Where can physicists be found?

nucleargirl

hm... maybe I have too much time on my hands... maybe I am just taking a leap in to the unknown... maybe... maybe not... anyway, to get to the point, I want to ask the good people of PF: where can physicists (nuclear physicists and astrophysicists in particular) be found in the wild? where do they aggregate? what do they partake in when not in the pursuit of knowledge? there is an absurd lack of information on these mysterious creatures....

FrancisZ

Gonna say: conventions. Otherwise, outside of a university, they probably try to keep a low profile.

Not sure that there is such a thing as a Physicist bar.

nucleargirl

ooooh! there should be one! that would be so cool! it could defy gravity, have a black hole where people could hide in... have worm holes to crawl through, have nuclear stuff to make people excited... giant magnets to stick people to... we could drink weird stuff... whatever physicists like to drink... lol the possibilities are endless! a cosmic room to watch the stars... anti-matter room.... where things doesnt matter! etc.etc

FrancisZ

Reminds me of funny scenes from the Elegant Universe...



Sorry, I can't pinpoint it actually; but there's a funny scene in a theoretical bar. It's well worth the watch anyway.

cristo

These sort of stereotypes are ridiculous. Why are physicists thought to be mysterious creatures waiting to be "found" somewhere?

jtbell

When I was in grad school, the nearest thing to a "physicists' happy hour" was at 3:30 PM every weekday, when the department secretaries put out coffee and cookies on a table near the preprint racks. This was long before the advent of arXiv.org, when physicists still communicated breaking news and ideas via paper preprints sent out to physics departments worldwide.

One day per week this was followed by the weekly departmental colloquium, which usually had a visiting speaker from some other university. Other days, there were specialized colloquia, e.g. for nuclear physics.

I think most departments still have a weekly colloquium with refreshments. Otherwise, I can't think of any remotely social venue (outside of APS conferences of course) where you might find enriched concentrations of physicists.

Math Is Hard

Someone gave me one for Christmas once. It was very hard to take care of, though. I ended up driving it down to JPL and setting it free.

Gad

FrancisZ

S'what I would've done.

Pengwuino

They are found in areas of high gravity.

sponsoredwalk

Physicists drink Absinthe & Stroh 80% that is blacker than a black hole when out congregatedly camping lighting fires via Boltzmann's equations
while lighting up the sky with derivations of Maxwell's equations, or so I'm led to believe

FrancisZ

I'll bet a bunch went to Comic-Con. They'd definitely go to the Trekkie conventions.

JaWiB

A better question might be how to spot a physicist. See, we participate in the same activities that everyone else does, but don't always look at things the same way. If you notice someone at a party staring at a glowstick through a beer bottle, for instance, they may be a physicist thinking about why the beer bottle seems to block blue light but not red light. Or they may just be drunk and trying not to vomit.

Or both.

Pengwuino

I don't konw a single physicist that does that, yet countless other normal, or "normies", people who went to that stupidity.

Klockan3

If you find one physicist somewhere then that would be classified as a high concentration of physicists.

Evo

They can be found racing go-karts.

nucleargirl

lol... these responses are funny!