John F. Nash Jr.'s Letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer (1957)
"There is general phenomenon, affecting mathematics and physics, of evolutionary elegantizing camouflage"

Mathematician John F. Nash Jr (1928-2015) was anything but inhibited, at least in his willingness to reach out and enter into debates about big issues with prestigious scientists. Famously, while still a 20-year old a graduate student, he went to see both Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and John von Neumann (1903-1957) to discuss, respectively, the “germ of an idea” related to relativity theory and “his rival idea” regarding equilibrium points in noncooperative games (Nasar, 1998) . In her biography of the man, Sylvia Nasar describes the first of these meeting, which took place in the fall of 1948, as follows:
Just a few weeks into his first term at Princeton, Nash made an appointment to see Einstein in his office in Fuld Hall. Einstein’s office, a large airy room with a bay window that let in plenty of light, was messy. Einstein’s twenty-two-year-old Hungarian assistant — an intense, chain-smoking logician named John Kemeny, who would later invent the computer language BASIC, become president of Dartmouth College, and head a commission to investigate Three Mile Island — ushered Nash in. Einstein’s handshake, which ended with a twist, was remarkably firm, and he showed Nash to a large wooden meeting table on the far side of the office.
The late-morning light streaming through the bay window produced a sort of aura around Einstein. Nash, however, quickly got into the substance of his idea while Einstein listened politely, twirled the curls on the back of his head with his finger, sucked on his tobaccoless pipe, and occasionally muttered a remark or asked a question. As he spoke, Nash became aware of a mild form of echolalia: “deep, deep, interesting, interesting”.
Nash had an idea about “gravity, friction, and radiation,” as he later recalled. The friction he was thinking of was the friction that a particle, say a photon, might encounter as it moved through space due to its fluctuating gravitational field interacting with other gravitational fields. Nash had given his hunch enough thought to spend much of the meeting at the blackboard scribbling equations. Soon, Einstein and Kemeny were standing at the blackboard as well. The discussion lasted the better part of an hour. But in the end all that Einstein said, with a kindly smile, was “You had better study some more physics, young man.”
The extent of Nash’s schooling in theoretical physics (as economics) was limited to some undergraduate courses at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University). His later foray into differential geometry (which would result in the publication of the so-called Nash embedding theorem1 in 1954) suggests that he either had or later obtained advanced knowledge of Riemannian geometry (which Einstein’s general theory of relativity is formulated in). Clearly, the “cocky youngster”, as Nasar describes him, didn’t shy away from either venturing into new fields or conjecturing about difficult problems (see essay below).
His visit to von Neumann’s office the following autumn (in October of 1949) appears no less audacious (Nasar, 1998):