;-)

Assorted Jokes from Physics, Engineering, Math, etc

Here are some great jokes selected from some of the discussion in this slashdot posting. Enjoy!

Classification
If it wiggles it's biology...
If it stinks, it's chemistry...
If it does not work, it's physics...
Pecking order of the sciences:
Biologists answer only to Chemists.
Chemists answer only to Physicists.
Physicists answer only to Mathematicians.
Mathemeticians answer only to God.

-or-

The biologist wants to be a chemist.
The chemist wants to be a physicist.
The physicist wants to be God.
God wants to be a mathematician.

2+2
So the teacher assigns to Ada, Bob, Charles and Danna to go home and figure out what is 2 + 2.

Ada, the daughter of a mathematician, asks her dad. He responds: "Well, 1 + 1 = 2. 2+ 1 = 3. 3 + 1= 4, but it can be rewritten as 2 + 2, so 2 + 2 = 4"

Bob asks his mom, who is an engineer. She takes out her HP calculator, punches in RPN the appropiate keys, and announces: "It is 4.000000000000"

Charles asks his dad, the phycisist, and he responds: "Well, it is about pi on a zeroth order calculation"

Finally, Danna ask his dad, who is an accountant: "Dad, how much is 2 + 2?" And he responds: "How much do you want it to be?"

-or-

Actually, the engineer whould say that it's about 5, but numbers aren't available that low, and we need to account for safety, so let's make it 10. Either that or 2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2.

Poles
The pilot of a plane on its way out of Poland dies unexpectedly in flight. A passenger is asked to fill in. He looks at the controls and shakes his head. "What's wrong?" someone asks. The reply: "I'm just a simple Pole in a complex plane."
More Poles
A 747 was flying along and was full of Polish people. As they were going past some beautiful landmarks, the pilot came over the intercom and instructed all who were interested in seeing the landmark to look out the right side of the plane. Many passengers did so, and the plane promply crashed. Why?

Too many poles in the right hand plane.

Control Theory
[red sign posted on my professors door]
If this sign looks blue...SLOW DOWN
(blue doppler-shifting... going *very* fast)
Better Wash...
Three Graduates are peeing in a bathroom.

The UGA graduate finishes, goes over and washes his hands very well using lots of soap and water, and says "at UGA, they teach us to be clean".

The Clemson graduate finishes peeing, and washes his hands with a very small amount of soap and water and says "at clemson they teach us how conserve resources".

The Georiga Tech graduate finishes and walks right towards the door. On his way out he says "At Tech they teach us not to piss on our hands".

(I've heard that one with Harvard and Yale students in place of UGA and GA Tech, and the third being a Princeton student who walks in, washes his hands and the goes to the urinal, saying "At Princeton, they teach us to wash our hands before handling a sacred object.")

A little poem...
((12 + 144 + 20 + (3 * 4^(1/2))) / 7) + (5 * 11) = 9^2 + 0

A Dozen, a Gross and a Score,
plus three times the square root of four,
divided by seven,
plus five times eleven,
equals nine squared and not a bit more.

Solar Physics
A solar physicist walks into a bar, gets the bartender's attention, and says "I'd like a Mexican beer, please."

The bartender immediately begins shouting "OK, everybody out! Right now! Everyone out of the bar!" And he heards all the patrons out into the street, slamming the door behind them.

The solar physicist shakes his head ruefully. "Darn," he says, "I should have seen that Corona mass ejection coming!"

(By the way, it goes without saying that the bar is in SoHo.)

Why was Heisenberg's wife unsatisfied?
When he had the time he didn't have the energy, and when he had the position, he didn't have the momentum.
Heisenberg again
Heisenberg is out for a drive when he's stopped by a traffic cop. The cop says "Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg says "No, but I know where I am."
Good News - Bad News
The chair of the physics department goes to the provost for the annual budget review. "I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is we have a lot of exciting things going on in the department - some potential Noble-prize winning stuff. The bad news is we need a new particle accelerator which will cost $10M."

