A photographer with a physics problem.

[mattbell]

The pictures are decently interesting, but the pseudo-science captions are hilarious.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13235562@N04/page3/

steuard  notes: Those captions aren't really what I'd call pseudoscience, but rather (apparently) actual titles of papers from the high energy theory preprint arXiv with a few words changed. (The phrases were close enough to "right" that I knew there had to be actual theoretical physicists involved somewhere. I wonder whether the photographer is one of them.)

Comments

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Those captions aren't really what I'd call pseudoscience, but rather (apparently) actual titles of papers from the high energy theory preprint arXiv with a few words changed. (The phrases were close enough to "right" that I knew there had to be actual theoretical physicists involved somewhere. I wonder whether the photographer is one of them.)

I'm quite entertained: it's a neat way of melding art and science, even if the actual science content is almost nil.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Awesome sleuthing.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Well, there wasn't that much sleuthing required: one of the first things I do every day is to read all the titles and skim most of the abstracts of papers posted to that particular archive. :)

In fact, in the handful of cases I've looked at each title comes from a paper that appeared on arXiv.org (in the hep-th section) within a day or two of the photo being posted. (It's even possible that each showed up in the list on the very day the corresponding picture was posted; it's a little hard to tell.)

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

High energy theorists are known for their cleverness and absurdity in choosing titles for papers. It's almost become a competition to see who can make the silliest pun or the most ridiculous title out of a serious paper :)