Piled Higher and Deepr nails it this week:
A Pofessor’s Negation Field is the unexplained phenomenon whereby mere spatial proximity to an experimental set-up causes all working demonstrations to fail, despite the apparent laws of Physics or how many times it worked right before he/she walked in the room.
I haven’t been on the faculty long enough to develop a really effective Negation Field, but my boss when I was a post-doc was the absolute king of this. I eventually stopped telling him when things were working well, because he’d invariably want to come see it, and then something would go spectacularly and bizarrely wrong. I would just take data as fast as I could, and show it to him after the fact.
Is there a theoretical equivalent of this effect? Do computers crash whenever theoretical faculty walk into their students’ offices? Does code mysteriously fail to compile? Do random number generators spit out “4” over and over and over?