Why did the chicken cross the road?

Albert Einstein: The chicken did not cross the road. The road passed beneath the
chicken.
Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross
roads.
Wolfgang Pauli: There was already a chicken on this side of the road.
Carl Sagan: There are billions and billions of such chickens, crossing roads just like
this one, all across the universe. [Apologies for perpetuating the misquote.]
Jean-Dernard-Leon Foucault: Whats interesting is that if you wait a few hours, it will
be crossing the road a few inches back that way.
Robert Van de Graaf: Hey, doesnt it look funny with all its feathers sticking up like
that?
Albert Michelson and Edward Morley: Our experiment was a failure. We could not
detect the road.
Ludwig Boltzmann: If you have enough chickens, it is a near certainty that one of
them will cross the road.
Johannes van der Waals: Some say it was a sixth sense that led the chicken to cross
the road. I say it was a sixth power.
David Hilbert: I was standing on the side of the road and a chicken came along,
evidently in some kind of strange state. I informed it that it was nevertheless still in
my space, so it went across the road.
Blaise Pascal: The chicken felt pressure on this side of the road. However, when it
arrived on the other side it still felt the same pressure.
John David Jackson: Youll find out after you complete this 37-page calculation.
Henri Poincare: Lets try changing the initial position of the chicken just a tiny, tiny,
tiny bit, and.look, its now across the road!
Enrico Fermi: In estimating to the nearest power of 10 the number of chickens that
cross the road, note that since fractional chickens are not allowed, the desired power
must be at least zero. Therefore, at least one chicken crosses the road.
Werner Heisenberg: Because I made darn sure it was standing right next to me on
this side.
Richard Feynman, 1: Its all quite clear from this simple little diagram of a circle with
lines poking out of it.

Richard Feynman, 2: There was this good-looking rooster on the other side of the
road, and he figured hed skip all the games and just get to the point. So he asked
the chicken if shed like to come over to his side, and she said sure.
Erwin Schrodinger: The chicken doesnt cross the road. Rather, it exists
simultaneously on both sides..just dont peek.
Charles Coulomb: The chicken found a similar chicken on this side of the road to be
repellent.
John Bell: Since there are no local hidden chickens, any hidden chickens you find
must have come from far away. They therefore surely must have crossed at least
one road on their way here.
Henry Cavendish: My dear chicken, I have calculated with the utmost detail and
precision the density of your insides. Now, for the sake of my precious sanity, I beg
you, stop that incessant clucking and be gone!
Arthur Compton: There were a bunch of chickens waving at me on this side of the
road, but then a car came along and they all scattered to the other side. The funny
thing is that the ones that ended farthest away were still waving at me a few
minutes later. So apparently, the ones that scattered the most had the longest
waves.
Hans Geiger: I dont know, but I say we count how many times it crosses!
Howard Georgi: It can cross all it wants, but Im going to sit here and wait until it
decays.
Edward Teller: I will build a more powerful chicken, and it will cross the road with
more energy than any chicken before!
Oskar Klein: Actually, it can get to the other side of the road without crossing it.
Satyendra Bose: An identical chicken already crossed the road, so this one was
much more likely to do the same.
Wallace Clement Sabine: If you listen very carefully, you can hear the pitter patter of
chicken feet, which implies that a chicken must be crossing the road.
Sir David Brewster: Let me give you my angle on this.
Galileo Galilei: The chicken crossed the road because it put one foot in front of the
other and took a sufficient number of steps to traverse a distance greater than or
equal to the roads width. Note that the reason is not because the earth is the center
of the universe. Oh, great another jail term.
David Gross, H. David Politzer, Frank Wilczek: The road is not wide. And at short
distances a chicken is free to do whatever it wants.

