The Physicists' Bill of Rights

[Rich Parsons]

Q: How do you tell an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician apart?
A: Put them, one at a time, in a room with an empty bucket on a table, a sink, a stove, and curtains behind the stove which have caught fire.
- The engineer will run to the table, grab the bucket, fill it with water, throw the water on the flames, douse the fire, and leave a mess.
- The physicist will do some rough order of magnitude calculations, fill the bucket one third of the way up with water, throw the water on the fire, douse the flames, and think himself clever for solving what would have been a messy problem elegantly.
- The mathematician will walk in the room, observe the fire, observe the bucket and the sink, and comment, "The solution is trivial," then walk out, leaving the proof as an exercise to the student.

Q: If you are still not sure, how can you tell them apart?
A: Place them each, one at a time, in a room with a bucket filled with water on a table, a sink, a stove, and curtains behind the stove which have caught fire.
- The engineer will douse the fire with the water in the bucket, leaving a mess.
- The physicist will do some calculations, throw 1/3 of the water on the flames, and douse the fire.
- The mathematician will empty the water from the bucket into the sink, place the bucket back on the table, then announce, "The problem is now reduced to one previously solved."

Was the fire Gas or grease or electric? the solution will depend upon the initial source, unless just putting out the flames on the curtains is the goal.

I do agree with the comment about the Mathematician and it is trival and let the student prove it.

 

[Ninjamom]

Was the fire Gas or grease or electric? the solution will depend upon the initial source,.....

Drat! Foiled once again by the initial conditions and the boundary values!

 

[arnisador]

Lol!

 

[Flying Crane]

5. To invoke the uncertainty principle whenever confronted by confused
mathemeticians, chemists, engineers, psychologists, dramatists, and
andere schweinhund.

Is that "any pighound"?

 

[MBuzzy]

Assumptions are wonder. With the right assumptions, ANY solution is correct!

 

[Ninjamom]

My father just emailed me this one:

Every Friday after work, a mathematician went down to the Ice Cream Parlor, sat on the second-to-last stool, turned to the last stool, which was empty, and asked a girl, who wasn't there, if he could buy her an ice cream cone. The owner, who was used to the weird, local university types, always kept quiet. But when Valentine's Day arrived, and the mathematician made a particularly heart wrenching plea into empty space, curiosity got the better of him, and he said, "I apologize for my question, but surely you know there is NEVER a woman sitting in that last stool. Why do you persist in asking out empty space?"

The mathematician replied, "Well, according to quantum physics, empty space is never truly empty. Virtual particles come into existence and vanish all the time. You never know when the proper wave function will collapse and a girl might suddenly appear there."

The owner raised his eyebrows. "Really? Interesting. But couldn't you just ask one of the girls who comes here every Friday if you could buy HER a cone? Never know... she might say yes."

The mathematician laughed. "Yeah, right. How likely is THAT to happen?"

 

[tellner]

A physicist came home, disheveled and unshaven at four in the morning to see his wife standing in the foyer.

"Where were you?"

"Honey, I can explain everything. There was a group visiting from MIT and went out afterwards. One of them was a really pretty woman. We got to talking, and, and, and I... I... went back to her hotel room and we had sex."

"You lying son of a *****! You were in the lab working again!"

 

[tellner]

Then there were the physicist, the engineer and the economist stranded on a desert island with a bunch of canned food and nothing else.

By the end of the first month the physicist had calculated the optimal trajectory and velocity to break open a #2 can, was well fed and had bulked up her throwing arm.

The engineer had improvised a can opener out of the stuff in his pockets and was hard at work on a canoe.

The economist was a starved corpse. On the sand in front of him he had written "Assume a can opener..."