The Richard Corey of Quantum Mechanics

When reading about great deeds by people who died young, many of us feel fascinated by the idea of doing something great and then dying young so that the whole world would continue to worship us for the next millenium or so. Most of us perhaps won't even realise that it's just an awkward culmination of the desire for attention by an emotional and sentimentalist mind, someone who lacks confidence and thinks that he/she has not got her due from the society. The reality is, of course, that in our colored vision we think of ourselves as someone unrealistically great! It happened to me too! But that was when I was in my early teens.

Then as years passed by, though my wishful thought of killing myself reamined, the justification for it changed. Because by then reality slowly started dawning upon me,by then I wanted to kill myself because I was sure that I was not going to make any meaningful contribution to anybody by my existence, and my life or death was not going to change/impact anything or anybody. In those days, the poem entitled "Richard Corey" fascinated me.

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"Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head."

By that time though I started doing science and perhaps subconsciously I started looking for a scientist, who killed himself, to justify my death-wish. And then I happened to stumble upon the life of Paul Ehrenfest because, like Richard Corey, he too shot himself.

Unlike me, however, his problem was different. He made many significant contributions to physics, and yet always suffered from low esteem and the feeling that he was no longer able to keep up with the modern developments in physics. " All through his life Ehrenfest had suffered from low self esteem, which was in marked contrast to the high esteem in which he was held by his fellow scientists. He was also greatly saddened by his son Wassik being a mongol and having severe problems both physically and mentally."

Incidentally, his teacher and a great physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, too committed suicide. But it was an even sadder episode because, " Attacks on his work continued and he began to feel that his life's work was about to collapse despite his defence of his theories. Depressed and in bad health, Boltzmann committed suicide just before experiment verified his work."

Epilogue: I had even decided a date for my suicide. But long before that day, I realised that I was not going to kill myself, and would rather continue living, however pathetic my life could be! And not because I was going to change the world, or make some pathbreaking invention or any major contributuion to the society; but simply because I had all along been a timid man, and I never had the courage to execute my wish!

And so I go on living!
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Note: Anyone who wants to read about Paul Ehrenfest, may look at the following:

Sources:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ehrenfest.html
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Boltzmann.html
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk
http://www.bartleby.com/104/45.html