Mad scientists of Stanisław Lem

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 universes in isolated lockers, Decantor, who created an immortal soul, Zazul, who cloned himself and was killed by the clone, 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 to communicate with each other, doctor Vliperdius, who is a robot doctor who runs an asylum for mentally ill robots, and professor A. Dońda,^[1] who catastrophically succeeded in his quest to prove the equivalence of matter and information.^[2][3]

In 28th Voyage of Tichy's Star Diaries, it is revealed that there were mad scientists in the family of Tichy himself; for example, his grandfather, Jeremiasz Tichy "decided to create the General Theory of Everything, and nothing stopped him from doing this".^[4]

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. ^[5]

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