Best of SCIENCE JOKES ARCHIVE


Twinkle, twinkle little star,
I don't wonder what you are
For by the spectroscopic ken
I know that you are hydrogen
- Lewis Fry Richardson
Qestion: What's the easiest way to observe Doppler's effect optically (not accoustically) in one's everyday life ?

Answer: Go out in the evening and look at the cars. Their lights are white or yellow when they approach, but they are red when they are moving away of you.

- Andrzej Kudlicki


Copernicus' parents: Copernicus, young man, when are you going to come to terms with the fact that the world does not revolve around you?!

- Erin Leonard Merit


Ludwig Wittgenstein: "It is a hypothesis that the sun will rise in the morning. This means we don't know it will rise"

Nikolaus Copernicus: "Actually, now that you come to mention it..."

- Jan Six


Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light. -- Alexander Pope
It did not last; the devil howling "Ho!
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo. -- Sir John Collings Squire
- From sdnaik
Qestion: How many general relativists does it take to change a light bulb.
Answer: Two. One holds the bulb, while the other rotates the universe.
MJ Kahn's Lightbulb list


...One of the best of the many Pauli jokes tells of Pauli's arriving in Heaven and being given, as befits a theoretical physicist, an appointment with God. When granted the customary free wish, he requests that God explain to him why the value of the fine-structure constant, alpha = e^2/(hbar*c), which measures the strength of the electric force, is 0.00729735 ....

God goes to the blackboards and starts to write furiously. Pauli watches with pleasure but soon starts shaking his head violently...."

- Gross,D.: 1989, Physics Today, (December), page 9.


HEAVEN IS HOTTER THAN HELL

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that ... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute temperature of the earth (300 K), gives H as 798 K (525°C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed ... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6°C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525°C is hotter than Hell at 445°C.

- 1972, Applied Optics, 11, A14.


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