Today, 10 facts about the scientist, mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, whose birthday was today.
He was home schooled by his father, who was a tax collector. From an early age, Pascal showed an aptitude for mathematics and at the age of 12 had worked out Euclid’s first thirty-two geometric propositions all by himself.
He almost died at the age of one year from an unknown disease which caused his stomach to swell up and gave him fits. In those days, the cause of such illnesses was generally assumed to be witchcraft, and an elderly woman who sometimes cared for the baby got the blame. At first, Pascal’s father rejected the idea, but when his son got no better he started believing it. The poor old woman was pressured into confessing, but was canny enough to suggest a cure – transferring the spell onto two stray Cats which were then killed by being thrown out of a Window. She probably thought it bought her some time at least, but by a happy coincidence, Pascal started to get better at this point.
By the time he was 16, he’d written a work on conic sections and submitted it to the polymath Père Mersenne. It was so good that Rene Descartes was convinced Pascal's father had written it, and it still forms the basis of Pascal’s theorem.
At 18, Pascal invented an early calculator, the Pascaline, which he did after watching his father work, wanting to make the laborious calculations he had to do easier. It wasn’t a huge success commercially as it was expensive to make and somewhat cumbersome to use. Rich people and royalty liked them as status symbols and expensive toys with which to show off, but the average tax collector couldn’t afford them.
Other inventions and ideas Pascal came up with include the hydraulic press, probability theory, the syringe and the concept of atmospheric pressure. He theorised that mercury in sealed container would rise or fall according to altitude. At this point, he was not very healthy and wasn’t able to climb a Mountain to prove it himself so he sent his brother in law up the mountain instead. Pascal did, however, climb a church bell tower that was 50 metres high in order to observe the effects himself.
He’s also credited with inventing public transport. He set up a network of horse drawn carriages called carrosses à cinq sols (5 sols being the flat fare) which followed five set routes and would run whether or not there were any passengers. The idea only enjoyed modest success at the time and by 1675 the venture had folded.
Pascal is also known for his works on religion and philosophy. He had a religious experience in 1664, an intense vision, which caused him to note on a scrap of paper: It began with: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and ended with a quote from Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He sewed this note into his coat so it was with hm everywhere he went. When he changed his coat, he transferred the paper. It was found by his servants after he died. He’s famous for a work known as Pascal’s wager, which lays out why a person should strive to believe in God. He described it as a game, similar to a coin toss, with two possible outcomes on which it is compulsory to bet. God exists, or He doesn’t. If the latter is true the player only loses a few pleasures he or she may have given up in order to please God, but if the former is true and God exists, then the player betting against that loses an eternity in heaven, hence it makes sense to bet on God existing. Although the wager is named after him, he may not have thought of it himself as a similar concept appears in eleventh-century Islamic texts and the plays of Euripides.
He also theorised that: ‘If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.’ Her long nose, he claimed, would have been seen as a sign of strength and good character, which contributed to her legendary beauty which attracted powerful men like Marc Antony and Julius Caesar. Her relationships with them had far reaching consequences. If she’d had a shorter nose, Pascal theorised, Marc and Julius might not have fancied her and the history of the world would have been completely different.
He died at the age of 39, having been in poor health for years. He declined medical treatment, saying that suffering was the lot of a Christian, and he would get better if God willed it. God clearly didn’t will it, and Pascal tried to get a place in a home for the terminally ill, but in the end, was too sick to be moved. An autopsy was carried out after he died, but even so it’s not clear what killed him. The autopsy noted stomach and abdominal organ issues and brain damage but came to no definite conclusion about cause of death. Modern speculation has suggested that he had tuberculosis, stomach cancer, or brain cancer or all three.
As well as a theorem, a law, a triangle, the SI unit for pressure and numerous university buildings, things named after him include: a programming language, an asteroid, a crater on the moon, islands in Australia and Antarctica, the Otter in the Animal Crossing series and the chameleon in Tangled.
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