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Friday, April 3, 2009

Which comes first?

At church, there were a lot little chicks crossing the parking lot. Someone asked the question which comes first, the chicken or the egg as if it were something profound. There is of course a whole class of questions like this. The usual answer from the philosophers is to say that they will funk you if you believe in the experimental results concerning Bell’s inequality. They invoke the authority of Einstein since he is no longer here except in spirit to defend his search for truth.

Here are the questions and the not so profound answers that are probably only funny and inspiring to me:
1. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Answer: God comes first when you are a born again Christian.
2. Which comes first, the LHC or the Higgs?
Answer: The Cooper Pairs in the electromagnets.
3. Which comes first, creationism or evolution?
Answer: Epigenetics
4. Which comes first, Nu (The Water Jar) or the scarab?
Answer: When Nu placed herself in the word scarab, she came to be.
5. Which number comes first?
Answer: Proofs by induction require a starting point.
6. Which comes first, meeting people or their impressions of you?
Answer: They will know you by how you love one another.
7. Which comes first, the exciton or the photon?
Answer: The Aharonov-Bohm ring with electric field tuning.
8. Which comes first, graphene or Coleman’s Theorem?
Answer: Equivalence, the father and the son.
9. Which comes first, when you break time reversal symmetry in a topological insulator?
Answer: The Majorana qubit, but only if you are tunneling (Crossed Andreev reflection).
10. Which comes first, puddles of excitons or their phases?
Answer: The inflation of vortices around particles at unstable minima.

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