It's Talk Like a Physicist Day!
Greetings ....
Well, (in my time zone, folks, and still in many others!) it's Talk Like a Physicist Day, Pi day, Bee writes about the PI gym (at the Perimeter Institute) albeit two days earlier, and Albert Einstein's 129th birthday! First, one cool way to talk like a physicist is to never refer directly to "zero" or "one." Instead, say the quantity is vanishingly small, or vanishes, and say "unity" instead of "one."
Second, here's the weird little story I heard years ago about someone who got in trouble for talking like a physicist, and was one as well (assuming it really happened ...): If you run a red light and it goes to court, beware of trying the apocryphal (?) tack of claiming that Doppler blue shift made the red light look green (or yellow.) Supposedly the physicist who posed that excuse some years ago faced a scientifically literate judge, to his dismay. The judge calculated that the driver had to be going around 100,000,000 mph, and fined him accordingly! It’s not always wise or clever to talk like a physicist, even if you are one.
(Does anyone remember when/where they head that one?)
Well, (in my time zone, folks, and still in many others!) it's Talk Like a Physicist Day, Pi day, Bee writes about the PI gym (at the Perimeter Institute) albeit two days earlier, and Albert Einstein's 129th birthday! First, one cool way to talk like a physicist is to never refer directly to "zero" or "one." Instead, say the quantity is vanishingly small, or vanishes, and say "unity" instead of "one."
Second, here's the weird little story I heard years ago about someone who got in trouble for talking like a physicist, and was one as well (assuming it really happened ...): If you run a red light and it goes to court, beware of trying the apocryphal (?) tack of claiming that Doppler blue shift made the red light look green (or yellow.) Supposedly the physicist who posed that excuse some years ago faced a scientifically literate judge, to his dismay. The judge calculated that the driver had to be going around 100,000,000 mph, and fined him accordingly! It’s not always wise or clever to talk like a physicist, even if you are one.
(Does anyone remember when/where they head that one?)
posted by Neil Bates at 20:33
2 Comments:
That is funny. But I wish schools would use traffic accidents in their physics problems. So many people obviously don't know anything about physics or they wouldn't be tailgating.
Monado, sorry I waited so long to let your comment through. I just forgot to moderate it.
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