Humour and physics
The Quantum Pontiff has a cool post about humourous comments on journal papers, or more specifically on papers that are submitted to the arXiv, which is an online “pre-print” collection, where physicists can post their papers for general comments before they’re submitted to a “real” journal.
My favourite was:
quant-ph/0207142 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Phase measurements with weak reference pulses
Authors: S.J. van Enk
Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures. I apologize for this boring paper
Journal-ref: Phys. Rev. A 66, 042308 (2002)
A couple of the comments you might only appreciate if you have a bit of physics background, but it’s always nice to see some humour in what can be a very dry and serious subject (publish or perish, you know!)
A little Googling showed that Uncertain Principles has a couple of great titles - the best is
What Does a Strongly Excited ‘t Hooft–Polyakov Magnetic Monopole Do?
from the journal “Elementary Particles and Fields”! Haven’t we all wondered that at some time in our lives?
I also turned up a link to a paper talking about style and author guidelines for journals, and features (somewhat paradoxically :)) the title “Catchy, clever titles are not acceptable: Style, APA, and qualitative reporting”. I can’t find any reference to this, but I can only assume that at one time journal guidelines explicitly prohibited being clever in your titles!
I guess there are pros and cons to having a clever title. On the one hand, it’s probably less useful in doing its purpose - quickly and concisely communicating the contents of the paper. On the other hand, it might inspire more people to read or remember your paper, and does establish you as someone with a bit of wit about you! David Mermin has a fascinating and highly entertaining piece about the role of humour and emotion not just in titles but in journal articles in general. It also includes a great story on his efforts to get the word “boojum” to be an internationall, scientifically accepted term!
Even if you can’t have funny titles, physicists, especially astronomers, do like to use clever acronyms or phrases. There’s WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), MACHO (MAssive Compact Halo Objects) and the famous theorem “Black holes have no hair” (remind me to tell you a famous faux pas by a friend of mine involving that statement sometime) which means that they don’t remember anything of what they were made of. My favourite term, which I’m sure isn’t meant to be funny, is the skirmion. And no, I still don’t really understand it. You can see a picture, though.
Of course, the absolutely coolest stunt ever to be in a journal had nothing to do with titles - it was the author list in the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper. This paper, about the formation of elements in the universe, was written by Alpher and Gamow. But, noting their names’ similarity to the Greek alphabet, they added Hans Bethe as an author (without his knowledge, initially!) so their paper was effectively the “Alpha-Beta-Gamma” paper, and came to be known as the “alphabet paper”. You might be pleased to know, however, that Bethe did approve of his name going onto the paper, and did then contribute useful discussions!
Chad Orzel Says:
I’m not sure if Bethe knew about his name being added to the paper, but Alpher didn’t. It was entirely Gamow’s doing– Gamow was well known for his weird sense of humor.
(Ralph Alpher is a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in my department, and used to have the office next to mine. He’s got some amusing stories about Gamow, but he’s kind of bitter about Penzias and Wilson.)
But Alpher wasn’t happy with it, since he was a young PhD student and figured that everyone reading the paper would think that he didn’t do much, it was all the great Bethe and Gamow.
There was a famous paper by Donald Knuth called “The Toilet Paper Problem”. Originally he had various section titles relating to toilet paper and related topics, but the referee convinced him to change them. The title stayed, though, since the name had already been used at a couple of conferences.