I tend not to tell the jokes I make up.
Apparently Dr Brian Cox is recording a new series of his excellent "Wonders of the Universe" thing. I like his stuff. He is obviously enthusiastic about stars and planets. And the moon.
The problem for Brian is that he has to explain all this stuff to us, simple lay people. It must infuriate him with his big brain, trying to get through our thick skulls about the composition of the gas giants, the atmosphere of Titan and why we can't shoot our rubbish into the sun (still not satisfactorily answered in my opinion). Meanwhile we sit with a slightly vacant stare, giggling everytime he mentions the rings of Uranus.
What Brian really wants to do is show us the really clever stuff, like the special relativistic redshift formula or the Polyakov action of super strings. But he can't because we're too stupid, (Christ, we can't even understand simplified M-theory).
So Brian has to resort to making comparisons. "If you imagine this tennis ball was the planet Mars", he will say, "Then the furrows of Andy Murray's brow represent the Martian Canals". This helps us to visualise the complex things he knows, and the physicist will use them a lot.
Unfortunately for Brian, this way of describing phenomena has resulted in him having to delay the recording of the second series.
During a particularly complex explanation of the Horsehead nebulae, Brian is painting a picture through the medium of speech. He begins to compare the interstellar cloud to a 250g packet of pistachios.
Suddenly he starts choking, and grabs his throat. He falls to his knees and is quickly rushed off to Arizona State Hospital.
Turns out he has a particularly bad nut analogy.
Ahem.
Like I said, I don't tend to tell jokes.
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