David Morin

Who needs the balance and check?
Screw peer review --- what the heck!
Send all of your crap
To the internet --- zap!
Who cares if it's nothing but dreck!

There once was a student with flash,
Who set out to make a big splash.
But the profs who were rising
Had no time for advising,
So she's back on the streets, selling hash.

There once was a scathing review,
Which blasted the work through and through.
It said that what's true
Is clearly not new,
And what's new is most surely not true.
(these last three lines come from a well-known quote)

On a merry-go-round in the night,
Coriolis was shaken with fright.
Despite how he walked,
'Twas like he was stalked,
By some fiend always pushing him right.

Ernst Mach found himself in Nantucket,
Where water he spun in a bucket.
He said with a grin,
As he wiped off his chin,
"My, how those distant stars suck it!"

Light passed a black hole from Nantucket,
Where his pull was so great he would suck it.
He said with a grin,
As he pulled the light in,
"With Hawking radiation, I'll chuck it!"

There was a black hole from Nantucket,
Whose trick was to grab light and suck it.
He sucked so much in,
I scratched at my chin,
Wond'ring where in this stunt he could tuck it.

A grad student's search for advisors
Turned up a boatload of misers.
There was barely a nickel,
Cash flowed in a trickle,
And not, as expected, in geysers.

"Extremize f," said the text.
I at once $\partial f/\partial x$'ed.
I zeroed that, sighed,
$\partial f/\partial y$'ed,
But solving these two had me vexed.

The change in the two cars' momentum
Was that which a third car had lent them.
Total P was conserved,
Until, braking, they swerved,
And total K.E., till it bent them.

When God said, "Let the Higgs be!"
He gave it but slight energy.
He said, "You grow thinner,
You must have some dinner."
So it ate up some W and Z.

On a tropical beach walked Niels Bohr,
Transfixed by the waves flowing pure.
Then he looked at the sand,
And thought it quite grand How those waves met the grains at the shore.

A young child looked up in the sky,
And said, "It's so blue, Mom, but why?"
You see, blue scatters more
(There's this power of 4),
So it rarely comes straight to your eye.

John never comes home to the house.
He's working too hard! cried his spouse.
He toils all night,
'Neath the terminal's light,
With only one hand on the mouse.

There once was an academician,
Whose papers should've earned the position,
But were too-fewly numbered,
So untenured he lumbered,
'Till he fell to the ranks of attrition.

What would you have said, Galileo,
If instead you dropped cows and did say, "Oh!
To lessen the sound
Of the moos from the ground,
They should fall not through air but through mayo!"

The experiment of Michelson and Morley
Allows us to say, very surely,
"If this ether is real,
It has no appeal,
And shows itself off rather poorly."

One day, legend says, Isaac Newton
Came a-runnin', a-hollerin', and a-hootin'.
He was a-rubbin' his head,
And a-wishin' instead
Of an apple, he'd picked a rambuten.

The cosmos according to Hubble
Expands like the soap of a bubble.
Let's hope it's not closed,
It would then be disposed
To shrink down to zero, and that's trouble.

One morning while eating my Wheaties,
I felt the earth move 'neath my feeties.
The cause for alarm
Was a long lever-arm,
At the end of which stood Archimedes.

Relativistic limericks have the attraction
Of being shrunk by a Lorentz contraction.
But for readers, unwary,
The results may be scary,
When they see just a fraction . . .

The power of M's and C-squares
Provides us with just cause for scares.
Our childhood fright
Of a bump in the night
Is now mushrooms from nightmarish prayers.

There once was a tunnel in Texas.
To physics, it turned out a nexus.
Congress said, "Nay!
For this we won't pay
It won't help in building a Lexus."

There once was a method, RG.
That gets rid of the infinity.
Some say that the bug
Is hid by a rug,
But maybe that's how it should be.

Your units are wrong! cried the teacher.
Your church weighs six joules --- what a feature!
The people inside
Are four hours wide,
And eight Gauss away from the preacher!

They're vacuuming dirt from Topeka
With a bad-ass, humongous Eureka.
The silt is then fed
To the East River bed,
"But you'll flood," Archi said, "Nuyorica!"
(note: we thought Nuyorica was a place in NYC, but now
we're not so sure.)

Larry Lobster crawls deep in the sea,
Where the pressure and depth guarantee
That all the frustrations
Of mighty crustaceans
Won't help when they have to go pee.

An electron is sure hard to please.
When spread out, it sometimes will freeze.
Though agoraphobic,
It's still claustrophobic,
And runs off when put in a squeeze.

Copernicus gave his reply
To those who had pledged to deny.
"All your addictions
To ancient convictions
Won't bring back your place in the sky."

As we grow up, we open an ear,
Exploring the cosmic frontier.
In this coming of age,
We turn in our cage,
All alone on a tiny blue sphere.

The referee caused him much strife.
She sounded so much like his wife.
"Accept my derisions
On all your revisions,
And get the hell out of my life!"

"To three, five, and seven, assign
A name," the prof said, "we'll define."
But he botched the instruction
With lame-ass induction,
And told us the next prime was nine.

Newton said as he gazed off afar,
"From here to the most distant star,
The wond'rous ellipses
And solar eclipses
All come from a 1 over r."

The skill to do math on a page
Has declined to the point of outrage.
Equations quadratica
Are solved on mathematica,
And on birthdays we don't know our age.