I was educated on the other version:” The man has lost a quarter and he’s looking under a lamp post. One would like to help him. “Where you lost it?” Over there, about 20m from here.” If so, why you are looking here?” “Because no light there!” (“Physicists jokes”).

Regards, Dany.

Compare:

S. Weinberg concluding comment (“Einstein and the Physics of the Future” (“Some Strangeness in the Proportions”, 506, Addison-Wesley (1980)):”I think the theoretical physicist is like the drunk in the story who has lost a quarter. He has no idea of where he lost it, but he’s looking under a lamp post because that is where the light is good. However, I always sympathize with the drunk. Because it is true. He doesn’t really know where he lost the quarter, but if he looks for it anywhere else but where the light is good, he is sure not going to find it.”

vs

“Пусть где-нибудь все ясно и светло -
Там хорошо, - но мне туда не надо!”
(Let anywhere everything is clear and brightly -
It is good there- but I do not need to be there!)

Who sounds like to talk like a physicist?

Regards, Dany.

Dawkins is so full of horse pucky. He can’t present science in any meaning way to the public without going on some foolish anti-religious rant. He routinely squares off against ignorant, lightweight straw men and “wins” his arguments by a series of ad hominum attacks. Dawkins waffling is enough to impress Joe six pack or auntie , not an informed layman or auntie. Dawkins isn’t winning anyone over to the scientific view of the world. It isn’t hard for a career scientist to derail an opponent or even an informed member of the “opposition”. Dawkin’s is like a grammar school teacher winning a debate against his hapless sixth grader students. It isn’t even an intellectual exercise, it’s just snobbery. God is simply NOT a scientific question. God is a religious question. Is Dawkins even a scientist? Whatever the answer to that question may be he certain passes himself off as more of a writer, anti-theologian, and provocateur of the inexperienced and uninformed. Based on the above link, you can add copycat. I’ve wasted enough time bashing Dawkins, it’s time for me to go out and berate my fellow man for his misguided belief in Newton’s laws and his total ignorance of Hamilton’s principle and action angle variables. Well at least I stick to science…

Wayne

Am I correct in observing that the particle plushies will fall to pieces without the existence of strings?

A true scientist might also realize that there is a possible, though perhaps highly improbable, chance that the observations he had made that led him to conclude that the pendulum would not hit him in the face were in error and/or incomplete.

All that remains then is to force the selection of that state from all possible states and voila! Pendulum in the face. (Not that I’d wish that on Dawkins.) It’s not about a force that moves the pendulum; it’s about what reinforces or destabilizes the preceding observations that lead to the expectation that the pendulum will not hit him in the face.

(Was that a little too ‘woo woo’ for physicist talk? It’s so hard to know…)

In doing this, I torqued like a fizzy cyst ;.)

making it short we can easily say, “talk like a physicists”. Physicists are insisting to talk like one of them.