Speaking of departmental seminars, as we were, it occurs to me that this might be an amusing Dorky Poll question:<\/p>\n
\nWhat’s the craziest thing you’ve heard asked of a seminar speaker?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Anybody who has spent time around academia has heard some loopy things asked in seminars and colloquia. What’s your favorite?<\/p>\n
Also, a bonus question (which I think is a repeat):<\/p>\n
\nWhat’s the difference between a “seminar” and a “colloquium”?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
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?”<\/p>\n
Of course, as we all know, protons don’t<\/strong> decay. At least, not on any time scale that we can measure– the experimental lower bound for the proton lifetime is something like 1035<\/sup> years<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard asked at a seminar?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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,… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Craziest Seminar Question?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}