A Stony Matter?

Question

Back in the old days before internet porn or Playboy magazine, the only way a young farm boy could see a naked lady was in a strip show at the annual county fair, and then only if he somehow sneaked a look, being underage and not permitted to enter.

Two such boys, Clem and Luke, decide to go to the back of the strip show tent and lift the canvas a bit to see what they might see.

But Luke is a bit hesitant, saying, "Wait a minute, Clem!  Don't you recollect what Preacher Buford said at church last Sunday?  He said if any man gazes upon a woman's nakedness not his wife, he will be turned to stone, just as Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking upon the forbidden."

"Aw, you're just a-scairt," chides Clem.

"No I ain't!  Go ahead and lift up that tent! "

Clem lifts up the tent fabric, looks, and in a few seconds, he whispers in terror, "Luke! Luke! Preacher Buford was right!  I'm a-turnin' to stone!  I can feel it a-startin' already! "

Answer 1

Tink, now that we have solved the quandary of turning mankind into stone, here is a quantum astrophysical cartoon for you...

Comments

Did I ever tell you about the time I got disqualified at the school science fair?

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Well O'Tink, after all these years...(Erwin Schrödinger, 1887-1961), at least we now KNOW that poor kitty is doing okay...  

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@ Virginia,

Yes, but in the meantime, the poor kitty died of old age. 

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O'No, O'Tink!

...do you mean to imply that even quantum kitties are subject to the vicissitudes of time?

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Sadly yes, Virginia.

I once saw a cartoon (can't find it now) that showed a gravestone, marked "Old physicists never die; they just become improbable," followed by the mathematical expression,

Lim ∫ψ*ψ dr → 0

 t → ∞

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Other Tink, I have a hunch there is something contained in the two equations, but I can only read the second one...

Poor Schrödinger...I always liked him a lot! His Nobel prize, his forays into the ashrams of India, trying to put together a philosophy for understanding all the strange stuff he was working with... inveterate ladies' man - got into trouble more than once with his ménage à trois with his wife and mistress, plus fathering children with more women...

While I was homeless, I had his little book with me WHAT IS LIFE?...and was dabbling therein...I read recently he ultimately gave up on the physics stuff, just too much to handle!

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@ Virginia,

The whole thing is only one expression. The integral  ∫ψ*ψ dr

represents the probability of finding the physicist somewhere in the universe. But this probability goes to zero in the limit (Lim) of the elapsed time t going to infinity. In other words, the physicist's wave function ψ (which depends on position r and time t )  becomes vanishingly small (for all r ) as t becomes large.

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Ha ha, ty O'Tink, I loved it!

...in other words, "shut up and calculate..." oh wait maybe that was Feynman?

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Maybe it was David Mermin, Virginia. 

http://www.gnm.cl/emenendez/uploads/Cursos/callate-y-calcula.pdf

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omg, N. David Mermin, how soon we forget!

...but according to the article, the saying then has only been around since 1989...I had read that Feynman was a misattribution, so good for you, O'Tink...

Answer 2

Lol - two good ones!

Thumbs up, T(h)ink and Virginia!

Answer 3

Two good ones! That's a good one Tink!