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Comment by mattheww | Hacker News Reader

You can't skip the story about Niels Bohr at the bottom.

Niels Bohr should know something about reactions and reaction times - in 1905 he played professional football (soccer) for Akademisk Boldklub, playing goalkeeper.

Seems like a pretty crappy experiment to pit the reaction time of an ex-professional athlete against (presumably) more typical people.

I can't tell if you're joking or not ... are you? Given the context it seems odd that you should interpret the anecdotes as being entirely serious and make such a serious comment, but perhaps I'm just having a sarcasm-detect failure ...

It's dual-purpose. Anyone who thought the article was tongue-in-cheek can assume that I too am being light-hearted. Anyone who thinks the article took Bohr's results seriously can take my comment seriously. Between the dry humor of Brits and the general idiocy of science reporting, I don't think there's any way to tell which is more appropriate.

This link to an audio interview was posted previously: http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4325.html Gamow talks about meeting Bohr and his wit: He says that he was startled to see a horseshoe nailed above the door to Bohr's house. Gamow asked Bohr why he had it there. Bohr said "I've heard that it works even if you don't believe in it."

In a series of mock gunfights with colleagues Bohr always drew second and always won.

Heh... Considering that all the participants were scientists, I'm surprised they concluded that one event caused the other.

Somebody tried making that objection but reviewer N.B. blocked his paper during peer review, citing inadequate references to existing literature. The scientist lost his funding, was denied tenure, and now lives in a van down by the river.

Did he play with Heisenberg? "We knew where both people were, no idea how fast they drew."

I know what you're thinking. "Does the nucleus have six electrons or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this uncertainty I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is an isotope of uranium, responsible for slow-neutron fission, and would blow your city clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

Hah, this is a trick question; the nucleus doesn't have electrons. And if it blows up, you don't bury the survivors.

Hah, this is a trick question; the nucleus doesn't have electrons.

Well, technically, in an s-orbital there is a substantial, non-zero chance of the electron being inside the nucleus.

Not true, you may have been thrown off by the fact that s orbitals are generally shown as spheres; but the radial extent (probability amplitude) of the wave function goes to zero for small radii, for all s orbitals, see http://www.chem.umass.edu/people/botch/Chem121F06/Chapters/C....

A classically-behaving point particle with the same charge as an electron would drop into the nucleus, but the wave nature of real electrons forbids it. Due to the uncertainty prinicple, there is a nonzero chance of finding the electron in the nucleus, but to say it is substantial is false.

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