Posts Tagged ‘Académie Française’
“How many general-relativity theorists does it take to change a light bulb?”*…
Jokes are where one finds them…
Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Ohm are driving along the road together – Heisenberg is driving. After a time, they are stopped by a traffic cop. Heisenberg pulls over, and the cop comes up to the driver’s window.
“Sir, do you know how fast you were driving?” asks the cop.
“No” replies Heisenberg “but I know precisely where I am”
“You were doing 70.” says the cop
“Great!” says Heisenberg “Now we’re lost!”
The cop thinks this is very strange behaviour and so he decides to inspect the vehicle. After a time he comes back to the driver’s window and says
“Do you know there’s a dead cat in the trunk?”
“Well, now we do!!” yells Schrodinger.
The cop thinks this is all too weird, so he proceeds to arrest the three. Ohm resists.
source
[Image above: source]
* “How many general-relativity theorists does it take to change a light bulb? Two: one to hold the bulb and one to rotate space.” (source)
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As we chortle, we might spare a thought for Louis de Broglie (or as he was known more officially, Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie); he died on this date in 1987. An aristocrat and physicist, he made significant contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties— a concept known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality— a topic that occupied both Heisenberg and Schrodinger and that forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics. After the wave-like behavior of matter was first experimentally demonstrated in 1927, de Broglie won the Nobel Prize for Physics (in 1929).
Louis de Broglie was the sixteenth member elected to occupy seat 1 of the Académie française in 1944, and served as Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences. He was the first high-level scientist to call for establishment of a multi-national laboratory, a proposal that led to the establishment of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
After only 145 years: overnight success!…
In the “Emerging Authors” section at Target: Anna Karenina, by that young upstart, Leo Tolstoy. (Readers will note, as well, the inclusion of Julian Barnes and Diane Ackerman… as for the Jane Austen Marriage Manual, it is presumably by an actual emerging author…)
[TotH to The Consumerist, from whence, the photo]
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As we fulminate on the fragility of fame, we might note that it was on this date in 1635 that Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII, established L’Académie Française, the oldest of the five académies of L’Institut de France. Its forty members– almost exclusively writers who are known, after election, as immortels– are the highest authority on all matters pertaining to the French language… a group to whom Tolstoy might well have been admitted had he not suffered the ignominy of being born elsewhere and writing in a different language; individuals who are not citizens can be admitted, but rarely are. (The Divine Jane would likely not have fared well even had she been born in France: the first woman member, Marguerite Yourcenar, wasn’t elected until 1980.)
L’Institut de France building
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