SCIENCE JOKES, QUOTES, AND ANECDOTES

SCIENCE JOKES, QUOTES, AND ANECDOTES

by Betsy Devine and Joel E. Cohen

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A FIRESIDE BOOK

Published by Simon & Schuster New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore

F:,,(SIDE

Simon & Schuster Building Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10020

Copyright ? 1992 by Betsy Devine and Joel E. Cohen Illustrations Copyright ? 1992 by David Goodnight

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any fonn.

FIRESIDE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Designed by Quinn Hall Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Devine, Betsv Absolut~ zero gravity / by Joel Cohen and Betsy Devine.

p. cm.

"A Fireside book."

L Science--Humor. L Cohen, Joel E. II. Title.

Q167.C65 1992

502'.07--dc20

92-21962

elP

ISBN,0-671-7406O-1

The authors would like to make grateful acknowledgment for the use of the following

published material: Light Bulb Jokes (throughout) excerpted from the Canonical Collection of Light Bulb

jokes, copyright ? 19B8 Kurt Guntheroth. Used with permission of Kurt Guntheroth. Lee DuBridge and Lord Kelvin quotes (p. 99), Sam Goldwyn quote (p. 144)? From A

Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown, Robert A. Baker (editor), Anchor Books,

Doubleday and Co., 1963. Reprinted by permission of the publisher: Prentice-Hall/A

Division of Simon & Schuster, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Darnin quotes (pp. 32, 67, 134). From Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle,

Charles Robert Darnin, edited and with an introduction by Nora Barlow, Philosophical

Library, 1946. T. H. Huxley anecdotes (pp. 74, 75, 100). From T. H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist, &

Educat,or, by Cyril Bibby, C. W. Watts & Co., Ltd. 1959?

Linnaeus anecdotes (pp. 77-8). From The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus,

Wilfred Blunt (with the assistance of William T. Stearn), Viking Press, 1971-

Mathematical greeting cards, bumper stickers, tombstones, light bulb joke table (pp.

37-8, 40, 42). Reprinted with permission from SIAM News: Volume 18, Number 5;

Volume 19, Number 1; Volume 21, Number 6; Volume 22, Number 5; Volume 24,

Number 3. "The Fifth Quadrant" competitions are edited by Richard Bronson and Gilbert

Steiner.

permissions continued at back of book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Preface by Joel E. Cohen Introductory Joke Academia The Scientific Personality Scientific Specializations Interdisciplinary Studies Love, Sex, Marriage, and Scientists Tales of the Great Scientists Teaching Science Scientific Reputations Scientific Writing on the Walls Medical Science Publish or Perish Scientific Product Warning Labels Experimental Apparatus The International Scientific Community Women in Science Food for Thought Popular Science Scientists in Heaven and Hell Scientific Aphorisms Logical Conclusions Afterglow

6 7 9

10 13 22 47 56 64 86 99 108 110 120 123 125 130 134 137 141 145 149 151 155

Acknowledgments

\b",y th2.nks to:

f rcd .-\lmgren Phil Anderson William Anderson Cathy Andrulis Peter Astor Krishna S. Athreya John Biggs Enrico Bombieri Gaby Borel Richard Bronson Ray Brown R. Eugene Burke Hal Caswell Dev Chen

David J. Cohen

Sidney Coleman Paul Cranefield David Damrosch Bob Dempsey Murray Devine Kevin Devine James Ebert Paul Feit Benji Fisher Shelley GJashow Paul Goldberg Murph Goldberger

William T. Golden

Herman Goldstine Anne Gonnella YIadelyn T. Gould Claire Thomson Graaf Raymond Greenwell Vi~tor Gribov Kurt Guntheroth Israel Halperin Susan Hewitt Charles Issawi Nina Issawi John Van Iwaarden Jay Jorgenson Steve Just Mark Kac Nick Khuri Liz Khuri Larry Knop Joe Kohn Manny Krasner Peter Kronheimer Sevda Kursunoglu T. Kuster

Bob Langlands Michael Larsen Leon Lederman Joe Lehner David Leston Gerri Lindner

Robert 1. Lipshutz

Saunders MacLane Gwendolyn Markus Lawrence Markus George Masnick Frank McCullough Sharon Johanson McCullough

E. J. McShane

Louise II.-1orse Dan Mostow Chiara Nappi Paul Nyiri Ingram Olkin Abraham Pais Robert Parks Jonathan Pila Robert Pollak Peter Ross Mary Beth Ruskai Amy Schoener Daniel Seiver Al Shapere Ruby Sherr Gus Simmons Montgomery Slatkin Gilbert Steiner Edward Subitsky Earl Taft Alvin Thaler Joan Treiman Sam Treiman Marvin Tretkoff Albert W. Tucker Paul Vojta David Vondersmith Edward Walters Andre Wei! David Wendroff Edward White Ludmila Wightman Mira Wilczek Amity Wilczek Frank Wilczek Dick Wood C. N. Yang

Peter Yo(h:is

Aki Yukie

PREFACE

When I was a freshman in college, I showed my calculus teacher a formula beloved by every high school scientist:

JeX = f(u").

(In case you can't read, this says: sex = fun. It's a freshman's idea of titillation.) He frowned. Then he said: "Doesn't the left side need a dx?" As I picked up my equation and left, I thought: "What a jerk! He thinks it's mathematics!" Thirty years later, I wondered whether I had been had. Maybe my section man saw that the equation said sex = fun. Maybe he was pretending to take it seriously. If so, I swallowed his act.

Scientists are funny people. Not just the great ones who think they've discovered the secret of life or of the brain or of the common cold. Even ordinary day-to-day scientists are funny, because they all think that the world makes sense! Most people know better.

In pursuit of their delusion, scientists have developed some pretty strange habits of thought and behavior. They constantly act as if things have explanations. This article of faith is very weakly supported by day-to-day experience. To justify this credo, scientists ignore all the things that don't have explanations (take your choice). They expend no end of the taxpayer's money to isolate, build walls around, and study intensely the few crumbs of life that do have explanations.

Scientists also insist that other people have to be able to understand their explanations. Scientists are forever explaining things to each other. They publish thousands of scientific journals with hundreds of thousands of articles, each read by two of the authors' friends and three of their enemies and an occasional, mad graduate student. They swarm, like bees in search of a nesting site, from one scientific meeting to another, shifting restlessly from one lecture to another, from a transparency with numbers too small to read to equations with notation too complex to comprehend-explaining and trying to grasp explanations. Scientists are just as good at explaining things convincingly as the director of the CIA, the chairman of the KGB, the pres-

PREFACE. ...??........? 8

ident of any tobacco company ~ certain religious leaders, and other revered figures of public and private life.

The reason that scientific explanations sound so strange is that they are. Let me explain. Daily life is a jumble. (You noticed that, too?) Therefore the parts of experience that make sense and have explanations don't have a lot to do with daily life. So scientists invent new language-new words, new conventions about words, plus new symbols and conventions about symbols-to describe the rare parts of life that make sense. (To be a properly formed mathematical expres-

sion, JeX needs a ................
................

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