The Provost is shocked. "That is a lot of money. It is incredible to me how different departments need different things. Why can't you be more like the math department? They only want Paper, Pencils and wastebaskets. And the philosophy department doesn't even want the wastebaskets..."

(Because the mathematicians will throw away wrong answers, but philosophers never throw anything away, be it right, wrong, or useless.)

Counting...
A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are sitting in an outdoor cafe. They watch two people go into a building across the street. Shortly thereafter, three people come out.

"Hmm," says the biologist. "It looks like they reproduced."

"Nah," says the physicist. "There was obviously error in our initial measurement."

The mathematician looks up from his coffee. "Who cares? If another person goes in, it'll be empty."

Top 10 reasons to Date and Engineer
  1. They are used to all nighters
  2. They are always willing to experiment
  3. They know how to increase and decrease friction
  4. They know all about heat transfer
  5. They do it with more torque
  6. Engineering couples have better moments
  7. They know how to deal with stress and strain
  8. They know how to test their rigid cantilevers
  9. "Lubrication, friction, and wear" is a class
  10. They design and build large erections
Snake Breeding - Groan!
There once was a snake breeder who had two snakes he was trying to mate. For the life of him, he couldn't get them within two feet of each other. Frustrated, he called up the local zoologist, and explained the situation. She hurried over, picked up the snakes and looked at them. "You know what I would do?" she said. "See that tree over there? Chop it down, chop off a good sized log, split the log in two, and make two tables out of them. Put the tables and the snakes into a cage, and let them go at it."

Well, the breeder thought that this was insane, but having no other options, he tried it. Sure enough, a few days later he had a whole slew of baby snakes. He called up the zoologist, and asked her how that was possible. She replied, "Well, you see, those snakes were adders. And everybody knows that to get adders to multiply you need log tables."

Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Godel and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar.
Heisenberg looks around the bar and says, "Because there are three of us and because this is a bar, it must be a joke. But the question remains, is it funny or not?"

And Godel thinks for a moment and says, "Well, because we're inside the joke, we can't tell whether it's funny. We'd have to be outside looking at it."

And Chomsky looks at both of them and says, "Of course it's funny. You're just telling it wrong."

Convergence
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were asked to review this mathematical problem. In a high school gym, all the girls in the class were lined up against one wall, and all the boys against the opposite wall. Then, every ten seconds, they walked toward each other until they were half the previous distance apart. The mathematician, physicist, and engineer were asked, " When will the girls and boys meet?"
The mathematician said, " Never."
The physicist said, " In an infinite amount of time."

The engineer said, " Well... in about two minutes, they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."

Anecdotal Evidence
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily, as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humor from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.
Fire!!!
An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician, and a statistician are all staying at a hotel. In the middle of the night the engineer wakes up to find that his trashcan is on fire. He runs to the sink, fills his ice bucket with water and douses the flames. Then, just to be sure, he runs back to the sink, refills the bucket and dumps more water into the trashcan. With the fire out, he goes back to sleep.

A little while later, the trashcan in the physist's room spontaneously breaks into flame, waking the physicist. He whips out his slide rule, does some calculations, then runs to the sink, fills his bucket with exactly .75 liters of water, and douses the flames. Having put out the fire, he goes back to sleep.

A few minutes later, the mathematician wakes up to see that his trashcan is on fire. He whips out a piece of paper, scrawls out some equations, then goes back to sleep, comfortable that a solution exists.

Meanwhile, the statistician is running from room to room lighting trashcans on fire -- he needed more samples.

No Brakes!
A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?

"I know," said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."

"No, no," said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."

"Well," said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."

Testing...
The problem with physicists is that they tend to cheat in order to get results.

The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy problems in order to get results.

The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at toy problems in order to get results.

Real software engineers...
Assorted Groaners

These separate pages also came from that slashdot thread:

And... here are some other funny sites referred to by the thread:

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Last Updated: January 13, 2004