We still don't know what M stands for

January 30, 2006 2:19 PM

The Everything of Theory and other articles by Gates, Roachcock, Kangaroo & Gall. Contains embedded video, not to mention branes and GUTs.
posted by Wolfdog (10 comments total)

I watch Star Trek and all that, but I would a bit embarassed putting Star Trek fan fiction on my university site. I mean, he's a physicist; he should be making Futurama jokes!
posted by Elagabalus at 2:36 PM on January 30, 2006

Ughhhhhh! Branes!
*shuffles forward menicingly*
posted by Smedleyman at 2:38 PM on January 30, 2006

oooh, oooh, scientific satire.
posted by wah at 3:02 PM on January 30, 2006

My favorite has always been How to explain irrational conformal field theory to your children:

Oohblahdee, ooblahdaa;
Que sera, sera.
Oowa ditty ditty dum ditty dee,
Dimensions of space be thou much more than three.
Oogam boogam, ditty wa ditty;
Let all be zero who were infinity.
Ooo ee oo ah ah, ting tang wala wala bing bang;
Find a rhyme for this line and see if I care.
posted by gleuschk at 3:06 PM on January 30, 2006

Footnote #1 was the highlight of the paper.
posted by sic friat crustulum at 3:56 PM on January 30, 2006

"oooh, oooh, scientific satire." - posted by wah

Circle gets the square!
posted by Smedleyman at 4:09 PM on January 30, 2006

LOLest use yet of semicolon in satyrical scientific writing:

The details of the calculations are presented elsewhere; here we give cartoons.
posted by grumdrig at 5:30 PM on January 30, 2006

Even as a physics major I felt like half the jokes were going over my head, but I loved this part:

Recent cosmological observations have indicated that α=e2/ħc varies with time. The obvious interpretation is that 2 is not a constant. This may be related to the classical limit

[q,p] = iħ → 0 in lim i → 0
posted by H-Bar at 6:19 PM on January 30, 2006

I was once privileged to have dinner sitting next to a Stanford physicist who won some Einstein Prize as an undergraduate at Princeton.

I ask him about string theory. He says: I can't comment on that because to review the materials would take me at least twelve years. (He was doing mathematical modeling of planetary gravitational lenses, that it turns out have all kinds of pretty internal reflections.)

I am not sure what this says about interpretive modern dance describing string theory.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:49 PM on January 30, 2006

Reminds me of this.
posted by kcds at 5:43 PM on January 31, 2006