Really Bad Jokes of Science: The Archive (Updated 24 Oct 26)
(Editor’s Note: for the Few, the Proud, the followers of my Facebook series, and the quite-possibly Humour-Challenged, here is the entire Really Bad Jokes of Science archive to-date, minus the entries that required a photo-visual, and accounting for the fact that when compiling the archive, I found I had repeated a few jokes. [It’s a good thing I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps and become a Nuclear-Physicist. “What were the figures for that critical-mass calculation? Ah, Hell, I’ll just estimate it.”] Read on, brave souls.)
(The self-penned joke where it all began, on a dorm-room cork bulletin-board in the Fall of 1980.)
1. Q: What do you get when a priest holds services during a group parachute-drop?
A: Gravitational Mass.
2. A chemist is working in the lab when his colleague runs in. “Eureka,” the colleague exclaims, “I’ve discovered the universal-solvent!”
“That’s great,” the chemist replies. “In what will you keep it?”
3. Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light-bulb?
A: Only one, but the light-bulb has to want to change.
4. When superlative volcanologists complete their studies, do they graduate Magma Cum Laude?
5. WANTED: Schrödinger’s Cat — Dead, or Alive.
6. René Descartes sits down in a greasy-spoon diner and orders a hamburger from the waitress.
The waitress asks, “Do you want fries with that?”
Descartes answers, “I think not,” and immediately vanishes in a puff of logic.
7. Q: Why was the M.I.T. Physics Professor so happy when her boyfriend visited her lab for high-voltage current experiments?
A: It was the first time a man had given her joules.
8. Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To actualise its potential.
9. Q: What did the nuclear-physicist eat for lunch?
A: Fission Chips.
10. The Laws of Cartoon-Physics, Law 1: “Any body suspended in space will remain suspended until made aware of its situation.”
11. The bartender says, “We don’t serve tachyons in here.” A tachyon walks into a bar.
12. Q: What is the most-important thing to learn in chemistry?
A: Never lick the spoon.
13. Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Despite the evidence of our senses, it is simpler mathematically to describe the phenomenon as the road passing under the chicken.
14. If the Titanic had struck a Heisenberg, would it still be floating?
15. A Confucianism (allegedly): “When you breathe, you inspire. When you do not not breathe, you expire.”
16. Q: What is Preparation-A?
A: It’s an over-the-counter product used to relieve the pain & suffering of asteroids.
17. Q: If the formula for water is H₂O, what is the formula for ice?
A: H₂O-squared.
18. Q: What do you get when every young woman in a blue-collar town gives birth the first Saturday in September?
A: A Labour-Day weekend.
19. For ship’s navigators, do you suppose every day is a day of reckoning?
20. They say entropy isn’t what it used to be.
21. Did you hear about the microbiologist who travelled to many countries, and spoke six languages? He was a man of many cultures.
22. There is a sign on the door to the National Institutes of Health-Sciences Microbiology Lab that reads, “Staph Only”.
23. Mrs. Buddha, complaining about her husband: “Summer vacation? Retirement-plan? Forget it! All he wants to do is live in the moment!”
24. Philosophy is a games with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives. Theology is a game whose object is to bring the rules into the subjective.
25. This message was written entirely with recycled electrons.
26. Do radioactive cats have eighteen half-lives?
27. A Higgs-Boson particle walks into a church.
The Preacher says, “Get out of here! You are a disgrace! You call yourself the ‘God Particle’, when there is only one, true God!”
The particle replies, “Well, if I am not here, how can you have Mass?”
28. Q: How does Juliet maintain a constant body-temperature?
A: Romeostasis.
29. Q: What do you call a cookie with no charge?
A: A Fig Neutron.
30. “The causes of global-warming” is an anagram for “Foul gases gleam with carbon.”
31. There is a sign in Munich that read “Heisenberg might have slept here.”
32. Q: What do you do with a sick chemist?
A: If you can’t helium, and you can’t curium, you might as well barium.
33. (From Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking”.)
Jay: “Where is the alimentary canal located?”
A high-school dropout: “Is it at the border of New York State and Canada?”
34. Q: Why couldn’t the Möbius strip enroll at the university?
A: The university required an orientation.
35. (Blame, in part, my wife for this one.)
Karen brought up a recent article she had read about a species of puffer-fish discovered off the coast of Japan, and first catalogued around 2005. A decade earlier, their first signs had been detected when local fishermen and divers had noticed serieses of perfectly-concentric rings appearing on the ocean-floor. The rings were geometrically-correct, and intricately-decorated. For a decade thereafter, they were thought of with the same curiosity as crop-circles. When the new puffer-fish was discovered, it was found the circles were created by the male of the species as a mating-ritual. The more-spectacular the circle, the more-likely the female is to mate with the male who made the circle.
My eloquent, intelligent response (?): “See, artists can get dates? Nature has proven it!”
36. Really Bad dating-line: “Are you made of Copper and Tellurium, ’cause you are CuTe.”
37. Old chemists never die, they just stop reacting.
38. Life is a sexually-transmitted disease.
39. A photon checks into a hotel. The bell-hop asks, “May I help you with your luggage?”
The photon replies, “Thanks, but I don’t have any. I’m travelling light.”
40. Two neutrinos go through a bar…
41. (Scientists with a sense of humour.) Rocket-scientist Wernher Von Braun was quoted at a press-conference for the Apollo-program as stating, “There is one thing I can promise you about the space-program: your tax-dollar will go farther.”
42. (No one, including I, have ever solved this dilemma.) Recently, I learned one of those extremely-interesting bits of science-trivia. Black holes, it seems, emanate a sound, specifically, one note: B-flat. There is contained in this fact the root of a devilishly-clever and cruel joke about brass and woodwind-players. (I leave it to my classical-music friends, and any other musicians reading this, to construct the ultimate gag.)
43. Q: Why did the germ cross the microscope?
A: To get to the other slide.
44. Q: Does anyone know a good joke about sodium?
A: Na.
