Science jokes part 2!

 I'm being grumpy, and I've been grumpy all week.  

We seemed to have spring -but then it went again. We seemed to have something resembling a warm temperature- and then it got cold again. We even had random repeating hailstorms one day last week. And to add insult to injury, we are losing an hour of sleep this weekend.

So!

I've decided that it is an adequate time for science jokes and explanations part 2. Also, because I have a mild case of writer's block and couldn't think of anything else to write. But I'm going to pretend that this was totally intentional. 

 

1.Did you hear about the horrible accident where the physicist accidentally chilled himself to absolute zero? He's 0K now. 

Absolute zero refers to the lowest possible temperature possible. In particle physics language, this means that particles have the minimum possible thermal energy. They are as still and are as cold as they absolutely can be. The temperature that this occurs is - 2743.15 celsius - or 0 kelvin. The kelvin scale measures temperature based on particle movement. Kelvin is represented as K- so absolute zero is literally 0 K.  

 

2.A man works into a bookstore and asks the clerk. "Do you have anything on Schrodinger's Cat or Pavlov?". The clerk replies "It rings a bell but I'm not sure it's here".

This combines two scientific ideas - Schrodinger's Cat and Pavlov's Dogs. 

Schrodinger's Cat was an idea in quantum physics to show how something - like an atom can exist in multiple states at once until it's measured, and an outcome is only set in stone once someone actually observes it.  Schrodinger was trying to show how ridiculous it was for quantum physics to be applied to every object. So, he suggested a thought experiment where a cat is shut in a box with a vial of poison. There is a 50% chance that the poison will be released and kill the cat- but there is no way to know if the poison has been released until the box is opened and the dead or alive cat is seen. So, until then, the cat is both dead and alive. Meanwhile, Pavlov's Dogs was an experiment by psychologist Ivan Pavlov. Simply put, every time he fed his dogs, he ran a bell. Eventually, the dogs associated the bell with food and just hearing the bell made them react- like salivating. 

 

3.Two chemists walk into a bar. The first one says "I'll have H2O." The second one looks at him strangely and says to the barkeep "I'll just have some water too." He turns to the first and asks "Why did you say it like that? We're not at work anymore". The first chemist silently curses under his breath that his assassination attempt failed.

Water is literally two hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom. This is though something called covalent bonding where an oxygen atom donates an electron to each hydrogen atom. But oxygen is able to bind to other atoms and in some cases, it also binds to another oxygen. Two hydrogen atoms and two oxygens create H202 - hydrogen peroxide, a toxic compound that won't do the body much good if ingested.  

4. A group of protesters form outside a science lab and start chanting... "What do we want? Time Travel! When do we want it? It's irrelevant!"

If time travel was possible, these protestors would be able to move backward or forward in time. Therefore, the idea of time being fixed won't apply anymore. These protesters don't need to care when they actually get the time travel because it just wouldn't matter. It's like a story about Stephen Hawking I heard once where he wanted to jokingly prove whether time travel was possible. He invited his friends to a birthday party but only sent the invites after the party had already happened. If anyone attended the party before the invites were sent, it would 'prove' that a person could have travelled into the past after receiving his or hers invite. Sadly, no one attended. 

 

5.Why was Heisenberg such a bad lover?  When he got the momentum, he couldn't find the position, and when he found the position, he couldn't muster up the momentum.

Werner Heisenberg came up with the Uncertainty Principle. It basically means that it is impossible to accurately know both the location and speed of an electron. Which basically means that you can't know both the position and exact momentum of something. So poor Heisenberg here can either find the position or find the right speed. But physics means he can't know both. 

 

6.Einstein gets on a bus heading into town. He asks the driver: “Excuse me, does the central library stop at this bus?”

This is a play on Einstein's theory of relativity.  The general idea goes that motion is relative- and nothing is absolutely 'stationary'. Everything is moving relative to something else. The Earth itself is spinning, and the bus would be moving relative to the Earth- your reference point. We are essentially imagining the Earth is stationary. But the bus could technically be selected as the reference point meaning that from a physics- sense, the library is what is moving.

7.They have just found the gene for shyness. They would have found it earlier, but it was hiding behind two other genes.

I don't think I really need to explain this one in this much detail. Genes control traits - usually height, eye colour, or hair colour for example, but there is some research suggesting that genes could influence personality traits -such as shyness. 

 

8.A chemistry teacher is recruited as a radio operator in the first world war. He soon becomes familiar with the military habit of abbreviating everything. As his unit comes under sustained attack, he is asked to urgently inform his HQ. "NaCl over NaOH! NaCl over NaOH!" he says. "NaCl over NaOH?" shouts his officer. "What do you mean?" "The base is under a salt!" came the reply.

NaCl - or sodium chloride is what is known as a salt. It's actually just table-salt. Salts are something in chemistry that is formed when an acid reacts with a base. Meanwhile, NaOH- or sodium hydroxide is a base. This is a compound that is the opposite of an acid, and it has a pH higher than 7. So, by yelling out NaCl over NaOH, this chemistry teacher is literally putting a base under a salt.