Speaking of departmental seminars, as we were, it occurs to me that this might be an amusing Dorky Poll question:
What’s the craziest thing you’ve heard asked of a seminar speaker?
One of the nice things about academia is that lots of educational events are put on, free and open to all. The problem is, these all too often provide an opportunity for slightly unbalanced individuals to ask distinguished speakers questions that don’t make any sense at all. And I’m not just talking about crazed questions from the faculty, either.
Anybody who has spent time around academia has heard some loopy things asked in seminars and colloquia. What’s your favorite?
Also, a bonus question (which I think is a repeat):
What’s the difference between a “seminar” and a “colloquium”?
My favorite example of a crazy question was asked to a speaker who gave a very nice talk about the quark structure of the proton, based on accelerator experiments. It was, more or less: “You’ve said a lot of interesting things about experiments on protons. Of course, as we all know, protons decay. What effect does proton decay have on your results?”
Of course, as we all know, protons don’t decay. At least, not on any time scale that we can measure– the experimental lower bound for the proton lifetime is something like 1035 years.
I’ve heard crazy questions that were more baroque than that one, but it’s hard to top for its utter wrongness. It was delivered in a very confident way, too, suggesting that the questioner had perhaps popped in from some other corner of the multiverse where what he was asking actually made sense.
So, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard asked at a seminar?
I guess each department has its legendary seminar questions which students whisper to each other at the end of every subsequent seminar for years afterwards.
Two that come to mind in this tradition from our department:
“And where does Stephen Jay Gould stand on this?”
“How would that work in a mockingbird?”
“As a concerned father, should I be genotyping my daughter’s dates for this mutation?”
Could one use black holes in missiles?
Also
What happened to the Elephant?
One time at band camp — no, wait, it was the Senior Seminar in Computer Science at an unnamed university not all that far from where you work — it was clear that the speaker had completely wasted the four years or so of education she had in CS. A video clip from ‘Virtuality’ was used to illuminate her report on the dangers of AI.
No one wanted to ask anything.
Finally I spoke up. “Could you explain the difference between virtual reality and artificial intelligence, please?”
After some stuttering, she announced that they were the same.
Not related, but this reminds me of “seminar bingo” our students sometimes play. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=847
I once witnessed someone stand up and accuse the invited guest speaker of plagiarizing everything she had been presenting.
I was in a seminar on how to shield astronauts from radiation on a trip to Mars. Someone got up and asked “How can we protect astronauts from neutrinos?”
Some years ago we had a colloquium on the subject of quantum black holes. The point was that certain information-theoretic problems with classical black holes could be solved by introducing quantization in the state equation of a black hole, or something like that (I’m working from my imperfect memory here). After the talk I got to ask the following crazy-sounding but legitimate question: Do quantum black holes have hair?
As many of your readers know, the only observable quantities about a classical black hole are its mass, charge, and angular momentum. This truism is generally summarized as, “Black holes have no hair.” I was curious whether this statement was also true of quantum black holes, so I alluded to that saying in my question. The speaker understood this and tried to answer this question (I think it amounted to “I don’t know,” but I am probably remembering this wrong). But some of the people in that audience were unfamiliar with the expression and wondered what I was on about.
As for things that are truly off the wall (as opposed to that last example), I don’t have anything from personal experience.
An on topic anecdote would be Isaac Asimov’s Ph.D. thesis defense. Asimov had been writing science fiction to pay his way through grad school. Shortly before finishing his thesis, he decided to get some practice writing papers in scientific style, so he wrote the short story “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline.” The premise was a fictional substance that would dissolve in water before the water was added, but only if you actually did add the water. Although he had asked the publisher to publish it under a pseudonym, it appeared with Asimov’s name on it, just in time for the thesis defense. Asimov’s concerns turned out to be misplaced; when one of the committee finally asked him jokingly about thiotimoline, he knew he had passed.
I answered the colloquium/seminar question in the last thread.
One of my favorites was just a glorious mispronunciation. A student at a bio-chem seminar asked, in reference to what I don’t recall, “Would you say this is a para-dig-un shift in thinking?” Yes, a hard G, followed by an N. In response to the almost deafening snickers, he corrected himself with, “Oh, I mean, para-dig-UM”, but still with a hard G. Room went into uproar.
