Thursday, February 10, 2005

Women in science

The Onion, on pursuing a physics grad student:

He (English grad student) asks: Do you want the stars? I will roam the universe for all eternity, gathering up the twinkling points of light in the night sky. I will string the glittering stars into a latticework of jewelry to tuck into your hair, to adorn your neck, and to string around your pretty ankles. Say the word and I will do it.

She (physics grad student) answers: ....let's consider what would happen if you gave me the stars in the night sky. There are 8,479 objects visible to the naked eye in the night sky under ideal viewing conditions. (Of course, many of these objects are not stars at all, but galaxies so distant that we perceive their billions of separate stars as single points of light. But I won't quibble.) Were you to gather, in one place at one time, just the stars that are visible to us, the result would be an implosion that would rend the very fabric of space-time. Regardless of where I tucked them, the massive implosion caused by the ultra-high-density matter collapsing under its own weight would form a black hole larger even than the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galactic spiral.

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