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 artificial universes in isolated lockers; Decantor, who created an immortal soul, Zazul, who cloned himself and was apparently killed by the clone who took his place; 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 as a communication medium; doctor Vliperdius, a robot doctor who runs an asylum for mentally ill robots; and professor A. Dońda. Dońda catastrophically succeeded in his quest to prove mass-information equivalence, analogous to mass–energy equivalence: by accumulating a huge amount of useless information in a supercomputer, Donda made the total amount of information accumulated by humanity to cross a certain threshold, after which it all converted into a new universe, leaving humanity without any knowledge. Professor mathematician Ammon Lymphater from the 1961 short storyFormula Lymphatera became interested in the emerging science of cybernetics and information theory, and started studying the works of an animal brain, the ant's brain in particular. He took note that the inherited knowledge is an evolutionary advantage somehow not exploited in full by the evolution. Eventually he came to a conclusion that only by pure biological restrictions that adaptive abilities of insects were stopped in their tracks by the evolution. He went on further wondering whether the ants have an ability to apriori knowledge, i.e., knowledge neither inherited nor learned. He decided to consult a famous myrmecologist, who told him about a rare ant species Acanthis Rubra Willinsoniana with exceptionally high adaptability... Eventually Lymphater devised and constructed "It" capable of instant precognition of everything within "Its" rapidly expanding perception range. From "It" Lymphater learns that the humanity is not the "crown of evolution", but rather evolution's tool to create "It", because the evolution could not create "It" directly. Realizing that the Superentity "It" renders the human civilization redundant and obsolete, Lymphater destroys "It". "It" already knew Lymphater's intentions, but not worried, knowing that sooner or later some one else will create "It" again and again. "It" was only the first variant of Lymphater's formula and the second variant is possible. Lyphater wonders whether the second one would be capable to create the third stage of the evolution which would amount to an artificial God... Physicist Molteris invented a time machine and died during time travel forward, oblivious to the fact that he will age with time. Some of these professors and some more unnamed ones, in words of Peter Swirski, strove to "inflict social panacea on entire populations", a part of Lem's philosophical analysis of social engineering. Professor Farragus from Lem's early novelette Koniec świata o ósmej irritated by a non-recognition of his fundamental discovery decides to prove he is right by destructing the Universe. In 28th Voyage of Tichy's Star Diaries, it is revealed that there were mad scientists in the family of Tichy himself: his grandfather, Jeremiasz Tichy "decided to create the General Theory of Everything, and nothing stopped him from doing this". A fictional review of a non-existing bookNon Serviam supposedly written by Professor James Dobb, discuses Dobb's ideas about "personetics", the simulated creation of intelligent beings inside a computer, a development of professor Corcoran's ideas. Professor Cezar Kouska, in his two books De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi, "reviewed" by Lem in A Perfect Vacuum proves that life is impossible and the probability theory is a bunk. Professor Kouska is the namesake of "Kouska's fallacy" in reasoning about concurrent happening of two highly improbable real-life events: in calculating of the probability of such a happening it is fallacious to assume that they are independent. The short story Professor Zazulfirst appeared in the 1961 collection Księga robotów. It served as a base of a TV short film Profesor Zazul directed by Marek Nowicki and Jerzy Stawicki. An encounter of Tichy with professor Corcoran was made into a TV show Przypadek Ijona Tichego by Lech Raczak. The story of professor Decantor raises a philosophical question of whether immortality has an inherent worth. Decantor gave immortality to his wife by writing the contents of her mind on a crystal, but this involved termination of her physical existence. Tichy argues this was in fact murder rather than afterlife. In his opinion, an eternal life without external sensations would be the worst torment ever. "People do no want immortality.<...> They simply do not want to die. They want to live, professor. They want to feel the ground under the feet, to see the clouds above the heads, to love other people, to be with them, and to think about this. Noting more."
