Science Jokes

[SK8ER]

Geology word plays
Several short geology plays on words

Okay, if you are a real geologist, you probably enjoy transferring geology vocabulary into everyday situations. For example, if you agree with what someone has said, you may say, You breccia! or My sediments exactly!

And if you are not pleased with the person's statement, you may resort to the old:

That's not gneiss!

[SK8ER]

Dedicated geologists
Total immersion geologists

Total immersion geologists: Are you totally obsessed with geology? If so, then you are a total immersion geologist. Here are the ten warning signs:

1. You judge a restaurant by the type of decorative building stone they use rather than their food.

2. You manage to turn any conversation into a discussion of geology, as in: "What did you think of that Superbowl game last night?" "I must have missed that conference. Who sponsored it? Geological Society of America?"

3. You refuse to let nightfall stop your field excursions and continue looking at the outcrops using the headlights of your field vehicle.

4. You like rock music only because it's called "rock" music.

5. You will try to claw through the water flowing in a stream to get a better look at the bedrock at the base of the channel.

6. You will walk across eight lanes of freeway traffic to see if the outcrop on the other side of the highway is the same type of rock as the side you're parked on.

7. You name your children after rocks and minerals.

8. You're not sure if you have children.

9. You view non-geologists as subhuman.

[SK8ER]

Asked in science class
REAL QUESTIONS ASKED IN SCIENCE CLASSES

Are the rivers flowing up the mountain or down the mountain?

Is that the ocean? (Asked while on a field trip to Marine Lab Beach on Guam (a small island in the Pacific).

How can the river be flowing north? That's uphill!

How can mass wasting be an agent of landscape formation on the Moon? The Moon has no gravity!

How do I get water into this beaker?

[SK8ER]

Earth science answers
REAL ANSWERS FROM EARTH SCIENCE EXAMS

The terrestrial planets are much larger than the gas giants.

Wegener found matching bedbugs on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The main problem associated with limestone aquifers is Lyme disease.

We don't have rock salt on Guam because that forms from from evaporation of oceans and we don't have oceans on Guam.

Erie, Pennsylvania has no volcanoes because it's too cold there.

The most important agent of landscape formation on Guam is greyhounds - they are intelligent.

We know that the sun is much farther away from us than the moon is, because we can see stars between us and the sun, but not between us and the moon.

The rear end of a trilobite is called a trilobutt.

[SK8ER]

Rhymes in chemistry
CHEMISTRY RHYMES
Old Man Stokes
Old man Stokes was a gentleman fine
Who lived beside the Raleigh line;
Old anti-Stokes, his existance denied,
Lived never-the-less on the other side.

[SK8ER]

Jokes of science 01
At the physics exam: 'Describe the universe in 200 words and give three examples.'

Q: What do physicists enjoy doing the most at baseball games?
A: The 'wave'.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was known as SLAC, until the big earthquake, when it became known as SPLAC. SPLAC? Stanford Piecewise Linear Accelerator.

A student recognizes Einstein in a train and asks: Excuse me, professor, but does New York stop by this train?

Researchers in Fairbanks Alaska announced last week that they have discovered a superconductor which will operate at room temperature.

The answer to the problem was "log(1+x)". A student copied the answer from the good student next to him, but didn't want to make it obvious that he was cheating, so he changed the answer slightly, to "timber(1+x)"

One day in class, Richard Feynman was talking about angular momentum. He described rotation matrices and mentioned that they did not commute. He said that Sir William Hamilton discovered noncommutivity one night when he was taking a walk in his garden with Lady Hamilton. As they sat down on a bench, there was a moment of passion. It was then that he discovered that AB did not equal BA.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends on your frame of reference.

[SK8ER]

The alcohol trouble
During grammar school science experiements into properties of different alcohols:

The residue of each test was tipped down the sinks, which were grouped in threes. There were no U-bends, but each group of sinks emptied into a single box, which overflowed into the mains sewers. Presumably this was intended to retain things like droplets of mercury, which was not banned from use when I was 16.

During the session, my bunsen went out, so I re-lit it with a splint lit from the teacher's bunsen. For safety's sake (!) I dropped the burning splint into the sink, intending to extinguish it with water, instead of waving it around in the alcohol fumes. A small blue flame disappeared down the plughole. Hum, thinks I, I wonder where that's going?

I opened the cupboard 'neath the sink, only to find the drain box, full of alcohol, a roaring mass of flame. Shutting the doors, I called out, "Er, Sir..." just as the inch-thick wooden lids blew off the adjacent un-used sinks. Fortunately, the back-blast extinguished the flames under the cupboard, so the box only sagged slightly!

[SK8ER]

Question is too easy
ON A CHEMISTRY TEST at Midpark High School in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, one question concerned how to clean the floor after a chemical-powder spill. In detail, I described the liquid I would combine with the powder in order to dissolve it with chemical bonding and electron transfer. I was pleased with my grasp of molecular structure until the exams were handed back. Our teacher asked another student to read her answer. She suggested a broom and a dustpan to sweep up the spill -- and got full credit.

[SK8ER]

For the last Joke I should add the following:

-- Contributed to "Tales Out of School" by Joe Astorino � 1996 The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. All rights reserved

[SK8ER]

Nail in experiment
DURING my freshman biology class at North High School in Springfield, Ohio, our teacher was lecturing on the conditions in which bacteria exist. Elaborating on the acidic environment where bacteria thrive, he suggested a simple experiment. "I want you to drop a nail into a glass of Coke or Pepsi, and then observe the acidic reaction on the nail," he said. The girl sitting next to me raised her hand and asked in all seriousness, "Do you mean a real nail, or a press-on?"

-- Contributed to "Tales Out of School" by Carolyn Stickney � 1996 The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. All rights reserved.