Why did the chicken cross the road?

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Why did the chicken cross the road?

Here are some answers, from some well-known physicists, to the age-old question:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Albert Einstein: The chicken did not cross the road. The road passed beneath the chicken.

Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross roads.

Wolfgang Pauli: There was already a chicken on this side of the road.

Carl Sagan: There are billions and billions of such chickens, crossing roads just like this one, all across the universe.

Albert Michelson and Edward Morley: Our experiment was a failure. We could not detect the road.

Ludwig Boltzmann: If you have enough chickens, it is a near certainty that one of them will cross the road.

David Hilbert: I was standing on the side of the road and a chicken came along, evidently in some kind of strange state. I informed it that it was nevertheless still in my space, so it went across the road.

Blaise Pascal: The chicken felt pressure on this side of the road. However, when it arrived on the other side it still felt the same pressure.

Enrico Fermi: In estimating to the nearest power of 10 the number of chickens that cross the road, note that since fractional chickens are not allowed, the desired power must be at least zero. Therefore, at least one chicken crosses the road.

Charles Coulomb: The chicken found a similar chicken on this side of the road to be repellent.

John Bell: Since there are no local hidden chickens, any hidden chickens you find must have come from far away. They therefore surely must have crossed at least one road on their way here.

Henry Cavendish: My dear chicken, I have calculated with the utmost detail and precision the density of your insides. Now, for the sake of my precious sanity, I beg you, stop that incessant clucking and be gone!

Arthur Compton: There were a bunch of chickens waving at me on this side of the road, but then a car came along and they all scattered to the other side. The funny thing is that the ones that ended farthest away were still waving at me a few minutes later. So apparently, the ones that scattered the most had the longest waves.

Howard Georgi: It can cross all it wants, but I’m going to sit here and wait until it decays.

Edward Teller: I will build a more powerful chicken, and it will cross the road with more energy than any chicken before!

Wallace Clement Sabine: If you listen very carefully, you can hear the pitter patter of chicken feet, which implies that a chicken must be crossing the road.

Galileo Galilei: The chicken crossed the road because it put one foot in front of the other and took a sufficient number of steps to traverse a distance greater than or equal to the road’s width. Note that the reason is not because the earth is the centre of the universe. Oh, great… another jail term.

Robert Millikan: It didn't. It made it part way and then just sort of hovered there, apparently feeling an equal pull in both directions.

George Francis FitzGerald: It had its doubts, but after starting across the road, the chicken observed that the distance to the other side didn’t seem quite as large, so it figured it would continue on.

Leo Szilard: First one chicken crossed. This then caused a few more to cross, each of which in turn caused a few more…

George Atwood: The chicken wanted to introduce a setup that would enable it to pose a question and thereby torture future students over and over and over...

Johannes Kepler: I don't know. But I'm glad it did, because as it waddled across, it was kind enough to sweep the area of the road with its wings. And it did so at an astonishingly consistent rate.

Robert Hooke: At first, the chicken was drawn across the road. But after passing the middle, it felt an increasing desire to return to the original side. It did end up making it to the other side (just barely), but then decided to return. I believe it is still going back and forth on this.

Lisa Randall: The only thing about the chicken we ever discuss is why it crossed the road. There are many more dimensions to it than that! 

Gustav Kirchhoff: It actually crossed the road twice, due to a strange desire to form a closed loop.

Louis de Broglie: Interesting, it always seems to flap its wings an integral number of times before it comes back.

Michael Faraday: No, again? How many times do I have to tell it to stick to the safety of its cage?!

Hugh Everett: I don’t know, but there’s another one over there that isn’t crossing the road.

Archimedes: I was running through the streets yelling and screaming, and it was only afterward that I realized I was carrying a chicken.

Ptolemy: Someone will probably think of a simpler explanation in a few thousand years, but the present understanding is that the chicken crosses the road because it is constrained to move on this here sphere, which in turn has its centre on this one over here. The end result is that, except in the rare case of retrograde chicken motion, the chicken does indeed cross the road.

Marie Curie: Good question. And one that is much less hazardous to one’s health.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss: Draw a pillbox around the road, and consider the flux of chickens through the box. If a chicken leaves this side of the road, then assuming that there are no chicken sinks or sources, it must end up on the other side.

Osborne Reynolds: No idea. But I can see from the ruffled feathers that this was turbulent chicken flow.

Edwin Hubble: Strange, it seems to move faster the farther away it gets.

Ernest Rutherford: The differential cross section for forward chicken scattering is quite large, so the chicken will most likely cross the road if it was initially heading in that direction.

Stephen Hawking: Chicken fluctuations will inevitably create a scenario where a chicken ends up on the other side of the yellow line, in which case there is a nonzero probability that it will escape to the other side.

Robert Oppenheimer: Although it was deemed appropriate at the time, people will forever question whether it was correct for the chicken to cross the road.