One feature sometimes found in public accounts of science is punning.
Punning
"A pun, also rarely known as paronomasia, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun
I like a good pun, so I thought I would make a note of those I came across from science related contexts. I think these are puns, whether they were intended or not…
"The oldest joke in atomic physics…"
"A neutron walks into a bar and orders a drink. 'How much?' the particle asks. The barman shakes his head. 'For you, no charge.'
Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table
There are plenty of science jokes based on puns ("I think I'm a cation. Are you sure? Yes, I'm positive?"), but these examples are taken from accounts that are seeking to communicate a scientific meaning.
From scholarly sources:
| Topic | (Alleged) pun | Source |
| gravity | "[Willem] de Sitter was a skilled mathematical astronomer, and his interest in problems of gravitation pulled him into Einstein's orbit." | Matthew Stanley Einstein's War |
| Huygens' undulatory theory of light | "It must be admitted that Huygens' theory also was based in the first instance upon classical mechanics…One could never get a clear picture of the internal forces governing the ether, nor of the forces acting between the ether and 'ponderable' matter. The foundations of this theory remained, therefore, eternally in the dark." | Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions |
| light | "…one of the next tasks should be the building of a theory meeting at the same time the fundamental requirements of quantum mechanics…and general relativity. Although a number of attempts have been made, and partial success have been achieved, no satisfactory synthesis has so far been performed. Light is still somewhat obscure." | Mario Bunge Philosophy of Science. Volume 2: From explanation to justification |
| metaphorical changes in language | "…the exportation of ideas (in particular concepts) from their original context. For example, the concept of stress has profitably been exported from physics to psychology and sociology. But, unless carefully performed, such an exploration of technical ideas may result in shear confusion." | Mario Bunge Philosophy of Science. Volume 1: From problem to theory |
| moon | "…the lines of illumination near the time of the dichotomy are very narrow ellipses [so] the parts in the middle of the moon will appear nearly in a straight line with each other an hour after the first and before the second quadrature which should the observe choose as he may for any thing given in Ricciolus his caution would run him upon a ridiculous absurdity." | John Flamsteed's Gresham Lectures [spelling modernised] |
| spurious correlations | "But even if the correlation between two variables is real and sustained, it may be…indirect, i.e., … it may be brought about by a third underlying variable … In such cases the correlation is, for some spurious reason, called spurious." | Mario Bunge Philosophy of Science. Volume 2: From explanation to justificatio |
From broadcast media
| Topic | (Alleged) pun | Source |
| black holes | "Beethoven wasn't the only one with dramatic flair 200 years ago-Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, may have also composed an intense flare as it consumed nearby material." | NASA – Tweet from @NASA |
| growing plants | "My father would grow all kinds of different fruit trees. My mother who has some indigenous roots, she would grow lots of different herbs and different things we could use to treat all kinds of ailments, you know, from headache to stomach ache…" | Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science at Kew Gardens, interviewed by Prof.Jim Al-Khalili on an episode of the Life Scientific |
| public health advice | "…there was quite a reluctance, I remember coming back, talking about, you know, promoting the use of condoms in gay men, and safer sex is what they were talking about, and there was a sort of sense amongst the medical community that they shouldn't be, kind of interfering in giving people guidance about their sex lives or they might discourage them from coming." | Prof. Anne Johnson, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, University College London interviewed by Prof.Jim Al-Khalili on an episode of the Life Scientific |
From 'popular science' works:
| Topic | (Alleged) pun | Source |
| bacteria | "These [encapsulated] bacteria have a sugar-based polysaccharide outer shell…This shell means the bacteria are far from sweet, and kill over 50 per cent of people without a spleen who are unlucky enough to catch them." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you. |
| chemical symbols | "Every element is given one or two letter to identify it – usually the first two letters of its name. … Plutonium should have been 'Pl', but [Glenn] Seaborg couldn't forget how much the Gilman Hall attic [laboratory] had reeked. In the stinkiest joke on the periodic table, he immortalised plutonium as pee-eew (Pu)" | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| chemical symbols | "…the creators named their new element immediately: 'berkelium'. It had been such an arse to create that Thompson and Ghiorso wanted its symbol to be 'Bm'. Seaborg overruled them and chose Bk." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| claimed superheavy elements | "Soon Ghiorso was convinced that Stockholm was 'completely wrong'. Nobelium, he and Seaborg joked in private, was nobelievium." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| comets | "The Incas of Perus regarded comets as intimations of wrath from their Sun-god Inti …" | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "Medieval scholars in Europe, who deferred to ancient wisdom and considered that comets inhabited the upper atmosphere, also suspected them of being Devil's work. So it is not altogether surprising to learn that certain medieval monks were swore they smelt a comet, or that the odour was of suitably devilish sulphurous gas. This report of halleytosis won approval in a book already mentioned, Cometomantia of 1684, which used it as evidence against those over-zealous astronomers who wanted to displace all comets into deep space, far beyond the orbit of the moon." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| epidemiology | "The odds against these variations [in flu infections] occurring by chance were rated by the astrophysicists as astronomical, and they offered a meteorological explanation for the fine-scale patchiness." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| genetics | "The technique was crude: they mushed fly bodies into a paste, isolated their DNA, put the mixture in a gel, and added their gene with a dye. The idea was that the gene would act like molecular flypaper and attach to every gene with a similar sequence." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| naming elements | "Hahn had been remembered by the Nobel Committee when his partner Lise Meitner had been overlooked: now she would appear on the periodic table while he would be forgotten. Chemistry has an odd habit of reaching equilibrium." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| separating elements | "…the Separator for Heavy Ion Reaction Products – SHIP. The name wasn't an accident; remembering the sea of instability, the Germans were convinced they could sail off to find new elements before their superpower competition." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| solar system | "The largest planet in our Solar System, Jupiter, causes the Sun to wobble at a mere 12.5 metres per second (around 45 kilometres per hour), which is hardly an 'astronomical' number." | Andrew May (2019) Astrobiology: The Search for Life Elsewhere in the Universe |
| twins | "Ten days after their [nuclear scientist Glenn Seaborg and his wife Helen] return [to Berkeley], she gave birth to twins. 'Two fragments', Seaborg announced to his colleagues. 'But not fission." [They were fraternal (dizygotic) not identical (monozygotic) twins] | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| vaccination | "The news of Pasteur's anthrax vaccine itself spread like a virus through Europe." | Thomas Goetz The Remedy. Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the quest to cure tuberculosis. |
From science journalism
fire ants
"Fire ants have a remarkable ability to survive floods …When it rains, the ants can be seen to avoid drowning by clumping together to form floating rafts of 10 or more ants…. Putting the rafts under stress, also resulted in the rafts "self-healing" with ants moving from the top to the bottom to keep it afloat. The buoy-ant mystery continues."
Michael Banks writing in Physics World
Some other examples:
- embryology is at an embryonic stage ('Einstein's Fridge: The science of fire, ice and the universe')
- hypothesis about abortive buds could be an abortive theory (Charkles Darwin)
- mycorrhizal fungi connect trees into the wood wide web (The Infinite Monkey Cage)
- reports of unidentified superconducting objects (Chemistry World)
- superglues stick around (Prof. Jeff Karp, Harvard Medical School and MIT)