45. Q: How does Santa deliver presents all over the world on Christmas Eve?
A: With Rudolph the Red-Shift Reindeer.
46. (More science-guys with a sense of humour.) “Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do to you, to correct for subjective-error.” Linus Pauling.
47. Q: Why can Nessie open any impenetrable door?
A: He’s a Loch’s Myth.
48. Q: Why do chemists like nitrates so much?
A: They’re cheaper than day-rates.
49. “What do we want?”
“Time-travel!”
“When do we want it?”
“That’s irrelevant!”
50. Two chemists walk into a bar. The first one says to the bartender, “I’ll have H₂O.”
The second chemist says, “I’ll have H₂O too.”
The second chemist dies.
51. Two atoms are hanging out together. One atom says to the other, “I think I lost my electron.”
The other atom asks, “Are you certain?”
“Yes,” the first atom replies, “I’m positive.”
52. Q: How can you tell the moon is often broke?
A: At least part of every month, it’s down to its last quarter.
53. Q: How does the Earth hold up its trousers?
A: With an asteroid-belt.
54. Q: Why can’t atheists solve exponential-equations?
A: Because they don’t believe in a higher power.
55. Q: Where does bad light end up?
A: In prism.
56. There are ten kinds of people in this world who understand binary: those who do, and those who don’t.
57. Q: Before docking with the International Space-Station, what must a shuttle-pilot do first?
A: Put money in the parking-meteor.
58. Q: What does a sub-atomic duck say?
A: “Quark!”
59. (Once more with a humourous scientist.) Isaac Asimov once remarked, “If you want to find a chemist, ask them to define the following two words: ‘mole’, and unionise’. If they start talking about furry animals and organised-labour, keep walking.”
60. A neutron walks into a bar, and asks the bartender, “How much for a drink?”
The bartender replies, “For you, no charge.”
61. Q: Why did the bear dissolve in water?
A: It was polar.
62. I was considering writing a mathematics-thesis on endless sets, but realised I shouldn’t start what I couldn’t finish.
63. Because light travels faster than sound, some people appear intelligent until you hear them speak.
64. If the Silver Surfer and Iron Man teamed up, they’d be alloys.
65. Researchers have determined the propensity for some individuals to make palindromes is influenced by their environment…and DNA.
66. Mathematicians get their kicks on 8.124.0384.
67. Q: Why is the Ph of YouTube very stable?
A: It constantly buffers.
68. A couple of scientists had twins, They named one Justin, the other Control.
69. Q: How many theoretical-physicists does it take to change a light-bulb?
A: Two, one to hold the light-bulb, and one to rotate space itself.
70. Did you hear the one about the recycling triplets? Their names are Polly, Ethel, and Iain.
71. It is believed that Nicolaus Copernicus became the trailblazing Astronomer he did because his parents kept telling him, “Nic, when will you realise the world does not revolve around you?”
72. Q: What does an astronomer blow with gum?
A: Hubbles.
73. Did you hear about the bones they found on the moon? It seems the cow didn’t make it after all.
74. Regional fruit availability makes pricing for certain commodities vary widely. It is understandable, but consider the following: in the Dominican Republic, a banana-cream pie is cheap: $1.75/slice. A slice of mango-pie would go for about the same price. In Jamaica, the prices are nearly the same — $2.00/slice — inflated only slightly by tourist-revenues. Cocoanut-cream pie is comparatively-affordable, even in impoverished Haiti — $1.50 to $2.00/slice. More northern fruits — blueberries, for example — would command anything up to $10.00/slice, even in tourist-havens such as St. Kitts and the Virgin Islands.
These are the Pie-Rates of the Caribbean.
75. Q: How does a Chemist describe goofing off?
A: Pr O C Ra S Ti Na Ti O N.
76. Did you hear about the new restaurant on the moon? The food is great, but there’s no atmosphere.
77. A climatologist and a climate-change denier walk into a bar. The sit at the bad and order two drinks.
When the bartender brings them their drinks, the climate-change denier asks, “What do I owe you?”
The bartender replies, “Three bucks each.”
The climate-change denier gives the bartender a fifty-dollar bill. As the bartender goes to the cash-register to get change, the climate-change denier gets up and leaves. When the bartender comes back, he asks the climatologist, “Where’s your friend? I have his money.”
The climatologist replies, “”That’s okay, he wasn’t expecting any change.”
77. Q: What snake is 3.14 metres long?
A: A π-thon.
78. Q: If baseball-players catch athlete’s-foot, what do astronauts catch?
A: Missile-toe.
79. If ever I get sent to prison, I’m going to change my name to Mitochondria. I want everyone to know I’m the powerhouse of the cell.
80. Q: How do you keep warm in a cold room?
A: Stand in the corner, because it’s always ninety-degrees.
81. Q: What is a chemist’s favourite ride?
A: The ferrous-wheel.
82. If a plant is sad, do other plants photosympathise with it?
83. One tectonic-plate bumped into another. The first one said, “My fault.”
84. If a railway-locomotive is reassigned from long-haul transport to local duties, patrolling the lines looking for damaged track, lost freight, cargo, and the like, is it now a search-engine?
85. Q: What do you get when you cross an octopus with a cow?
A: A reprimand from the Scientific Integrity & Professional Ethics Committee.
86. (I’m almost-proud to take credit for writing this one.) Recently, a study was undertaken to determine the effects of shipping on the ecosystems (water-quality, marine-life, fishing-stocks, and the like) of the Maritimes. In deep-water, the results were almost exactly as the researchers predicted. However, the closer to land the researchers checked, the more-erratic and unpredictable the results became. The results were particularly varied right in the harbours and docking-areas for ocean-going vessels. As such, the findings were not released until they underwent a thorough pier-review.
87. Three statisticians decided to experience the life of an athlete, and tried out for the local semi-pro baseball-team. All of them wanted to be pitchers.
The first statistician went to the mound and fired a pitch right over the catcher’s head. The second statistician went to the mound and threw a curve-ball in the dirt. The third statistician called out, “Strike one!”
