Catching Vibes, and Kindred Matters

Summary

One winter day at Princeton, after a light snowfall, I accompanied Dr. Einstein over to Fine Hall. As we were walking along, I sensed that we were being followed, so I turned my head and looked back. There, about a dozen paces behind us, I saw a freshman physics student, whom I knew, carefully putting his feet one after the other in Dr. Einstein's footprints. He did this for about half of a block. The next day I met the student and asked him why the day before he had walked in Dr. Einstein's footprints.

“Oh,” he said. “I had a tough physics test coming up that morning, and I thought that if I walked in Dr. Einstein's footprints I might perhaps catch some useful vibes.”

“Did it work?” I asked.

“No, not at all,” he mournfully replied.

“Why didn't you walk in my footprints?” I asked.

He looked at me somewhat startled and unkindly said, “Do you think I'm that crazy?”

So it would seem that there is not much in such ideas as catching vibes, or in numerological and astrological nonsense. Consider, for example, the following facts. Garrett Birkhoff and I were fellow graduate mathematics students at Harvard. I learned that we were both born on the same day, of the same month, of the same year, in the same state of the union, and in towns with names starting and ending with the same letters.