Famous last words
Nuclear physicist: See, cold fusion does not work.
Nuclear physisist: What was the critical mass, exactly?
Physisist: And now we reach absolute zero.
Astronomer: That asteroid won't hit the Earth.
Chemist: And now the tasting test.
Chemist: And now a little bit from this...
Chemist: And now shake it a bit.
Chemist: Why is there no label on this bottle?
Chemist: In which glass was my mineral water?
Chemist: Why does that stuff burn with a green flame?!?
Chemist: First the acid, then the water...
Chemist: Oh no, wrong beaker...
Microbiologist: These bacteria cannot live outside the substrate.
Field biologist: They never attack humans.
Murphy's Ten Laws for String Theorists:
(1) If you fix a mistake in a mathematical superstring calculation, another one will show up somewhere else.
(2) If your results are based on the work of others, then one such work will turn out to be wrong. (3) The longer your article, the more likely your computer hard disk drive will fail while you are typing the references.
(4) The better your research result, the more likely it will be rejected by the referee of a journal; on the other hand, if your work is wrong but not obviously so, it will be accepted for publication right away.
(5) If a result seems to good to be true, it is unless you are one of the top ten string theorists in the world. (By the way, these theorists refer to their results as "string miracles".)
(6) Your most startling string-theoretic theorem will turn out to be valid in only two spatial dimensions or less.
(7) When giving a string seminar, nobody will follow anything you say after the first minute, but, if miraculously someone does, then that person will point out a flaw in your reasoning half-way through your talk and what will be worse is that your grant review officer will happen to be in the audience.
(8) For years, nobody will ever notice the fudge factors in your calculations, but when you come up for tenure they will surface like fish being tossed fresh breadcrumbs.
(9) If you are a graduate student working on string theory, then the field will be dead by the time you get your Ph.D.; Even worse, if you start over with a new thesis topic, the new field will also be dead by the time you get your Ph.D.
(10) If you discover an interesting string model, then it will predict at least one low-energy, observable particle not seen in Nature.
In summary, anything in string theory that theoretically can go wrong will go wrong, but if nothing does go theoretically wrong, then experimentally it is ruled out.
Ten little known facts about relativity:
(1) Nothing in the known universe travels faster than a bad check.
(2) Energy equals milk chocolate square (attributed to Albert E. Hersey)
(3) Delivery of Christmas gifts by Santa to the children of the world is now accomplished by riding Rudolf the red-shift reindeer.
(4) The general relativity theory of gravitation is responsible for people falling in love.
(5) The speed of an IRS tax refund is constant.
(6) Anger is neither created nor conserved but only changed from one form to another.
(7) The speed of time is one second per second, which is also called the fundamental unity.
(8) Death and taxes are the same for all constantly moving observers.
(9) Moving midgets are shortened.
(10) Divorce and alimony are equivalent but the latter is multiplied by an enormous factor.
Question: What is "IT"?
Geologists do IT on the ground.
Astronomers do IT all night.
Chemists do IT by bonding.
Chemists also do IT on a table, periodically.
Newton did IT with force.
Eighteenth century physicists did IT with rigid bodies.
Maxwell did IT with magnetism.
Analytical Chemists do it with precision and accuracy.
Volta did IT with a jolt.
Watt did IT with power.
Joule did IT with energy.
Ohm did IT with resistance.
Pascal did IT under pressure.
Hooke did IT using springs.
Coulomb got all charged up about IT.
Hertz did IT frequently.
Boltzmann did IT in heat.
Ampere let IT flow.
For Franklin , IT was an electrifying experience.
Edison claims to have invented IT.
When Richter did IT, the Earth shook.
For Darwin , IT was natural.
Freud did IT in his sleep.
Mendel studied the consequences of IT.
When Wegener did IT, continents moved.
Classical physicists do IT in perfectly uniform harmonic motion.
Heisenberg was never sure whether he even did IT.
Bohr did IT in an excited state.
Pauli did IT but excluded his friends.
Schrödinger did IT in waves.
Bose did IT with partners.
Einstein did IT on a curved surface.
Oort did IT in a cloud.
Hubble did IT in the dark.
Watson and Crick got all wound up about IT.
Cosmologists do IT in a big bang.
Theorists do IT on paper.
Wigner did IT in a group.
Richter and Ting did IT with charm.
Astrophysicists do IT with young starlets.
Planetary scientists do IT with Uranus.
Electron microscopists do IT 100,000 times.
Feynman did IT in fields.
Hawking wrote a brief history of IT.
And super symmetric theorists do IT with sleptons.
Soil chemists do IT dirty.
Answer: IT = science, of course.