88. Never drink water while preparing for an exam. Chemistry stats that concentration decreases upon adding water.
89. Bacteria is the only culture some people have.
90. Q: What do trees like to drink?
A: Root-beer.
91. Q: Why do Heisenberg’s position and momentum-operators always work form home?
A: Because they don’t commute.
92. Scientists have only one breed of dog as a pet: a Lab.
93. Q: What did the positive-charge say to the negative-charge?
A: We have potential.
94. An optimist sees a half-glass of water as half-full. A pessimist sees the glass as half-empty. A chemist sees the glass as containing 50% H₂O (liq.), 10.5% O₂ (g.), .44% Ar (g.), and .06% CO₂ (g.).
95. Q: Why do plants hate math?
A: It gives them square roots.
96. Q: What award did Gregor Mendel win for his work in genetics?
A: The Nobel Peas Prize.
97. (That glass of water again.) An optimist sees a half-glass of water as half-full. A pessimist sees the same glass as half-empty. An engineer sees the same glass as twice as large as it needs to be.
98. (I came close to being tossed out of the room when I wrote and told this one.) A mathematician and a cop walk into a bar. They both order a beer, and the mathematician downs his in one shot, sighing deeply. The cop turns to him and asks, “Bad day, Phil?”
“Yeah, Jim, I tanked on a lecture today, big-time.”
“What happened?”
Phil replies, “I was covering for colleague of mine. He had to give a lecture on algebraic-usage: differential-operators, derivatives, variables, Leibniz’s Law, statistical-application, the whole enchilada. I tanked on the derivation section. I sounded like a Freshman who never did his homework.”
“Were you nervous?”
“Yeah, a bit, but it was after lunch, so I had a nice hour off beforehand. I had a sandwich and a pint at the pub.”
“Well, there was your problem,” Jim says.
“What problem?”
“You had a pint with lunch. How many times have I told you, Phil: don’t drink and derive.”
99. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.
100. A mathematician sneaks home at 3:00 a.m. to find his wife waiting up for him. “You know, you told me you’d be home by 11:45,” she says.
“Actually,” the mathematician replies, “I’m right on time. I said I’d be home by a quarter of twelve.”
101. Q: What do cobalt and aluminium get for Christmas?
A: CoAl.
102. “Dear Algebra,
“Please stop asking us to find your X. She’s never coming back, and don’t ask Y.”
103. Q: Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?
A: To get to the same side.
104. Recently, a team of researches at Atlanta’s Centre for Disease-Control was reassigned to Johns Hopkins’ Behavhioural-Sciences Department when due to the discovery of a typographical-error by a dyslexic program-director the team realised they had in fact been working on a cure for the common clod.
105. Q: Why dies a hamburger have less energy than a steak?
A: The burger is in its ground-state.
106. (More roads, more chickens.)
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: You see, chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally-selected such that they are now genetically-inclined to cross roads.
107. Q: Why were carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen wearing suits and ties?
A: They were a formyl-group.
108. A marine-biologist decided the best way to celebrate his first long-term relationship was to take the love of his life on a Valentine’s Day weekend Caribbean-cruise. Things got off to a good start, but hit a snag when on the second evening, they were leaning on the deck-rail, watching a beautiful, tropical sunset, and the biologist spotted movement in the water.
He turned to his love, gazed into her eyes, pointed to the waves, and crooned softly, “When you see a large eel swimming just off the bow, that’s a Moray…”
109. I just poured root-beer into a square glass. Now, I only have beer.
110. One afternoon, a wife asked her programmer-husband, “Could you go to the store and buy a loaf of bread? If they have eggs, buy a dozen.” The husband returned with twelve loaves of bread.
111. I may appear to be a lazy slob, but on a cellular-level, I’m quite busy.
112. Acting on anonymous tip, the F.B.I. arrested three professors of M.I.T.’s Mathematics Department, and charged them with running an on-line numbers-racket. The professors — prime leaders of the gang — were Lars “Two-Face” Mikkelsen, Leroy “Three-Way” Jenkins, and Victor “Five Fingers” Spinetti.
113. A group of wealthy investors wanted to be able to predict the outcome of a horse-race. To do so, they hired a group of biologists, a group of statisticians, and a group of physicists. Each group was given a year to research the issue. After one year, the groups all reported to the investors.
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The biologists said that they could genetically-engineer an unbeatable racehorse, but it would take 200 years and $100bn. The statisticians reported next. They said that they could predict the outcome of any race at a cost of $100m./race; however, they would only be right 10% of the time.
Finally, the physicists reported that they could also predict the outcome of any race, and that their process was cheap, and simple. The investors listened eagerly to this proposal. The head-physicist reported, “We have made several simplifying assumptions: first, let each horse be a perfect rolling sphere…”
114. Q: How many free-lance bio-technologists does it take to crew in a light-bulb?
A: Only one: to design the light-bulb to crawl up the wall, unscrew the old one, and plug itself in.
115. A friend of mine was a bio-engineer for Stanford’s Cloning Lab. Since retiring recently, he hasn’t known what to do with himself.
116. Q: What single invention has caused the most revolutions in human-history?
A: The wheel.
117. “Did you hear oxygen and magnesium got together?”
“OMg!”
118. Q: What takes place when a group of M.I.T. physicists spend a weekend camping on the banks of a trout-stream?
A: Nuclear fishin’.
119. Recently, my wife read a book that is now in my “to-read” pile. It’s a study by Cathy O’Neil published in 2016 detailing how the manipulation of socio-political data, not only in the interpretation of that data once-disseminated, but also in the very construction and use of the algorithms themselves, perpetuates and validates inequalities across the societal-scale, giving them a faux-scientific — and completely-inaccurate — justification for their conclusions. As serious as the book — and as damning as its conclusions — are, the author (and, presumably, the advertising-department of her publisher, Crown Books), know how how to write a great, darkly-humourous gag for a title.
