HUMOR: Science humor - Is there such a thing?

We recently did an after dinner entertainment program for a group of engineers at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, FL. My part was Master of Ceremonies, jokester, and moderator of a trivia contest. Mostly the jokes went ok and everyone had a good time. However I had prepared some, what I thought, were particularly clever jokes that my engineer audience just didn't get. . I will tell the jokes just as I would present them to an audience and then offer explanation at the end.

Joke # 1

As part of a series of "You might be an engineer if . . ." jokes I stuck this one in as a lead up to my other physics jokes:

You might be an engineer if you are afraid to look at your life for fear the probability wave might collapse and you are really someone else.

Joke # 2

Speaking of the weirdness of things at the sub-atomic level, one of your engineers and a rock star named Alex Lifeson are suspected of conducting the Schrodinger Paradox experiment on a live cat in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton. Whether or not the cat is alive can not be determined. However, you here in the audience can determine which of the two men gets arrested by properly answering the following question: How many Heisenbergs does it take to change a light bulb. Of course, there are two acceptable answers.

Acceptable answer # 1

I am uncertain about the answer.

Acceptable answer # 2 (preferable)

If you know how many then you don't know where the light bulb is.

Now, maybe I am just warped but I think that is really funny. Or maybe I have too high an opinion of the intelligence of engineers. There are double meanings and double punch lines throughout the jokes.

Probability wave Joke # 1

A probability wave contains all the possible outcomes of an event. Observing the probability wave is said to cause the wave to "collapse" into one reality rather than all the possible realities. Thus if one looks at one self one might turn into somebody else.

In physics, a wave packet is an envelope or packet containing an arbitrary number of wave forms. In quantum mechanics the wave packet is ascribed a special significance: it is interpreted to be a "probability wave" describing the probability that a particle or particles in a particular state will be measured to have a given position and momentum.

By applying the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics it is possible to deduce the time evolution of a system, similar to the process of the Hamiltonian formalism in classical mechanics. The wave packet is a mathematical solution to the Schrödinger equation. The square of the area under the wave packet solution is interpreted to be the probability density of finding the particle in a region.

In the coordinate representation of the wave (such as the Cartesian coordinate system) the position of the wave is given by the position of the packet. Moreover, the narrower the spatial wave packet, and therefore the better defined the position of the wave packet, the larger the spread in the momentum of the wave. This trade-off between spread in position and spread in momentum is one example of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Alex Lifeson/Shrodinger Paradox Joke # 2

Alex Lifeson is a rock star who was arrested on New Years Eve after a drunken brawl at the Ritz Carlton. The arresting officer was none other than Chris Knott, Tracy Knott's (nee Kogok) husband (family friends), granted this is obscure, but there were local engineers in the audience who might have gotten the reference.

The Naples incident
On New Year's Eve 2003, Lifeson, his son, and his daughter-in-law were arrested at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Naples, Florida. Lifeson, after intervening in an altercation between his son and police, was accused of assaulting a sheriff's deputy in what was described as a drunken brawl. In addition to suffering a broken nose at the hands of the officers, Lifeson was tasered six times. His son Justin was also tasered repeatedly.

According to Justin's file in the Felony section of the Public Records database of Collier County, Florida,[10] the judge determined that, based on the testimony of the prosecution's witnesses, including one of the police officers involved in the incident, that while the potential for violence existed, none was offered by Justin. As part of the plea agreement Lifeson and his son were each sentenced to 12 months of probation with the adjudication of that probation suspended. Upon successful completion of the probation, the matter is to be expunged from their records. In addition, they had to pay all court costs. In the fall of 2005, the court granted early dismissal from probation to both Lifeson and his son.

The Schrodinger Paradox is a thought experiment never intended to involve a real cat. Essential it says that a cat being poisoned in a box could be both alive or dead depending on how the probability wave collapsed. Schrödinger's cat, often described as a paradox, is a thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics being applied to everyday objects, by considering the example of a cat that may be either alive or dead, according to an earlier random event.

Heisenberg and Joke # 3

In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that locating a particle in a small region of space makes the momentum of the particle uncertain; and conversely, that measuring the momentum of a particle precisely makes the position uncertain.

Thus, if you know how many Heisenbergs you don't know where the light bulb is.

Please let me know if you laughed or just questioned my sanity and sense of humor.