Black Holes and Physicists’ Jokes

Posted by jns on September 22, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, when the world did not end by getting sucked into a black hole newly created by the just-energized Large Hadron Collider (at CERN), it seemed that journalists were casting their lines very widely to find any related story about physicists and CERN and human- or hadron-interest that they could write to cash in on the high-tech apocalyptic anxieties. Case in point: a piece in the Wall Street Journal (referenced below) about a group of scientists at CERN taking part in an experimental workshop program in improvised comedy. The reported justification is that it might help them with their lateral thinking about such allegedly abstruse topics as the Higgs boson. Myself, I think they’re just a little stir crazy from being underground all the time.

But, the piece did report on a few jokes that, it says, physicists tell. To be honest, I hadn’t heard them before. (Well, to be really honest, I’d heard them a day or two before at a rehearsal, told by another cast member who evidently reads the Wall Street Journal.) However, I haven’t moved in physics circles for several years now.

One of the reported jokes: A neutron walks into a bar and asks how much the drinks are. The bartender says: “For you, no charge.”

That’s pretty funny, sure. But they saved the real knee-slapper for the end of the article:

And consider the following one-liner, delivered in the CERN cafeteria by Mr. [Stephen] Goldfarb[, a physicist working at CERN]: “Two protons walk into a black hole.” That’s the joke.

[Alexander Alter, "Two Protons Walk Into a Black Hole, And Other Jokes Physicists Tell", Wall Street Journal, 4 September 2008.]

I am not kidding when I say that this one still makes me laugh every time, although I think it would be slightly funnier this way:

Two photons walk into a black hole….