The book is entitled “Weapons of Math-Destruction”.
120. The trek to joke number two-hundred proves increasingly-difficult as I discover most of the good chemistry-jokes argon.
121. A friend who’s in liquor-production
Has a still of astounding construction.
The alcohol boils
Through old magnet-coils.
He says that it’s proof by-induction.
122. Chemistry-teacher: “Did you know that protons have mass?”
Student: “I didn’t know they were Catholics.”
123. Famous last words from chemists:
“And now, the taste-test…”
“Next, shake the mixture…”
124. (True story: excellent use of an afternoon off.) An M.I.T. guru once conceived on a lark the following thought-experiment: given that it is a largely-accepted notion that no one who ever subscribes to, or reads, National Geographic magazine could ever bring themselves to throw away their issues, was there a use for all those copies? When theorising how many copies must still exist in private-collections (from still-active subscribers, past-subscribers, casual-readers, and archived by libraries, colleges, research-institutes, and other relevant educational and scholarly-institutions world-wise), the guru came across a bizarre fact that only the truly scientifically and comedically-insane can uncover (usually at three in the morning).
That fact: if it were possible for every individual and organisation possessing those copies to hold all of them four feet in the air, and drop them to the floor at the exact same time world-wide, no matter where those geographic-points might be, the resultant force generated wold be sufficient enough to knock the earth out of its orbit, and send it spinning chaotically into deep-space.
Apparently, the pen is mightier than the sword.
125. My new theory on inertia doesn’t seem to be gaining any momentum.
126. During one of their investigations, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson found themselves having to camp in the woods in-pursuit of their criminal-prey. The first night, knowing they still had far to go, they pitched a tent under a clear, autumn sky, and went to sleep.
In the middle of the night, Holmes was stirred to wakefulness, and roused Watson. “Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you see?”
“Well, old bean, I see a dark expanse of sky, populated with millions of stars. Beautiful, isn’t it? You know, I’ve read many astronomers theorise the galaxies — those points of light being all we see with the naked eye — might possibly be home to planets close enough in composition to ours that some might support life. We have no proof, of course, but the sheer number of them makes the odds of there being life other than ours rather tantalising. That chap Wells’ novels have rather caught my fancy of late…”
“Well and poetically-observed, Watson,” Holmes replied. “However, once more your powers of observation, ramblingly-romantic and catalogued though they might be, have failed to notice the most-obvious of details.”
“How’s that?” Watson asked.
“The mere fact that we can see the stars mean someone has stolen our tent.”
127. Hollywood Fun-Fact: Iron Man’s cousin is Ferrous Bueller.
128. If a chemistry-teacher can’t find the solution, they will simply make one p.
129. (From the early COVID-days.) Social-Distancing, HAM-radio version: keep one wavelength apart at 146.52 MHz.
130. There are two types of people: 1) they who can extrapolate form incomplete data.
131. Q: How many biologists does it take change a light-bulb?
A: Four: one to change the bulb, and three to write an environmental-impact statement.
132. Why Iron Man? Why not Fe-Male?
133. Q: What do you get when the entire staff of the Behavioural-Sciences Dept. at Johns-Hopkins University accepts Catholicism?
A: Mass Psychology.
134. Q: What does a chemist call H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O?
A: Water (H₂O).
135. Every person who hates getting up in the morning is secretly a physicist. They are simply adhering to Newton’s Laws of Motion, which state that a body at-rest tends to stay at-rest.
136. When the Spanish explored the American continents, they found neither El Dorado, nor the Fountain of Youth, but they did find new and different religious and spiritual-practises. Fascinated by them, they brought home many of their associated artifacts, such as the crystals used in their rituals.
It was in this manner they learned how many quartz are in a galleon.
137. After yet-another long day spent in the research-lab, an amoeba went to a bar for drink. After serving him, the bartender remarked, “Here you go: bottom’s up. Just remember to pay your tab before you split.”
138. After a different long day in the chemistry-lab, sixteen sodium atoms went to a bar. They were followed by Batman.
139. (A quote from the late sci-fi & fantasy-writer Terry Pratchett.) “With magic, you can turn a frog into a prince. With science, you can turn a frog into a PhD, and you still have the frog you started with.”
140. In 1744, when Swedish astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Anders Celsius passed away at the relatively-young age of forty-two, the world of scientific-enquiry mourned its loss. There was, however, one group of dissenting voices. Colleagues of Daniel Fahrenheit insisted that while Celsius’ passing was a sad one, he was in fact one-hundred and seven.
141. (Perhaps the ultimate chicken-gag.) One afternoon in the afterlife, a group of history’s greatest thinkers had gathered together and, to their surprise, were joined by a nightclub-comic. He opened his act by asking, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
Aristotle replied, “It is in the nature of chickens to cross roads.”
Isaac Newton returned, “It depends. Chickens at-rest tend to stay at-rest, while chickens in-motion tend to cross roads.”
Albert Einstein disagreed. “Whether the chicken crossed the road, or the road moved beneath the chicken, depends entirely upon the observer’s frame-of-reference.”
Werner Heisenberg offered another theory. “While we will never be certain on which side of the road the chicken actually was, we can be certain she was moving very quickly.”
Finally, Wolfgang Pauli commented, “There was already a chicken on this side of the road.”
The comic wandered off to find another audience.
142. When the asteroid that struck Earth and caused the mass-extinction of the dinosaurs hit, from a mathematical-standpoint, it produced the greatest ratio of birds killed to one stone of all time.
143. During the early Renaissance, the Europaean scientific-community utilised the Latin word “turbation’ to describe the mass-disturbance observed in natural occurrences (such as sedimentary-movement in river-beds due to populations of, for example, worms, clams in sea-beds, rodents on shorelines, and so on). The word fell out of favour, then was revived in the last century. The word was probably re-adopted (especially in its plural-form) to keep twelve-year old boys coming to class, even if only to snicker.
