The science of humour.

I always thought scientists were serious, humourless individuals.
You know, men with their minds brimming with equations and formulae.

Till when I was in ninth standard and came across tuning forks.
You bang a tuning fork against a block of wood.
And when the tuning fork starts vibrating, you hold it close to another tuning fork.
The second tuning fork now starts reciprocating in a phenomenon that is scientifically known as a ‘sympathetic vibration’.

What a gag.
One tuning fork is banged and vibrates.
And the other feels sympathy and starts doing the same.
I mean, which guru of frequency and related studies thought this up?
The man’s Hyde must have been Groucho Marx.

This convinced me that scientists must not be taken lightly.
(Though science, I did. And am paying for.)
And I was reading somewhere about this botanist who insisted on following binary nomenclature off the beaten path.
He insisted on naming discoveries in the botanic kingdom after female genitalia.
(This doesn’t qualify as funny, but is a little weird.)

Mimosa pudica and hibiscus rosasinensis do not really have the average 13 year old falling off his chair.
But sympathetic vibration?
There he falls, off his bench!

There are many more.
Half-life, for example, is the molecular equivalent of middle-age, but then again, not really.
Mole is not the ugly protuberance peering out of your collar but is something to do with the mass, in grams, which is numerically equal to the substance’s molecular weight or something equally unquantifiable and has something to do with Avogadro’s number.
But why ‘mole’?

Or the most misspelled word in India, ‘vulcanisation’.
Every self-respecting, entrepreneurial Mallu has a different spelling for it.
But why name this simple process, attended to with the least attention in dingy stalls across the country after the Roman God of Fire?
Is the smart-arse who invented and named vulcanization looking at your friendly neighbourhood ‘tire-punchr’ and having a ball?

Maybe.
These guys were wicked.
Most of them.
The guy called Clark who was in some way associated with logarithms definitely was not.

Somewhere 6 feet under, his tibia and fibula clash as he rolls over and over again.
Cursed by the millions he inflicted his torture tables on.
The tuning fork man, may he soul rest in peace.
He made science a little enjoyable.