Yesterday I had to spend a bunch of time waiting for a repair guy, so as a way of passing time I started a very silly thread on Twitter: descriptions of what various famous historical physicists would’ve been like on Twitter. You can find the start of the resulting thread of extremely niche jokes here, but as a hedge against the deliberate ephemerality of Twitter, I’ll collect them here in blog form:
P.A.M. Dirac has been on Twitter since 2009, follows two people, and has tweeted six times. All six have gone viral.
Niels Bohr’s feed is entirely full of 35-part tweet storms with the threading all screwed up.
Sir Isaac Newton’s Twitter feed alternates between screenshots of complicated calculations annotated in Latin and quote-tweet dunking on Robert Hooke
Richard Feynman’s Twitter feed is mostly Instagram links to photos of himself at sketchy parties and video clips of bongo playing.
Wolfgang Pauli’s Twitter feed is just endless shitposting.
Marie Curie’s Twitter feed is still highly radioactive.
Otto Hahn’s Twitter feed is all retweets of Lise Meitner.
Julian Schwinger’s Twitter feed is only active between midnight and 6am. It’s mathematically identical to Sin-Itiro Tomonaga’s.
Lev Landau’s Twitter feed contains all the rest of Twitter.
Henry Cavendish is not on Twitter.
Erwin Schrödinger’s public Twitter is polite and erudite, but he’s really on the site so he can send skeevy DMs to a series of younger women.
Once a month, Werner Heisenberg RT’s a bunch of old stories about how he deliberately sabotaged the Nazi atomic bomb project.
Emmy Noether is only allowed to post to Twitter using David Hilbert’s account.
Robert Millikan has been known to delete selected tweets that don’t fit in with the story he’s trying to tell.
Ernest Rutherford inexplicably appears on a list of “100 Top Chemists on Twitter”
James Watson’s most-liked tweet was copied without attribution from Rosalind Franklin’s Twitter feed.
George Gamow has been known to @ Hans Bethe into random Twitter threads for no good reason. Bethe is bemused, but proceeds to contribute usefully to them.
Johannes Kepler keeps quote-tweeting incorrect decodings of Latin cryptograms from Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei’s Twitter account was suspended for making fun of the Pope.
All of David Bohm’s tweets are geotagged with a definite position and momentum, but you can only predict them with a non-local model.
Pierre de Fermat’s tweets are full of abbreviations so that he can reach his point with the least possible characters.
James Prescott Joule can give you an exact numerical value for how much work he would’ve done if he hadn’t been faffing about on Twitter.
Michael Faraday got a permanent job because he made a kick-ass Storify out of Humphrey Davy’s tweets.
John Stewart Bell tweets more than can be explained with any strictly local model.
It’s possible that I’ll return to this, but I’m close to exhausting all the historical physicists I know anything amusing about (I’ve been trying to avoid jokes about people who are still alive or recently deceased). If I do come back to it, I’ll use the #FamousPhysicistsOnTwitter tag.