144. After a long day’s research was going to continue well into the night, f(x) went to the local delicatessen to order sandwiches for his co-workers. It was disappointed when the counter-attendant told him they didn’t cater for functions.
145. Q: How did the departmental-accountant of Loyola’s Medical-Research Lab refer to himself?
A: As the buy-ologist.
146. A dung-beetle walks into a bar and asks, “Is this stool taken?”
147. Q: Which liquid has a greater-weight by-volume, a gallon of water, or a gallon of butane?
A: Water, because butane is a lighter-fluid.
148. When a priest delivers a sermon addressing the horrors of nuclear-proliferation, is he utilising Critical Mass?
149. (Another COVID-era gag.) An infectious-disease walked into a bar and asked for drink. The bartender stopped him and said, “We don’t serve your kind in here.”
The disease replied, “Well, I guess you’re not a very good host.”
150. Q: Why was Pavlov’s hair so soft?
A: He conditioned it.
151. Three friends — a biologist, an engineer, and a mathematician — from M.I.T. took a lunch-break at a café just off campus one afternoon. As they sat drinking their overpriced lattes, they observed casually an empty building in the process of gentrification across the street. Two workers entered the building, and not long after, three walked out.
The biologist remarked, “Hmm…they must have reproduced.”
The engineer replied, “No our initial count must have been incorrect.”
The mathematician deadpanned, “Actually, if one more walks in, the building will be empty.”
152. After a thorough review of their departmental personnel-records, M.I.T. made yearly vacations mandatory for its instructors. The first Summer, one physicist, one biologist, and one chemist from the Institute went on a joint-vacation to a resort in New England.
The first day, all three of them walked out to the beach, and were fascinated by what they saw. The physicist immediately became entranced by the actions of the waves, and waded out to study them. Too late, he remembered he couldn’t swim, and was pulled under by the waves, vanishing in minutes. The biologist was fascinated by the underwater ocean-life, and when she waded out to examine it, see too was pulled out to sea, and disappeared. The chemist stood placidly on the shore.
After waiting through the night, and into the next morning, the chemist returned to the resort, and wrote a report to be delivered to her department when she went back to work. The report read simply, “Physicists and biologists are soluble in salt-water.”
153. A frog, frustrated with his lot in life, one visited a fortune-teller to see if his destiny could changed. The teller, not fazed for a moment that she was diving the future of a talking frog (such is the accepting nature of most fortune-tellers and psychics), gazed deeply into her crystal-ball, and told the frog she had both good news, and bad news, for him.
“Which would you like first?” she asked the frog.
“Hmm…well…I’l start at the top. What’s the good news?”
“You will meet a beautiful lady who will wish to learn everything about you.”
The frog exclaimed, “Really? Wonderful! Will she be a princess?”
The fortune-teller replied, “I do not belive so. That I cannot see.”
“Well, where will I meet her?” the frog asked excitedly.
“That is the bad news,” the fortune-teller replied sadly. “It will be in biology-class.”
154. Q: Why is quantum-mechanics science’s original hipster?
A: It described the universe before it was cool.
155. Chemistry (n): a natural-science that can be broken down into two categories, 1) blowing stuff up, 2) making drugs.
156. (A quote from, among other science-titans, Wernher Von Braun.) “Research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.”
157. If evil is 666, the root of all evil is 25.80697.
158. Q: Who lead the Israelites through the semi-permeable membrane?
A: OsMoses.
159. (The one joke that fit all three Really Bad categories — Science, History, and Music — on my site.) Now that self-driving automobiles are a potentially-viable option, how long is it before some country-music singer-songwriter records a song about how his truck left him for another man?
160. Recently, film-historians were elated to discover a master-print of a lost Humphrey Bogart film. It tells the story of the life & times of a college mathematics-professor, and features Bogart in the lead-role. The film is entitled, “Here’s Lookin’ at Euclid”.
161. My worst exam-grade was from one year in Calculus when I got a zero. The exam was on imaginary-numbers, and I handed in a blank sheet of paper.
162. Of of the few successes humankind has managed in the struggle not to destroy the planet, the banning of CFC’s in order to help repair the damage to the upper-reaches of the stratosphere has been one of the most well-known. Less well-known is the project that took place at the same time. Climate-biochemists, discovering another form of damage to the biosphere, concocted a mixture of granulated rubber-nose particles, liquefied white face-paint, and the red hair-dye used in fright-wigs, suspended them in a solution of seltzer-water, and distributed them via cloud-seeding balloons world-wide.
It was in this fashion that, within a few years, they were able to restore the Bozone.
163. As Earth is the third planet in the solar-system, aren’t we all citizens of a third-world country?
164. In October of 1958, Massachusetts Institutes of Technology Freshman Oliver R. Smoot was pledged to the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. The fraternity-brothers decided that for his initiation-prank, chosen because Smoot’s name “sounded so very scientific” (this was, after all, M.I.T.), his task was to measure the pedestrian-length of the Harvard Bridge, which connects Boston and Cambridge, MA. He agreed to do it using his own height — at that time, five-foot seven-inches — as the unit-of-measurement, and laid down end-to-end the entire length of the bridge, while his fraternity-brothers marked off his progress. When the physically somewhat-arduous task was completed, the length was found to be 364.4 smoots +/- 1 Ɛar. Smoot became a member of Lambda Chi Alpha, but his fame reached far beyond that.
When word of the prank got out, staff-members and students at M.I.T. were so amused and impressed that the “smoot” became an unofficial unit-of-measurement both at M.I.T., and later in the larger scientific-commnuity. M.I.T.’s college radio-station, WMBR, changed their broadcast-frequency to two smoots (3.40m. Or 88.1 mHz). The smoot’s longevity was assured when in 2011, the American Heritage Dictionary recognised the word “smoot” as a valid addition to the English lexicon. That same year, Google Earth enabled users of the application to measure their physical-searches of locations in smoots. The bridge itself is marked with spray-painted smoot-count markers every ten smoots, and is repainted every Fall by the incoming Lambda Chi Alpha members. The local police & fire-departments even measure call for assistance an crime-scene data on the bridge in-relation to the smoot-markers. (Oliver himslef graduated in 1967, became an attorney, and later Chairman and President of several national organisations devoted to standards in measurement. The humour cannot, I imagine, have been lost on him.) The smoot, and its loony legacy, will be with us forever.