A Prof of mine back in grad school used to have a great list on questions (for math talks) on his door that could be used with ANY talk. the ones I remember:
Isn’t there a hint of this result in an early work of Gauss? (the answer is always “yes”)
Have you worked through the details of the example where n = 4? (the answer is always “I have a grad student working on this right now”)
Have you seen the work of Mikhail Grobvich in the Serbian journal of complex group theory from 1983? it seems related.
(there IS no such person or journal.)
I’ve never tried any of these, but they sound like fun.
Weirdest would have to be when a female physics professor from a neighboring school gave a talk on stat mech (I honestly can’t even remember what the talk was on), and one of the professors (who was notorius for being a sexist jerk) asked how the scanners at the super market worked…which had absolutely nothing to do with her talk.
Sometimes the unbalanced individuals are inside the department.
There was a homeless guy who used to come to all sorts of departmental seminars in my grad department. He had a habit of standing up and starting questions like “This reminds me of my work on angels…”
With scrith, of course.
An especially fine seminar comment was uttered by “Papa” Carl Djerassi after an academician presented an unconscionably bad seminar on cancer testing and regulation. (Linear graphs with only one data point, “we know there is no effect at zero dose”). Papa Carl stood up, said “how very useful”, and sat down. The auditorium went dead silent.
Academics strive to be elegant.
At my Ph.D. defense, some of my non-physics friends came along, presumably for moral support. There’s an unspoken code within physics departments (probably all departments) that you don’t ask a difficult question at a friend’s Ph.D. defense.
But my roommate’s brother, who was staying with us at the time, wasn’t in the department, and didn’t seem to catch onto that unspoken code. During the public questions period, he asked me, “Well you’ve talked a lot about the things that have worked in your research over the last few years, and they all sound good. But can you tell us about some of your worst mistakes in doing this research?”
That one took me by surprise… of course, it’s good to be open about the fact that not all research ideas pan out, and I was able to handle it o.k. without losing face too badly (I passed, anyway). But that was a pretty memorable question!
Not a crazy question, but a crazy response. A student was describing research on the effect of cobalt on wheat in which cobalt was applied to some field plots. He was asked ‘What is the long-term fate in the soil of the cobalt you apply?’ Before he could reply, his supervisor jumped up and said ‘Cobalt is a rare-earth element and it gets converted to other rare-earth elements.’ We gave silent thanks that there was no member of the press present for that particular seminar.
“Why did you choose to treat this special case of the question, which is obviously the only uninteresting one?”
Still scary twenty years later.
Maybe not crazy, but unexpected. There was a Meteorology Department seminar that was related to climate change and global warming. I don’t remember the exact topic but it was a pretty technical modeling talk comparing results from different climate models or something. There was an out-of-department visitor who asked, “But, what about all the animals?”
When Brian Greene gave a public talk overview of superstring theory and why one might care about it at my undergrad university, someone in the audience asked in the end:
Do you think that we will ever be able to harness molecular motion to propel a saucer-shaped spacecraft?
There was also a question of how the information theoretics of black holes relates to souls, but I can’t remember the exact question now.
Will you accept input from a Humanities professor?
Seminar: Class format–certainly a primarily decentralized teaching format.
Colloquium: The way we use it at my school, it’s a right talking to by a scholar to peers. It’s usually a report on research.
When fellow grad students at my school, many moons ago, were coming up with something to describe a series of papers that were being given, we settled on the Old English word: Mickelgemote, or “a meeting of the bigwigs.”
During a critical thinking course for freshmen, I invited a long-tenured senior historian into my classroom to discuss his just-released book about conspiracy theories in American history (the writing course was examined “extraordinary claims”). I was still a grad student and encouraged my students to ask questions of him when he arrived, you know, so I didn’t look like a dingus. He went on for an hour about how conspiracies were dangerous for liberal democracies, and he made constant reference to his book. One student, dear heart that she was and who had assured me before class that she was great at asking questions, raised her hand when the scholar asked, “Are there any questions?” “So, are you saying that conspiracies are good things?”
