Getting the word "penguin" into a physics paper
Two physicists, Melissa Franklin and John Ellis were playing a game of darts, had a bet that the looser had to use the word "penguin" in their next paper. Apparently Melissa didn't finish the game but someone else took her place and her replacement won. This was probably a good thing because Melissa was an experimentalist and they tend to write papers in extremely large collaborations, any spurious penguin references would probably have been vetoed by about 200 people. As a theorist (and now a bloody high ranking but surprisingly down-to-earth one), John Ellis could do pretty much what he liked. He got high and decided that some of the diagrams looked like penguins, so the conditions were fulfilled. Wikipedia's finest photoshopping shows some slight resemblance: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_diagram

However, the paper in question turned out to be rather influential. Everyone who has studied particle physics to 3rd year undergraduate level will almost certainly have heard of these "penguin diagrams". The entire course of particle physics was made slightly more entertaining by a stupid bet.
(GothicTechie, Wed 13 May 2009, 9:07, 1 reply)

This is excellent.

( Cawl, Wed 13 May 2009, 10:02, closed)