Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Non-detection of the Tooth Fairy at Optical Wavelengths

Whoa!

First we had a "paper" on Gods as Topological Invariants. Now comes a "study" on the detecting Tooth Fairies! Is it still April 1st?

In any case, it is still a pretty funny piece. Still, where do these people find the time to do all these, and are they still on sale? :)

Zz.


2 comments:

cb said...

That article on Tooth Fairy is nice indeed but posted one day too late. For the April Fool's day 2012 I think personally the most appropriate article on arxiv staid almost unnoticed because it was too much in advance ... just like certain superluminal neutrinos !
I want to refer to http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4714: "Breaking the light speed barrier" by O. I. Chashchina, Z. K. Silagadze. May be a more flashy title could have been : " Gess who was the phantom of OPERA ? Elvis of course !"
The article seems to me not only full of humor but informative ! Let me quote the following from the text (page 23)
"... there may exist a “substrate” whose excitations do not belong to the relativistic world and, therefore, can move superluminally. It is clear that such type of superluminal particle-like excitations ..., are conceptually different from tachyons and deserve their own name. We name them “elvisebrions” ( - elvisebri in Georgian means “swift as a lightning flash”. Admirers of the Elvis Presley music will also appreciate the name, we hope)."

Douglas Natelson said...

In my group in grad school, we came very close to writing "On the lack of a superconducting transition in little plastic army men". Unsurprisingly, little plastic army men show no evidence of a superconducting resistive transition down to milliKelvin temperatures.