Robert Millikan: It didn't. It made it part way and then just sort of hovered there,
apparently feeling an equal pull in both directions.
Peter Higgs: We must first find the chicken.
Nicolaus Copernicus: The chicken was moving at a slightly different orbital speed
around the sun.
Fusion researchers: Because it knew that in 30 years it would get to the other side.
[No insult intended here. Well, at least not to the physicists working hard with the
meager funds they've been given.]
George Francis FitzGerald: It had its doubts, but after starting across the road, the
chicken observed that the distance to the other side didnt seem quite as large, so it
figured it would continue on.
Leo Szilard: First one chicken crossed. This then caused a few more to cross, each of
which in turn caused a few more
George Atwood: The chicken wanted to introduce a setup that would enable it to
pose a question and thereby torture future students over and over and over...
Johannes Kepler: I don't know. But I'm glad it did, because as it waddled across, it
was kind enough to sweep the area of the road with its wings. And it did so at an
astonishingly consistent rate.
Robert Pound and Glen Rebka: It was out for a morning jog and wanted to get its
heart rate up by crossing over the crown of the road.
Robert Hooke: At first, the chicken was drawn across the road. But after passing the
middle, it felt an increasing desire to return to the original side. It did end up making
it to the other side (just barely), but then decided to return. I believe it is still going
back and forth on this.
Lisa Randall: The only thing about the chicken we ever discuss is why it crossed the
road. There are many more dimensions to it than that!
Norman Ramsey: I dont know why, but I do know that it took 4.71988362706153
seconds to get there.
Pierre de Fermat: Forget about why. Ill show you how it can get there in the least
amount of time.
Neils Bohr: In attempting to answer the question by observing the chicken, I
collapsed its wavefunction to the other side.
Gustav Kirchhoff: It actually crossed the road twice, due to a strange desire to form
a closed loop.
Louis de Broglie: Interesting, it always seems to flap its wings an integral number of
times before it comes back.

Michael Faraday: No, again? How many times do I have to tell it to stick to the
safety of its cage?!
Max Planck: It appears to be a white chicken. Sorry, I deal only with black bodies.
Sir William Hamilton: With regard to the issue of crossing the road, the chicken
made it to the other side by taking as little action as possible.
Hugh Everett: I dont know, but theres another one over there that isnt crossing
the road.
Edward Witten: 50 years ago, you probably would have said there was no hope of
answering this question either.
Archimedes: I was running through the streets yelling and screaming, and it was
only afterward that I realized I was carrying a chicken.
Amadeo Avogadro: What, just one? I deal only with very large chicken numbers.
Ptolemy: Someone will probably think of a simpler explanation in a few thousand
years, but the present understanding is that the chicken crosses the road because it
is constrained to move on this here sphere, which in turn has its center on this one
over here. The end result is that, except in the rare case of retrograde chicken
motion, the chicken does indeed cross the road.
Marie Curie: Good question. And one that is much less hazardous to ones health.
Willebrod Snell: Im not sure, but I did notice that when it stepped onto the road, it
changed its direction.
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss: Draw a pillbox around the road, and consider the flux
of chickens through the box. If a chicken leaves this side of the road, then assuming
that there are no chicken sinks or sources, it must end up on the other side.
Johann Balmer: Why are there only two lines in the middle of the road?
James Clerk Maxwell: Ok, Miss Chicken, lets figure this out together. Hold out your
right foot. yes, thats it. good. now curl your talons. right. now look at
your. hold on you dont have any thumbs!
Osborne Reynolds: No idea. But I can see from the ruffled feathers that this was
turbulent chicken flow.
Karl Schwarzschild: The sad thing is, I know I could have answered this question
too. [This one isnt meant to be funny.]
Christian Doppler: It always sounds a bit down when its heading over there, but
rather upbeat when its coming back.
Edwin Hubble: Strange, it seems to move faster the farther away it gets.

Ernest Rutherford: The differential cross section for forward chicken scattering is
quite large, so the chicken will most likely cross the road if it was initially heading in
that direction.
Lene Hau: Well, I wish it hadn't. It cut right in front of me while I was out for a bike
ride, chatting it up with a photon.
Stephen Hawking: Chicken fluctuations will inevitably create a scenario where a
chicken ends up on the other side of the yellow line, in which case there is a nonzero
probability that it will escape to the other side.
Lord Kelvin: I dont know. But I think the road actually starts back there a bit.
Daniel Bernoulli: Because it enjoyed flying to the other side. Ok, wait, can someone
tell me once and for all if Im relevant to all this flying stuff or not?!
Robert Oppenheimer: Although it was deemed appropriate at the time, people will
forever question whether it was correct for the chicken to cross the road.