While science is a serious business, it is not immune to practical jokes. Everyone thinks of science as some sort of "no-fun" industry, but this couldn't be farther from the truth. In honour of April Fools Day and to demonstrate what I'm talking about, let's take a look at some of the most memorable pranks by scientists in history.
4. Richard Feynman Being A Troll During the Manhattan Project
In case you weren't listening during grade 10 history, I'll remind you that this was the project that was going on in Los Alamos, New Mexico during World War II where the goal was to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis did. This was obviously very serious business…
Well, serious business to everyone except Richard Feynman, one of the most genius, yet eccentric physicists of all time. While in Los Alamos, the scientists working on the project were barely allowed communication from the outside world. As a result, the young Mr. Feynman got bored and decided to troll the entire place.
He did this by sneaking into people's rooms and cracking their safes and "stealing" their documents. He wouldn't tell anyone, so you can imagine the shock of the physicist who would come back from a lunch break and find that his important documents had been stolen. Remember, they were in the middle of a freaking war here. There were spies everywhere so it caused a lot of paranoia. People eventually figured out if was Feynman and got so irritated with him that everyone had to change their codes and revamp security!
Feynman claims that he just wanted to show everyone that more security was needed in Los Alamos. Sure, Feynman. We definitely believe you…
3. Beware the Flying Penguins!
Quick science lesson: Penguins can't fly. Don't tell this to the BBC though. In 2008 on April Fool's Day, the BBC, in collaboration with some scientists that were helping make a film called Miracles of Evolution, made a joke video about flying penguins. In the video, a guy watches as hundreds of penguins rise into the sky and migrate South for he winter. You should probably see it for yourself…
2. A Fake Math Paper Actually Gets Published
In science and math, when something gets published, it is like an unofficial stamp that says the research has been approved by other scientists. So imagine everyone's surprise when a "joke" paper by professor Marcie Rathke actually got published! Here's the story: Professor Rathke developed a computer program that would take a bunch of mathematical terms, symbols and phrases and bring them together to make a completely random paper. She made one that sounded ridiculous enough and decided to send it for peer review before publishing. Here's the title of her paper:
“Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE”
If that makes zero sense to you, don't worry - it's complete gibberish! To add to her confusing title, here is the intro to her paper:
Let ρ=A . Is it possible to extend isomorphisms? We show that D′ is stochastically orthogonal and trivially affine. In [10], the main result was the construction of 𝔭 -Cardano, compactly Erdős, Weyl functions. This could shed important light on a conjecture of Conway-d’Alembert.
Once again - complete nonsense. How this paper managed to get published, I have no idea. If one thing's for certain though, it's that Marcie Rathke is a pretty good troll.
Source: http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102
1. Caltech Students Win McDonalds Contest…In An Interesting Way
In 1975, McDonalds held a raffle where all you had to do was fill out an entry form and hand it in to a local McDonalds. If your form was the lucky one, you could win a year's worth of grocery plus other McDonald's merchandise! In fact, you could even enter yourself as many times as you wanted!
The "enter as many times as you want" clause didn't seem to be much of a problem since pretty much everything was done by hand back then, so it's not like somebody is going to somehow fill out a million forms and hand them in, right?
Well, that's exactly what a savvy pair of Caltech students did. 1975 was before the dawn of personal computers, but the clever students were able to write a program that filled out and printed forms for them. They had the program running non-stop and were able to hand in over 1 million entries by the contest deadline! Obviously they won and obviously, McDonalds was pretty pissed off!
Because of these two guys, McDonalds now includes fine print in each of their contests that states "Limit is one per person". I'm sorry, but when two college kids can make a multibillion dollar corporation angry enough to make new rules, they deserve a round of applause.
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