New Yorker Confusion
i know it's kinda cheap to not post for a few weeks and then steal posts from fellow bloggers. but i can't let this one go. (theoretical) physicists love to be photographed in front of their blackboards, full of seemingly incomprehensible squiggles. (i could pick on too many friends and colleagues, so in diplomatic physics spirit, here is feynman.) what's going on in the image above? it's not incomprehensible! as ryan points out, a second-year physics major can decipher the blackboard above: it displays a diagram of the decay of a neutron into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino (standard beta-decay, not even in quark notation), the schrödinger equation, the heisenberg uncertainty principle, einstein's mass-energy relation (in its incomplete form)... well, what's the fun in that? where is the mystery? we're supposed to be incomprehensible!
posted by Zosia A. C. Krusberg at
10:46 AM
3 Comments:
You always have my permission to steal. It is an homage!
I don't even look at my New Yorkers that often, there's too much other stuff to read so they usually just go straight into the trash. (Yes, it's a horrible waste, I know.)
I at least looked at the cover of this one last night though.
Oh, and you overlooked the real message in the cover... despite the overwhelming weight of physics, the scientist still knows the joys of a poached egg carefully laid out for breakfast.
When I make tenure, I'm going to require a kitchen (and a comfy leather couch) in my office.
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