At the physics exam: 'Describe the universe in 200 words and give three examples.' Question:
What do physicists enjoy doing the most at baseball games?
Answer:
The 'wave'.
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was known as SLAC, until the big earthquake, when it became known as SPLAC.
SPLAC? Stanford Piecewise Linear Accelerator.
A student recognizes Einstein in a train and asks: Excuse me, professor, but does New York stop by this train?
Researchers in Fairbanks Alaska announced last week that they have discovered a superconductor which will operate at room temperature.
The answer to the problem was 'log(1+x)'. A student copied the answer from the good student next to him, but didn't want to make it obvious that he was cheating, so he changed the answer slightly, to 'timber(1+x)'
One day in class, Richard Feynman was talking about angular momentum. He described rotation matrices and mentioned that they did not commute. He said that Sir William Hamilton discovered noncommutivity one night when he was taking a walk in his garden with Lady Hamilton. As they sat down on a bench, there was a moment of passion. It was then that he discovered that AB did not equal BA.
The experimentalist comes running excitedly into the theorist's office, waving a graph taken off his latest experiment. 'Hmmm,' says the theorist, 'That's exactly where you'd expect to see that peak. Here's the reason (long logical explanation follows).' In the middle of it, the experimentalist says 'Wait a minute', studies the chart for a second, and says, 'Oops, this is upside down.' He fixes it. 'Hmmm,' says the theorist, 'you'd expect to see a dip in exactly that position. Here's the reason...'.
A Princeton plasma physicist is at the beach when he discovers an ancient looking oil lantern sticking out of the sand. He rubs the sand off with a towel and a genie pops out. The genie offers to grant him one wish. The physicist retrieves a map of the world from his car an circles the Middle East and tells the genie, 'I wish you to bring peace in this region'.
After 10 long minutes of deliberation, the genie replies, 'Gee, there are lots of problems there with Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, and all those other places. This is awfully embarrassing. I've never had to do this before, but I'm just going to have to ask you for another wish. This one is just too much for me'.
Taken aback, the physicist thinks a bit and asks, 'I wish that the Princeton tokamak would achieve scientific fusion energy break-even.'
After another deliberation the genie asks, 'Could I see that map again?'
What is the difference between a physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician?
If an engineer walks into a room and sees a fire in the middle and a bucket of water in the corner, he takes the bucket of water and pours it on the fire and puts it out.
If a physicist walks into a room and sees a fire in the middle and a bucket of water in the corner, he takes the bucket of water and pours it eloquently around the fire and let's the fire put itself out.
If a mathematician walks into a room and sees a fire in the middle and a bucket of water in the corner, he convinces himself there is a solution and leaves. (credit: Jeremiah Jazdzewski)
An experimental physicist performs an experiment involving two cats, and an inclined tin roof.
The two cats are very nearly identical; same sex, age, weight, breed, eye and hair color.
The physicist places both cats on the roof at the same height and let's them both go at the same time. One of the cats fall off the roof first so obviously there is some difference between the two cats.
What is the difference?
One cat has a greater mew. (credit: Mike Varney)
French physicist Ampere (1775-1836) had two cats, one big and a one small, and he loved them very much. But when the door was closed cats couldn't enter or exit the room. So Ampere ordered two holes to be made in his door: one big for the big cat, and one small for the small cat. (credit: Marga - unverified story)
A psychologist makes an experiment with a mathematician and a physicist. He puts a good-looking, naked woman in a bed in one corner of the room and the mathematician on a chair in another one, and tells him: 'I´ll half the distance between you and the woman every five minutes, and you´re not allowed to stand up.' the mathematician runs away, yelling: 'in that case, I´ll never get to this woman!'. After that, the psychologist takes the physicist and tells him the plan. The physicist starts grinning. the psychologist asks him: 'but you´ll never get to this woman?', the physicists tells him: 'sure, but for all practical things this is a good approximation.' (credit: Thomas Mayer)
Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip?
To get to the same side. (credit: Tom Gregg)
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Issac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest, chickens in motion tend to cross roads. (credit: Muhammad Ahmed)
A neutron walks into a bar; he asks the bartender, 'How much for a beer?' The bartender looks at him, and says 'For you, no charge.'
Two fermions walk into a bar. One orders a drink. The other says 'I'll have what he's having.' (credit: Jeff Nastasi)
Two atoms bump into each other. One says 'I think I lost an electron!' The other asks, 'Are you sure?', to which the first replies, 'I'm positive.'
Renee Descartes walks into a bar, the bartender says 'sir can I get you a martini 'Descartes says 'I don't think...' and he disappears (credit: OCROWLEY101)
Where does bad light end up? Answer: In a prism! (credit: Gary Lisica)
Heisenberg is out for a drive when he's stopped by a traffic cop. The cop says 'Do you know how fast you were going?' Heisenberg says 'No, but I know where I am.'
Why did the chicken cross the road? Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends on your frame of reference.
There is this farmer who is having problems with his chickens. All of the sudden, they are all getting very sick and he doesn't know what is wrong with them. After trying all conventional means, he calls a biologist, a chemist, and a physicist to see if they can figure out what is wrong. So the biologist looks at the chickens, examines them a bit, and says he has no clue what could be wrong with them. Then the chemist takes some tests and makes some measurements, but he can't come to any conclusions either. So the physicist tries. He stands there and looks at the chickens for a long time without touching them or anything. Then all of the sudden he starts scribbling away in a notebook. Finally, after several gruesome calculations, he exclaims, 'I've got it! But it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum.'
