "Kobra" (pl:Teatr Sensacji i Fantastyki). Previously "Sfinks" aired this play on December 19, 1963. In 28th Voyage of Tichy's Star Diaries, it is revealed that there were mad scientists in the family of Tichy himself: his grandfather,  Jeremiasz Tichy "decided to create the General Theory of Everything, and nothing stopped him from doing this".A fictional review of a non-existing book Non Serviam supposedly written by Professor James Dobb, discuses Dobb's ideas about "personetics", the simulated creation of intelligent beings ("personoids") inside a computer, a development of professor Corcoran's ideas.Professor Cezar Kouska (alias Benedykt Kouska), in his two (fictional) books De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi ( ("On the Impossibility of Life"  and "On the Impossibility of Prognostication"), "reviewed" by Lem in A Perfect Vacuum proves that life is impossible and the probability theory is a bunk. Professor Kouska is the namesake of "Kouska's fallacy" in reasoning about concurrent happening of two highly improbable real-life events: in calculating of the probability of such a happening it is fallacious to assume that they are independent. The short story Professor Zazul first appeared in the 1961 collection Księga robotów (Robots' Book). It served as a base of a TV short film Profesor Zazul directed by  Marek Nowicki and Jerzy Stawicki (shot in 1962, produced in 1965, premiered on August 27, 1968). An encounter of Tichy with professor Corcoran was made into a TV show Przypadek Ijona Tichego (1999) by Lech Raczak.