# The physicist's puzzle

An unknown physic1st left behind this puzzle with his belongin9s and he can no longer Be found. Here is the puzzle he left with u5 before disappEaring.

Can you figure who this mysterious physicist was and what was the message he left behind?

Edit: One of the shaded squares was in the wrong location

• This seems to have no solution as a nonogram -- is the top-right shaded cell supposed to be moved down one?
– Deusovi
Nov 8 '20 at 2:58
• @Deusovi Sorry about that! The lower left was supposed to be 1 to the right. I have fixed it in the puzzle. Nov 8 '20 at 3:05

You can find the solution to the nonogram in Anonymous' answer. For the rest

The weird numbers and capital letters in the question spell 19B5E. Interpreting these as hexadecimal digits and using A1Z26, this translates to Aiken. There happens to be only one physicist named Aiken with a wikipedia page, Howard Aiken.

That wikipedia page also links to the Aiken code developed by Aiken. Using the Aiken code for each row in blocks of four and concatenating by rows gives the following numbers
8, 1, 18, 22, 1, 18, 4, 13, 1, 18, 11, 9

Using A1Z26 again gives Harvard Mark I, a computer designed by Aiken.

Solution :-

Step $$1$$ :-

Start eliminating the squares we already know from the information. It is easy to see this.

Step $$2$$ :-

The $$7$$th column can also be filled in only one way. After filling, this allows us to eliminate some more red tiles, simply from the fact that one cannot place a black tile there.

Step $$3$$ :-

One may not find any solution right now, but one can observe that R1C5 square is black. If it was red then one would not be able to fill the column with the $$1,1,1,1,1$$ setup. This forces R1C6 to be black, hence R1C8 is red. Using the same argument, both R3C8 and R4C8 squares are red, which forces R3C4 , R3C5 , R3C6 squares to be black, and R4C4 , R4C5 , R4C6 square will be red.

Step $$4$$ :-

Using the previous argument, one can proceed using that R6C4 square is black, the rest follows from continuous solving one after another.

Step $$5$$ :-

The R8C8 square is black from the given information, and then you can solve it easily to get the solution. I think this need not be explained, one can now solve using the basic techniques and one will arrive at this solution.

So I have solved this already, the rest remaining is to find the name of the physicist and the message he left behind, well I am not finding any clue to the nonogram though.