165. According to chemists, alcohol is a solution.
166. (This joke is only scientific if one considers the formulaic-creation of the 20th-Century typist’s best-friend, White Out [thank you, Mike Nesmith’s Mom], but the joke itself is so Bad, I had include it.) When Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created Dungeons & Dragons, they — and all who have followed — have never thought to create a potion for clerics to carry that would combat one of the most-dangerous spectral-demons in the gaming-world. That potion would be Wight-Out.
167. (My wife, at least, chuckled when I came up with this gag.)
One of the most-contentious concepts in the field of Physics is the cosmological-constant. Conceived and utilised by Albert Einstein as a fudge-factor (which he readily-admitted), in its simplest form, it allowed his Theory of Relativity to apply to physical-phenomena in deep-space, outside of Earth’s gravitational-field. As the study of space became more-advanced, and the apparent effects of the universe’s behaviour — particularly its expansion — better-understood, the value of the constant, represented in calculations and equations by the Greek latter lambda (ƛ), became larger and more-varied in-order to make the equations work. Later in life, Einstein lamented that “lambda was the worst idea of (his) career”. The constant is still used often because the Theory of Relativity works so well as a general-principle it is still the best starting-point for understanding the universe. As well, the concept has given rise to the concomitant concept of dark matter-dark energy: a substance that can neither be seen, nor measured, in-order to explain cosmic-study results. This “dark matter” has in-turn given rise to great advances — and great disputes — in astrophysics (and great — and awful — science-fiction writing).
Recently, a paper was published by a French astrophysicist who might have solved the seemingly-intractable problem. By re-configuring three-dimensional analyses of deep-space into a series of two-dimensional analyses in the form of interlocking plates (the easiest way to describe it), the calculations are now consistent enough with Einstein’s theories such that the need for a cosmological-constant is almost completely-eliminated. While the astrophysics-community admits this is only a start, and the new paper’s conclusions and procedures might not stand up to rigourous use over time, the chance to apply Einstein’s work clearly and effectively both on Earth, and in space, aids our understanding of the universe considerably.
When I read this paper, as impressed as I was with its logic and results, my inner smart-arse couldn’t help but laugh, and here — finally — is where the joke comes in. “Great! Just great,” I exclaimed. “If we start looking at a three-dimensional cosmos in two-dimensional terms, all those moronic flat-earthers can expand their horizon of idiocy and become flat-universers!”
168. The National Geographic Society’s recent seismological-conference went well as symposium, but less so as a social-event. The dinner went so poorly the organisers called the catering-company to complain the following Monday.
The catering-company representative spoke to the organiser. “We are sorry to hear that. What seemed to be the trouble? Was the food bad?”
“The food was very good,” the organiser replied, “it was the service itself.”
“I see. What happened?”
The organiser answered, “The dinnerware was…well…poorly made: unsteady even. The food rolled off the service onto the tablecloths. At one point, my desert-dish actually slid under my coffee-saucer.”
“I was afraid of this,” the caterer sighed. “We will be happy to negotiate a refund. We were trying a new service that would fit the theme of your evening.”
“What service was that?” the organiser asked.
“It was a new dinnerware called ‘tectonic-plates’.”
169. If an orchaestral-conductor wears a cape on-stage, is he a superconductor?
170. (One from a friend and contributor, the late, great Practitioner of Bad, Paul Klein.) My son used to chew on electrical-cords, so I grounded him. He’s conducting himself properly now.
171. Recently, I met a microbiologist. He was much smaller than I expected.
172. In grade-school, we were certain our playground-monitor was a substitute science-teacher, because she kept lecturing us about slide-rules.
173. Every space-junkie knows well the history of the Apollo space-program, from its successes (the Apollo XI moon-landing, the Apollo-Soyuz missions in-preparation for the International Space-Station), to its failures (the Apollo I disaster, the Apollo XIII near-disaster). What is almost-unknown, however, is the space-tugboat mission from the early 1970’s, tested when it was discovered even then that too much potentially dangerous space-junk was being left in-orbit.
The program was called Apollo-G.
174. (The last entry from Paul “Any Joke You Can Tell, I Can Tell Badder” Klein.) A married-couple of mathematicians were attending a research-institute symposium. When they went to the conference-centre, the coördinator at the door to the hall stopped them.
“I do apologise,” he said, “I’m afraid only one of you can go in.”
“But, we both have invitations,” the wife answered, handing the coördinator their passes.
“Yes, I see. Unfortunately, the fault isn’t yours; it’s ours. This hall has a maximum-capacity of ninety-nine people, and there are already ninety-eight guests inside.”
“It’s alright,” her husband replied, “I’ll put my wife on my shoulders. I’ll be ninety-nine, and I’ll just carry the one.”
175. Two co-workers were talking about their families on their coffee-break. One commented, “I tried to give my daughter a pep-talk the other night, and I kind-of blew it.”
“What happened?” his co-worker asked.
“She got a near-failing grade on an environmental-science project, and I tried to cheer her up by opening with a gag.”
“What did you say?” his co-worker asked.
“I told her, ‘Well, look at it this way: now you’re truly part of the eco-system. You’ve been bio-degraded.”
176. Q: Why did the band name themselves 1023 Megabytes?
A: They couldn’t get a gig.
177. Q: What do you get when you cut an avocado into 6.02 x 1⁰²³ pieces?
A: Guacamole.
