So, upon handing me his solution to the final exam yesterday, one of the students decided to share a physics joke he’d heard. I like good-bad jokes, and this is deliciously terrible. I’ll try to recall it*:
—
“Einstein, Newton, and Pascal are playing hide and seek. It is Einstein’s turn to cover his eyes and count while the others hide. He does so, and then yells ready or not here I come. Uncovers his eyes. Pascal is nowhere to be seen, but Newton is right there in front of Einstein, holding a piece of chalk. He has drawn on the ground around his feet a white square, 1 meter on each side. Einstein says to Newton, I found you, you’re not very good at this! Newton says, No no no Einstein, you found one Newton per meter squared- You’ve found Pascal!”
—
Awesome.
The great thing about this is that you can immediately come up with your own variants using other physicists, pairing two properly, and the third (like Einstein) just in there to form the narrative. And mess with time as well as space…. so for example you can have Coulomb, Ampère, plus some random physicist, or Joule and Watt and some random third person. Maybe Joule is seen through a door that he is opening and closing once a second (no, no…. you’ve found Watt…). Same for Coulomb, and so forth.
Try your own…!
I wonder if there a good narrative where all three names are crucial in the joke’s play on units.
-cvj
*Thanks Orestis! (He found it here, he emailed me later.)
