Physics band names

• Ultraviolet Catastrophe (punk)
• Tip Tilt ('80s hip-hop)
• The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment (twee indie group out of Brooklyn)
• Zustandssumme (pre-reunification West German metal)
• Simple Harmonic Oscillator (barbershop quartet)
• Spaghettification (jam band)
• Strange Charm (I think they played at Lilith Fair?)

The physical state of pizza

Spoiler: It’s solid.

So determined Chester County President Judge James P. MacElree. In order to determine whether a thrown slice of pizza counted as a "solid object" under the law, His Honor undertook scientific observation of a pie:

MacElree said that to confirm his assessment, he bought a pizza and tested its physical properties. Unlike a gas, the pizza did not take up the shape or volume of the container in which it came, i.e. a cardboard box. When he sliced it into six pieces -- ''because I was not hungry enough to eat eight pieces," he said in an aside - the slices did not reform to take the shape of the container, and thus it was not a liquid.

To confirm that a slice was a solid, MacElree said he picked one up and noted that it retained its basic shape, "although it did droop a bit at the end.

"Further, I was able to bite off one piece which required some chewing before I could swallow it," he continued. "I put the remainder on top of a paper towel and observed that it stayed in place, did not spill onto my desk, and held its shape (less one bite)," he wrote. "I therefore concluded it was a solid."

I’m a bit disappointed that Judge MacElree did not rule out plasma or Bose-Einstein condensate.

On cosmetology and cosmology

Via See the Invisible Hand, the Wall Street Journal reports on the escalating licensure requirements for many jobs:

Texas, for instance, requires hair-salon “shampoo specialists” to take 150 hours of classes, 100 of them on the “theory and practice” of shampooing.

By way of comparison: I have a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Shampoo specialists spend more lecture hours learning “the theory and practice of shampooing” than I did on thermodynamics and solid state physics, combined.

I am become Debt, the destroyer of worlds

From the Manhattan Project to collateralized debt obligations, we physicists have unleashed destruction and havoc upon the earth.

However, I don’t think that “fund our experiments or we’ll go out in the world and eff things up real good” is an ethical or compelling argument.