In 1998 Physics Today's editors decided to celebrate the magazine's 50th anniversary with a special issue. Among the one-time features we considered was a humor competition. Readers were invited to submit funny physics stories. The best would be published in the anniversary issue.
Well, that was the plan. The entries were so bad, so unfunny, that we decided not to run any of them. Despite numbering around 130 000, the magazine's readers had failed to find the fun in physics.
There are jokes about physics. In my undergraduate statistical mechanics class, the lecturer, a self-professed socialist, explained that the Boltzmann distribution, not an equitable distribution, was the most probable—"unfortunately," he remarked with perfect comic timing. And of course, I expect you've heard a joke or two about the uncertainty principle, "Heisenberg walks into a bar . . . or does he?"
In general, physics isn't a rich source of humor. It's too abstract and rarefied, too free of irony. But, I contend, those same qualities mean that the people who practice physics are objects of fun, if not for physicists themselves, then for the nonphysics laity.
The CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory draws its humor from the obsessive nerdiness of its main charactors, an assortment of Caltech physics students, as this clip shows.
Paul Dirac was perhaps the most purely esoteric physicist. As if to prove my contention, there are several humorous anecdotes about him, including this one:
Dirac was watching Anya Kapitza knitting while he was talking physics with Peter Kapitza. A couple of hours after he left, Dirac rushed back, very excited. "You know, Anya," he said, "watching the way you were making this sweater I got interested in the topological aspect of the problem. I found that there is another way of doing it and that there are only two possible ways. One is the one you were using; another is like that . . . " And he demonstrated the other way, using his long fingers. His newly discovered "other way," Anya informed him, is well known to women and is none other than "purling."
In being funnier than their metier, physicists are like Mr. Anchovy and other chartered accountants. The Monty Python sketch "Lion Tamer" doesn't work if you replace "accountancy" with "physics," but it still makes me laugh.
