“Joke’s on you”—Famous physicists whose attempts at humor ruined their legacies
How using Sarcasm in Science can Bite You in Uranus
Think about the one thing you are most passionately opposed to. Maybe it’s a political party or a country we’ve been at war with, your rival sports team or your boss’s managing style… it could even be kale chips or the Kardashians. Whatever you choose, it must plumb the very depths of your soul and be present in every fiber of your being. A hint of a whisper of a thought of it should be enough to drive you to action. Something you’d fight against tooth and nail, or are fighting against now.
Great. Now imagine dying, but sticking around as a ghost just long enough to catch the chatter about you at the funeral. To your shock, everyone’s talking about how in love with that thing you were (that thing you hate). Like, you couldn’t get enough of it. It’s all you would talk about! Two people even claim in their eulogies you were the originator of it all. What if it wasn’t just your personal network incorrectly associating you together with it, but the press, other colleagues, historians, and the world at large? Eventually, you and that-thing-you-hate become practically synonymous.
Oh, that wouldn’t be awesome?
That’s not the legacy you expected to leave?
Tough bananas.
Sometimes, outside forces conspire against your best intentions and decide for you!
In this article, you will learn about three high-profile cases of an attempt at humor that totally backfired and had the exact opposite effect intended, forever enmeshing their good name with that bad idea (these associations are still held today by nearly everyone you might ask). I’ll lay out what it was they opposed, why, what their counterargument was, and how the public ultimately responded.
Boxed in with the Big Bang
The big bang event was “the day without a yesterday”
— George Lemaître
Let’s begin as the universe began, with the Big Bang. A Belgian cosmologist and catholic priest named George Lemaître originally proposed the Big Bang’s underlying concept in 1931. Building on work from Hubble, which showed everything in the universe expanding in all directions, away from everything else, Lemaître imagined “rewinding the tape” and playing the universe’s progression backward, and traced everything back to a single point. A single point, compressing within itself the entirety of the universe’s mass and energy. Lemaître called this point the “primeval atom.”
Lemaître imagined this point as a supermassive, super energetic, special particle he named the “Primeval Atom,” which disintegrated in an explosion that birthed time and space themselves, and everything in them. Lemaître wrote, “If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning,” and called this beginning “the day without a yesterday.” Initially dismissed, even Lemaître would later admit that his theory lacked solid empirical support. Still, he firmly believed the universe was indeed expanding, and that cosmic rays are “fossils” of its original explosion. In many respects (i.e. cosmic microwave background radiation—” CMBR”), he was right.
It wasn’t Lemaître who coined the term the Big Bang, though. That credit belongs to one of Lemaître’s biggest critics, an English astronomer named Fred Hoyle who was staunchly opposed to the concept. Hoyle explained how implausible the theory seemed because it would require that everything popped into existence from a single point…. everything from, essentially, nothing. Out of the vast, dark, still emptiness of space, everything we know of (and even that which we don’t) was created in a single instant, like a primordial thunderclap from beyond. Like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, Hoyle could not abide.
Hoyle instead advanced his ideas of a stationary universe (called the “steady-state” model) which claimed the universe is not expanding at all. An outspoken critic, Hoyle was dead set on discrediting Lemaître’s theory and was interviewed by several radio shows. It was in a 1949 BBC Radio broadcast that he explained that theories like Lemaître’s about the beginning of the universe presuppose that “all the matter in the universe was created in one ‘big bang’ at a particular time in the remote past.”
The theory would require that “all the matter in the universe was created in one ‘big bang’ at a particular time in the remote past.”
— Fred Hoyle
Unfortunately, Hoyle’s joke fell as flat as Euclidean space. The media freakin’ loved it and would go on to popularize the term “big bang” so much that it replaced the theory’s real name (the “cosmological theory of inflation”) and is still what we call it today. Whereas Lemaître’s explanation of his theory confused the public, Hoyle’s “big bang” cut through all the noise and painted an easy-to-grasp concept everyone could understand.
Hoyle’s intention to point out how laughable and cartoonish Lemaître’s theory was had backfired. Instead of dissuading people from the theory, Hoyle inadvertently branded it with a name that made the theory more palatable and understandable by the public and raised awareness of the theory more than Lemaître could ever have achieved alone. Oops.