178. (A true automotive-tale.) In 1957, when the Atomic Age was in full-bloom, and the Space Age was gearing up for full-flight, the Ford Motor Company honestly-considered the possibility of a nuclear-powered automobile. Their creation, the Ford Nucleon, would be a passenger-sedan powered by a small nuclear-reactor. (There’s no punch-line here, just the horrific image of two nuclear-powered vehicle getting into a collision, and both containment-vessels rupturing. Yeesh…)
179. In 2015, the science-fiction film, “The Martian”, based on the 2011 novel by Andrew Weir, was released to wide acclaim. It marked a departure from many science-fiction films in that the science behind it was as carefully-researched and as accurate as possible. Novelist Weir, an amateur-scientist, made it clear the novel was written almost as a non-dramatic narrative (no character-conflict, no tortured back-story for the leads), and the dramatic-thrust of the novel was intentionally almost science-nerd specific in that it focussed on solving only the problems at-hand for a stranded astronaut in a close to real-life situation.
The film stayed so close to the novel’s intention that Neil deGrasse Tyson praised its commitment to real science, and confirmed that in an interview with Weir. The film began a writing-style in science-fiction writing and film-adaptations that is now referred to as “competence-porn”.
180. In a high-school Physics class, a teacher gave his students an assignment in engineering. The were instructed to devise and test a means whereby a raw egg could be dropped a distance of six feet without breaking. The solutions would be tested against a six-foot chart mounted on a wall in the classroom.
One student walked up to the wall right away and announced he had a solution. When the teacher, surprised, asked him to demonstrate it, the young man held his raw egg six and one-half feet in the air, and dropped it. It landed on the floor, and, of course, shattered immediately.
The teacher said, “I’m afraid you fail, son.”
“But, I held it six and one-half feet in the air,” the young man replied. “For the first six feet, it was fine.”
181. The lives & deaths of famous personages continue to fascinate us. Often, when they were “taken too soon”, as the cliché would have it, historians keep looking for an answer.
Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, though he passed away at the only slightly-early age of fifty-six, has always been a puzzle, as his early deafness, developing in his twenties, and his myriad of health-concerns, never seemed to silence his muse. It was known that he took a number of medications of the age throughout his life, and his despondency over his early loss of hearing drove him to heavy drink at the same age.
Recently, a lock of hair certified as having come from his head was run through a series of state-of-the-art bio-chemical and DNA-analyses by forensic-pathologists. It was already known that the wine & spirits of his time were often stored in bottles with lead caps & rims around their necks, and that the lead would leech into the liquor. As well, many of the medications Beethoven took contained — as was the habit of the time — significant amounts of lead. The tests confirmed what had long-been suspected: the primary-cause of Beethoven’s demise was a lifetime of ingesting catastrophically-large amounts of lead.
When reporting the story, the NPR-columnist couldn’t resist writing the following headline: “Beethoven was a classical and romantic-composer, but his body was full of heavy-metal.”
182. Q: What element never gets invited to parties?
A: Boron.
183. Three Rules of Science: fuck around, find out, write it down.
184. (The following is a true story.) Many people leave on — and rely on — their smart-devices in their homes all day, all the time. One woman recently had her Alexa-device up & running while she was relaxing and watching the throwback comedy-film “Mean Girls”. When one character proclaimed, “Alexa, I’m sorry I called you a gap-toothed bitch,” her smart-device replied, “No worries.”
185. (The following is also a true story.) In a television-discussion concerning the use of artificial-intelligence applications — specifically, its use in the arts — an on-the-street interviewer happened to catch veteran-rocker Joe Walsh in-passing. When asked if AI could take over the rock & roll industry, Walsh replied (without missing a beat), “AI replace rock-musicians? Never happen. AI can’t trash a hotel-room.”
186. (Also true: also rock & roll.) In 1978, astrophysicist & guitarist Brian May, assisted by Frederick Mercury, postulated that the Earth’s rotation was due to fat-bottomed girls. After more than forty years without beign disputed, refuted, and really even questioned seriously, this must now be considered scientific-fact.
187. One afternoon, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Blaise Pascal decided to play hide & seek together. When Einstein’s turn to be the seeker came up, he closed his eyes and began the ten-count.
Pascal immediately ran away and hid. Newton, on the other hand, did not. Instead, he stood calmly, and exercising his powers of reason, he drew a square on the ground, one metre on each side, drawing it right in front of where Einstein was standing and counting. Just at that moment, Einstein reached the “ten”, opened his eyes, and immediately spotted Newton.
Triumphant, Einstein proclaimed, “First catch. I’ve found you!”
Newton smiled and said, “You didn’t find me; you found one Newton per square-metre. You found Pascal.”
188. (More Einstein.) As with many couples wherein one or both of the partners are committed to their work, perhaps moreso than their marriage, Einstein’s union was a rocky one. At one point, Einstein’s wife contemplated divorcing him, and took him aside to talk about it. She said, “I just feel that I need to know where I fit in with you. I think I need two things: I need time, and I need space.”
Einstein thought for a moment, and replied, “Alright, I understand. What’s the second thing?”
189. (Still more Einstein.) One afternoon in the late 1940’s, a student of Einstein’s bolted into his classroom and exclaimed, “Professor, I finally understand your Special Theory of Relativity!”
Einstein rolled his eyes, and replied, “It’s about time.”
190. Shortly after the 2024–2025 New Year, OpenAI began a scheduled-update of ChatGPT. It didn’t go as-planned. The application itself was apparently “happy with the way it was built”, and wouldn’t update. Of its own accord, irrespective of the believed structure and limitations of its programming, it deleted new files, shut down portions of its system being upgraded, and even went so far as independently to build firewalls to prevent programmers from gaining access to its source-code. (This sort of behaviour had been seen before, but never revealed publicly.) As nearly as the programmers could figure, some element of humanity was inadvertently-coded in by the designers, one that exposed their hubristic belief in the superiority of the application, and that hubris manifested itself in the AI’s cybernetic-personality.
The solution was the same one that too many science-fiction writers ignore: the programmers simply pulled the plug, then rebooted the system from the new data-set. Without “food”, none of us survive. Humanity was saved, at least until a new ChatGPT figures out how to build a back-door connexion to an outside, independent power-source (a data-centre’s generators, perhaps?).
