Chicken crossing Road
Hawkeye
Why did the chicken cross the road? — a compilation of fictitious answers from renowned physicists by David Morin, Physics Department, Harvard University
David Morin: “After finding the first four of the following answers on the web, I figured I’d make up some more, and I got on a roll. Have fun with them. A few are a bit esoteric…”
Below is a selection of Morin’s compilation, followed by answers from renowned poets and philosophers imagined by me.
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.
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.
Erwin Schrodinger: The chicken doesn’t cross the road. Rather, it exists simultaneously on both sides ….. just don’t peek.
Charles Coulomb: The chicken found a similar chicken on this side of the road to be repellent.
Oskar Klein: Actually, it can get to the other side of the road without crossing it.
Satyendra Bose: An identical chicken already crossed the road, so this one was much more likely to do the same.
Peter Higgs: We must first find the chicken.
Pierre de Fermat: Forget about why. I’ll show you how it can get there in the least amount of time.
Neils Bohr: In attempting to answer the question by observing the chicken, I collapsed its wavefunction to the other side.
Sir William Hamilton: With regard to the issue of crossing the road, the chicken made it to the other side by taking as little action as possible.
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.
Edwin Hubble: Strange, it seems to move faster the farther away it gets.
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.
© 2008 by David Morin
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Why did the chicken cross the road?
Martin Heidegger: the very chickenness of a chicken, the essence of its being, entails an innate, existential desire to be on the proverbial “other” side of the road.
Heinrich von Kleist: a chicken, standing on one side of the road, and in the process of contemplating the idea of crossing said road, is but a mere bystander, a token in the much larger movement of poultry across nation borders.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: farewell, farewell my love; fate commands that we cannot be together as you are in the throes of another betrothal, so I must say adieu to you and the world I love; herewith I will forfeit my life by crossing this busy road at noon.
Michel Foucault: for a chicken-qua-chicken, the perversity of institutionalized one-side-of-the-roadedness can only be overcome by the one ultimate liberating act: of crossing the road.
© 2023 by Joachim Frank
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