Today during our quantum meeting:
Speaker: Imagine you are moving through imaginary time…
Snarky me: Um, if you’re imagining moving through imaginary time, wouldn’t you just be moving through real time
Other audience member: Actually I think you’d be moving backwards in time…
Maybe the joke is that by arranging for calculations to be simpler after Wick rotations, Nature is trying to tell you something and you’re not listening.
HeHeHe! 😆
But it was the setup that made it – it wouldn’t have been half as funny if you’d come straight out with the “backwards in time” line.
An addition for your quantum misuse database:
http://www.quantumtouch.com/index.php?p=news&id=234
It’s always great when jokes just set themselves up. I remember a couple of examples that happened to me.
In the first, I was at a meeting about a year after the quantum teleportation paper was published, and Seth Lloyd made a comment that the way the protocol worked, there was no reason that you couldn’t teleport a state of matter onto a state of antimatter. I immediately said “But wouldn’t that then be the evil copy?”
A few years later the sequence got reversed. It was at QCMC (I think); David Deutsch was delivering a keynote lecture remotely via a video link. He had gotten up to a very dramatic statement, something along the lines of “The way the universe works is therefore-” Click! The connection went out.
While Seth was redialing, I piped up with “I guess someone doesn’t want us to know the way the universe works!” To which Seth immediately replied, “Are you saying that Stephen Wolfram sabotaged the connection?”
Oh, well. I guess you had to be there. 🙂