Then there was the upper class twit from the Friends of the Library. The group had awarded Native American author N. Scott Momaday the Library Prize (cash to come and talk). Certainly none of the Friends had read his House Made of Dawn. He was talking about a charity that went out to reservations and taught traditional native skills such as weaving, pottery, and “how to make soap.” At the end of a reading, he opened the floor for questions, and at one point, after a number of questions about writing, the literary scene and publishing, one friend of the library stood up and asked: “How do you make soap?”
Oh, and I totally know why the neutrino question was funny. Silly physicists.
Bob
An outside quantum chemist came to our physics department to give a colloquia on modelling the formation of ice crystals, with a view towards finding materials that could be used to encourage crystallisation at higher temperatures (essentially a briefing for our own quantum computational group). One of my fellow undergrads had been told that the work would be appropriate to his project by his advisor, which largely involved trying to supercool water in strange situations. I tagged along to see what it was all about.
We sat through some very interesting materials physics, and the fun revelation that the old cloud seeding ideas were based on flawed physics (they looked at bulk crystal properties then matched them to ice, not realising that surfaces reform when cut, so the surface structure wouldn’t be the right shape to encourage seeding). However, little that seemed relevant to my friends project. By the time he was rattling off the names of various quantum modelling languages, it was pretty clear it wasn’t relevant at all.
Still, my friend wouldn’t give up, so he fired off a question.
“You have various materials you think might decrease the freezing point. Can you think of anything that might increase it?”
“… antifreeze?”
Well, I remember one seminar that I think made everyone in the room cringe.
The speaker, a frequent visitor to the department, is giving a talk in two parts. The first part was examining some spurious effects in a widely used code used in the field, saying there was a need to write a more precise code as the experimental data were getting better and better. One of the authors of the code is in the audience, and says, effectively “You can just change a setting in the code to make it more precise at the expense of longer running time.” SMACK.
Then, in the 2nd part, the speaker describes some work on finding appropriate combinations of variables that are less degenerate with each other than the ones typically in use in the field. At the end, the same guy who made the previous comment says “Yeah, we did this same thing in a paper we put out 3 years ago.” DOUBLE SMACK.
Everyone in the room felt really uncomfortable.
An quite common occurrence at public Clinical Grand Rounds talks I’ve attended in a certain Department of Psychiatry are people requesting personal medical advice. “Yeah, uh, Doctor, I have a problem exactly like that, except instead of hearing voices, I just get really, really angry. Should I be taking, what’s it called, Serium?”
I’m pretty sure several (but not all) of these questions have come from the same individual at different talks. Also common are requests to diagnose family members by history.
I attended a talk by a guy who estimated the solar constant by calculating photon pressure on a satellite, which slightly changed the orbit. An audience member got up and took about 5 minutes to ask whether the launch vehicle was the limiting factor in the precision of the estimate. He lost the speaker at about 2:15 and got nothing but silence.
Finally someone in the back yelled “Would you get better results if you had a bigger rocket?”
“Oh,” the speaker said, “obviously.”
Once, at a space engineering conference, I was
scheduled into the miscellaneous and weird session.
Since I am not a Tenure Track professor, publish wild and crazy ideas at the drop of the hat, and am a 2nd generation science fiction author and editor, I often get in the de facto “psychoceramics” session of science conferences.
The most distinctive speaker in this session started out by declaring:
“Everybody here is talking about how to get from the
Earth to the Moon. Wrong approach! I alone want to
explain why we should bring the Moon to Earth. The
best place to land it is at Antarctica. Then one can
drive or sled to the Moon.”
After he finished, he asked for questions. Loooooong
silence. Finally, I raised my hand.
“Why stop with the Moon?” I asked. “Why not figure out
the best places to bring Mercury, Venus, Mars, and
Pluto? I’m not so sure about the gas giants.”
He practically leaped back to the microphone.
“Exactly! I’m pleased to see that there’s at least one
scientist in the audience who can see the implications
of my theory.”
He had a young attractive grad student who thanked me
for not leaving his paper presentation without a question.
Poor old man. Was that the right thing for me to do?
“Who funded this research”
The difference between a seminar and a colloquium, as I see it:
Seminar: save your crazy questions until the end
Colloquium: feel free to interrupt with crazy questions at any point