The Physicist And The Fat Chicken…

(We are students in our research labs; one of the staff researchers is an old physicist.)

Student #1: “[Old Physicist] always ignores real world considerations and oversimplifies situations.”

Student #2: “This chicken sandwich would be a spherical chicken, in a frictionless vacuum.”

Student #1: “Really, I don’t think he would be that bad.”

Student #2: “I bet you a million bucks he would.”

(They draw out a spherical chicken on the whiteboard and we have a laugh about it. It stays for the next year, almost forgotten, when Student #3 is talking to the physicist about a project. I walk in to hear this:)

Student #3: “So thinking about what would happen to a chicken…”

Old Physicist: *interrupts* “Well, we can model this. First let’s consider the chicken to be roughly a sphere…”

Me: *to [Student #1]* “You owe [Student #2] a million bucks.”

Student #1: “He really did it. D***, I don’t wanna tell [Student #2] he was right, but this is unbelievable!”