Fun fact: Hoyle still holds his beliefs today…
Learn more about this story at Scientific American
“Think inside the box”
The experiments physicists devise can sometimes seem sadistic and cruel but are often made to illustrate a particular point. Take Erwin Schrödinger, for example… you may have heard of his cat? The experiment is thus: place a cat inside a “perfect box,” where its inside does not interact with the outside environment. Now, toss in a radioactive isotope, a hammer, and a vial of poison. Yes, really. If the isotope decays before we look in the box, it will release a hammer that will smash the vial, which will release the poison, which will take away one of Mr. Whisker’s nine lives. Rube Goldberg would be proud.
Surely, though, one would suppose Schrödinger must have a logical basis for going to all that trouble, right? Is it just that he enjoys the nail-biting suspense and mental torment of small animals? It’s not. In fact, Schrödinger had a dog and all accounts are that it lived a long, full life, free of radioactive isotopes, hammers, and poison. Phew!
Perhaps he used a cat because he had a soft spot for “man’s best friend,” owning a dog himself (it’s a common misconception he had a cat). Maybe he thought cats would fare better, having nine lives and an affinity for boxes, and felt more comfortable putting one inside his imaginary, miniature Saw VII torture room.
The reason Schrödinger used an animal was to capture everyone’s attention. Schrödinger had discovered and lent his name to the now-famous “Schrödinger wave equation,” which dictates how quantum systems evolve over space and time, but even he didn’t take its math literally. He argued his theory painted an incomplete picture of what really took place, or perhaps may only serve as an abstract mathematical tool.
Unfortunately, the cat was out of the bag 😆 at that point and, like Lemaître, his analogy got away from him and captivated people’s interest, with just the right amount of mystery and intrigue, and eventually became what is still today the most well-known thought experiment in all of physics
.Instead of getting people to take his theory less literally, people pointed to the story as though that’s exactly what’s happening. Schrödinger’s name has become so intertwined with the idea of superposition that he’s often referred to, even by other physicists, as the biggest proponent of the exact concepts he was trying to dissuade people from.
Since then, Schrödinger’s name has become synonymous with the wave equations he never wanted us to take seriously, and even other physicists associate him with fathering —not fighting— the current theory‘s interpretation.
“Shut up and calculate!”
“If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be ‘Shut up and calculate!’”
— David Mermin
This legendary quote is almost always attributed to the late, great Richard Feynman because it describes his worldview on physics; namely, that realism (the idea that a real, physical reality exists somewhere, beyond what we can measure or interact with) should be abandoned. Feynman didn’t think physicists should spend time trying to figure out what the quantum realm is, or what it means. They should use their equations to solve problems and get things done.
The phrase has since become deeply embedded in the literature on quantum foundations, repeated in academic papers and popular articles and books. It has become a handy put-down, an easy slight, a catchy synonym, summarising in just four words everything that is wrong with a dogmatic, orthodox interpretation that insists there is nothing more to be understood from a supremely successful theory of physics that — to many — leaves just too many unanswered questions.
“Don’t ask questions beyond that,” was his attitude. Other questions are not in the realm of physics, but philosophy, and, today, he’s largely correct. While many lauded Feynman’s fresh, practical approach, many physicists disagreed and believed it abandons one of the core functions physics has served for millennia: o answer life’s toughest questions about the physical world we live in. Love it or hate it, the phrase stuck and represents an entire school of quantum thought now.
Although the phrase “Shut up and calculate” is most commonly attributed to Richard Feynman himself, it was actually Feynman’s critic, David Mermin, who coined it… and you guessed it, he was attempting to use humor as a means to point at how simple-minded and obtuse Feynman’s ideology was. Mermin, a solid-state physicist at Cornell University, believed physicists should do anything but just “shut up and calculate.” It was a column he penned for Physics Today where he wrote, “If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be ‘Shut up and calculate!’”
The intent was to use humor to reduce Feynman’s approach to a silly catchphrase. Instead, proponents of Feyman’s beliefs loved the term and adopted it as their defacto slogan. They wore it proudly as a badge of honor. So instead of discrediting Feynman’s ideology, he branded it with the equivalent of its verbal logo, and worst yet it’s Feynman himself who almost always gets the credit. To this day, even other physicists often get it wrong. It’s by far the quote he’s most (erroneously) known for by the public at large.