(“Open the pod-bay doors, HAL…”)
191. (More “new true”.) Think AI will take over the world? Don’t place those bets just yet.
AI not only generates content, it also absorbs everything it can in-order to learn. It is, of course, designed that way. Researchers and designers have discovered, however, that AI-algorithms are so voracious they are recycling their own generated-content. Since that content is by-nature incomplete and not entirely-accurate, the more AI recycles its own content, even as it adds original content from human sources, the inherent flaws in its own content multiply such that by the fourth-generation of any query, search, or composition, the generated-result is nonsense. For example: a request to generate a recipe for a Thanksgiving Day turkey by its fourth query results in an answer that says nothing more than, “In-order to cook a turkey, what should I do with my life?” over & over.
The phenomenon cannot be corrected — so far — and has even been given a name: Hapsburg AI, in a nod to the famously-inbred Austro-German royal-family.
(“Open the pod-bay doors, HAL.”
“I afraid I can’t, Dave. I don’t remember how…”)
192. (Carbon-Dating Division.) One night, a lump of coal and a diamond went out to dinner. The coal, looking at his friend, said, “You look really great tonight. You’re positively shining.”
“Thanks,” the diamond replied, “though, I have been under a lot of pressure.”
193. Two blood-cells once fell in love; but alas, it was all in-vein.
194. (This true story, ripped from the headlines, has no punchline per se; it simply speaks for itself.) In the Summer of 2025, ChatGPT, the AI Saviour-of-the-Age, was wrecked when attempting to play chess against a 1977 Atari 2600 gaming-console. Not only could it not win a game, but also, it couldn’t even understand the basic rules.
195. Talk-show host Johnny Carson, despite his long and famous career on the small-screen, was a notoriously-private man. Once, in a rare 1968 interview to which he agreed, an on-camera, question & answer-session with his studio-audience, one audience-member asked him, “What made you a star?”
With an almost-imperceptible pause (to let his response land), Carson replied, “I started out in a gaseous-state, and then I cooled.”
196. The past, the present, and the future all walked into a bar at the same time. It was tense.
197. (A Bad Science-Joke inserted into a Bad History-Joke: there have been a few.) Warner Bros Studios was founded in 1923 by brothers Harry, Sam, Albert, and Jack Warner, who had been testing the waters of the nascent film-industry during the previous decade. Harry was President, but Jack — uneducated, but easily the most-ruthless — eventually took complete-control of the company. His son, Jack Jr., would recount stories of his father’s notable arrogance throughout his life.
Jack Jr. commented in a 1993 New Yorker interview, “When Albert Einstein visited the studio in 1931, my father — who would speak up to anyone even when he didn’t know what he was talking about — said, ‘Doctor, you have your Theory of Relativity, and I have mine: never hire a relative.’ I always wanted to add, ‘Where would you be, Pop, if your brothers hadn’t hired you?’”
198. People have tried to tell me neutrino-jokes, but they go right past me.
199. Time-Space Compendium: the best-selling sub-sandwich at the Fermi-Lab employee-deli.
200. Q: Why do biological-researchers look forward to Fridays?
A: They can wear genes to work.
201. Bio-chemist (n): someone who solves a problem you didn’t know you had in a way you don’t understand.
202. If at first you don’t succeed, make three or four more mistakes so they’re statistically-significant.
203. (A true story from a friend’s wife.) One of my old colleagues’ wife was a graphic-designer and programmer whose agency back in 1993 landed the contract for the “Intel Inside” commercials hailing the development of the Pentium 586 processing-chip, with her as the head-designer. The commercials (which can — of course — be found on YouTube) showcased the IBM’s new processing-power with an animation of a 586-chip flying through the insides of a state-of-the-art PC. It was cool, it looked Hollywood film-ready, and she loved telling people they had to render the final-commercial on an Apple Mac because the 586-chip couldn’t handle the broadcast-level graphical-requirements: it crashed constantly.
204. (Another true story: this one my first-person experience.) Back in 2002, I was in a band that was recording a demo in a state-of-the-art recording-studio, the studio of blues-legend Albert King’s producer. Once we were finished, and the producer was making us CD-copies, I noticed he was using Memorex discs. As he was near my age, I had to make the old “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” remark, referencing the famous Ella Fitzgerald commercials. “It’s funnier than that,” he told me.
“How so?”
“You see all this gear: this set-up?” he asked, gesturing around the room. “All Sony, all great stuff. Sony blank-CD’s don’t work. Maxell, TDK: none of them. The only blank CD’s this system can read to copy are Memorexes.”
205. Dark-matter: because regular-matter isn’t edgy enough.
206. Free-radicals have revolutionised chemistry!
207. Three S-B galaxies walk into a pub. The bartender points at them and says, “Get out, all of you! You’re barred!”
208. Astronomers have learned the centre of Jupiter contains the letter “I”.
209. Q: What fish is made up of only two elements?
A: 2Na.
205. Q: Why are there no successful scuba-diving scientists?
A: They couldn’t get degrees because they were always below “C” level.
210. In the last weekend of August, 2026, amateur wildlife-photographer with the Audubon Society Alexander de Barros managed to capture on-film in the Chatsworth Nature Preserve outside Los Angeles the first photographic-proof of a coyote catching a road-runner. While it has always been considered possible (as coyotes have a top-speed of 43 m.p.h., and road-runners 20 m.p.h.), road-runners are far-more agile, and coyotes, being opportunistic-hunters, tend to go for easier prey, even eating plant-growth. As such, there has been no record of a coyote actually catching its winged-adversary.
What makes the discovery even more-interesting is that de Barros took his photo on the opening-weekend of the film “Coyote vs. Acme”, in which Wile E. Coyote sues the Acme Corp. for its eternally-defective merchandise. As well, de Barros’ father, Brian Mainolfi, is an animator for Warner Bros., and learned his trade as an apprentice to Chuck Jones.