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At the Party with the Physicists
One day, all of the world's famous physicists decided to get together for a party (ok, there were some non-physicists too who crashed the party). Fortunately, the doorman was a grad student, and able to observe some of the guests...
* Everyone gravitated toward Newton, but he just kept moving around at a constant velocity and showed no reaction.
* Einstein thought it was a relatively good time.
* Coulomb got a real charge out of the whole thing.
* Cauchy, being the mathematician, still managed to integrate well with everyone.
* Thompson enjoyed the plum pudding.
* Pauli came late, but was mostly excluded from things, so he split.
* Pascal was under too much pressure to enjoy himself.
* Ohm spent most of the time resisting Ampere's opinions on current events.
* Hamilton went to the buffet tables exactly once.
* Volta thought the social had a lot of potential.
* Hilbert was pretty spaced out for most of it.
* Heisenberg may or may not have been there.
* Feynman got from the door to the buffet table by taking every possible path
* The Curies were there and just glowed the whole time.
* van der Waals forced himeself to mingle.
* Wien radiated a colourful personality.
* Millikan dropped his Italian oil dressing.
* de Broglie mostly just stood in the corner and waved.
* Hollerith liked the hole idea.
* Stefan and Boltzman got into some hot debates.
* Everyone was attracted to Tesla's magnetic personality.
* Compton was a little scatter-brained at times.
* Bohr ate too much and got atomic ache.
* Watt turned out to be a powerful speaker.
* Hertz went back to the buffet table several times a minute.
* Faraday had quite a capacity for food.
* Oppenheimer got bombed.
* The microwave started radiating in the background when Penzias and Wilson showed up.
* After one bite Chandrasekhar reached his limit.
* Gamow left the party early with a big bang while Hoyle stayed late in a steady state.
* For Schrodinger this was more a wave function rather than a social function.
* Skorucak wanted to put everybody on his web site.
* Erdos was sad no epsilons were invited.
* Born thought the probability of enjoying himself was pretty high.
* Instead of coming through the front door Josephson tunnelled through.
* Groucho refused to attend any party that would invite him in the first place.
* Niccolò Tartaglia kept stammering throughout the evening.
* Pauling wanted to bond with everyone.
* Keynes was keen to question the marginal utility of this party.
* Shakespeare could not decide whether to be or not to be at the party.
* John Forbes Nash wanted to play a n-person zero sum game.
* Pavlov brought his dog; which promptly chased after Schrodinger's cat.
* Zeno of Elea came with two friends - Achilles and the tortoise.
* Bill Gates came to install windows.
* Bertrand Russell kept wondering if the cook only cooks for the guests, who cooks for the cook?
* Witten bought a present all tied up with superstrings.
* The food was beautifully laid out by Mendeleyev on the periodic table.
* Riemann hypothesised about who would arrive next; to which Newton retorted, ' hypotheses non fingo.'
* Chadwick was handing out neutrons free of charge.
* Everyone was amazed at Bell's inequality.
* Watson and Crick danced the Double Helix.
* While Fermat sang, 'Save the Last Theorem for me.'
* Maxwell's demon argued with Dawkin's friend, the selfish Gene.
* Russell and Whitehead insisted on checking the bill for completeness and consistency. Godel said it was incomplete and it can never be proved otherwise.
* Epimenides the Cretan announced that only non-Cretans spoke the truth.
* Rontgen saw through everybody.
* Descartes cogitated, 'I think I am drunk. Therefore I am at the party.'
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The Fate of the Universe
a poem by Leslie C. McKinney, Ph.D
You physicists have become annoying
You can't seem to make up your minds
Did everything come from nothing
Or was nothing all there was to find?
What was that first singularity
And what made it start to inflate?
You say a vacuum is not really empty
As long as energy potentiates?
At time zero there was zero space
But fluctuation took care of that
Now there's space of an ill-defined shape
That's full of live/dead cats.
Continuing on you tell us
That we're here cause CP ain't conserved
I never thought of myself as a leftover
This is becoming absurd.
But the universe is here now
At least part of it, I guess,
How is it you can't find the dark matter
To account for the missing mass?
And what is this dark energy
Permeating like a fog?
Einstein was shamed by his fudge factor
But you've brought it back in vogue.
The news from Canada is distressing
There are too few neutrinos from the sun
But physicists aren't constrained by facts
They'll make three neutrinos from one.
So the Standard Model is in danger
It's time for a paradigm shift,
Well paradigm shift, shmaradigm pfffft,
Will you guys please get over it.
Any idea how the story will end?
Big crunch, cold death, lost souls?
Or a slipper slide to a new universe
Through a slimy little worm hole?
Which confirms my general suspicion
That reality is just theory for this bunch
Waves are particles, particles are strings,
And the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
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And finally to end it, Something for this special time of year:
Is there a Santa Claus? - a physicists view
Consider the following:
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical).
This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the Earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.
On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that 'flying reindeer' (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.
We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each.
In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.> In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
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Bloody Hilarious ****
