Chicken stories

You can decide for yourself if Kent has entirely too much time on his hands.

How did the chicken cross the road? ... It depends on the type of chicken.

NT Chicken: Will cross the road in June. No, August. September for sure.

OS/2 Chicken: It crossed the road years ago, but who wants a big blue slow chicken.

Win 95 Chicken: You see different colored feathers while it crosses, but cook it and it still tastes like ... chicken.

Microsoft Chicken (TM): It's already on both sides of the road. And it just bought the road.

Amiga Chicken:Multiple chickens, crossing many roads, at the same time, but they were unfortunately marketed as frogs.

OOP Chicken: It doesn't need to cross the road, it just sends a message.

Assembler Chicken: First it builds the road ...

C Chicken: It crosses the road without looking both ways.

C++ Chicken: The chicken wouldn't have to cross the road, you'd simply refer to him on the other side.

VB Chicken: USHighways!TheRoad.cross (aChicken)

Delphi Chicken: The chicken is dragged across the road and dropped on the other side.

Java Chicken: If your road needs to be crossed by a chicken, the server will download one to the other side. (Of course, those are chicklets)

Web Chicken: Jumps out onto the road, turns right, and just keeps on running.

Gopher Chicken: Tried to run, but got flattened by the Web chicken.

Newton Chicken: Can't cluck, can't fly, and can't lay eggs, but you can carry it across the road in your pocket!

Cray Chicken: Crosses faster than any other chicken, but if you don't dip it in liquid nitrogen first, it arrives on the other side fully cooked.

Quantum Logic Chicken: The chicken is distributed probabilistically on all sides of the road until you observe it on the side of your course.

Lotus Chicken: Don't you *dare* try to cross the road the same way we do!

Mac Chicken: No reasonable chicken owner would want a chicken to cross the road, so there's no way to tell it to.

Al Gore Chicken: Waiting for completion of NCI (National Chicken-crossing Infrastructure) and will cross as soon as it's finished, assuming he's elected and the Republicans don't gut the program.

and finally, my contribution ... in the spirit of Stephen Hawking ... how a quantum chicken actually works, or "a brief history of chickens" ...

The Chicken starts to cross the road, but somewhere between here and the other side it crosses the event horizon and disappears. Since additional matter falling into a black hole increases the surface gravity and extends the event horizon, it starts creeping toward OUR SIDE OF THE ROAD!. As more and more people tell chicken crossing the road jokes, the number of (virtual) chickens crossing the event horizon brings it ever closer...indeed, there is a finite number of chickens which, having attempted to cross the road, will cause our relativistic joke teller on this side of the road to be engulfed by the expanding event horizon, thus ending the process. This is especially true of four-breasted chickens crossing the road (the TYSON effect).

With four-breasted chicken, the event horizon will start to retract due to a mismatch between the number of chicken breasts and chicken legs, and will seek equilibrium, expelling the additional parts. Since this all happens in a finite but extremely small instant of time, unsophisticated observers or creationists may not notice the effect and mistakenly believe that the car the just went by ran over the chicken and the only recognizable parts left are the extra breasts (and some blood). These parts were emitted as a particle cloud and sometimes accidentally reform into chicken McNuggets, which are intrinsically too massive to remain even in a black hole...

The chicken blood is a problem insufficiently addressed by the current hypothesis, but further research accelerating chickens at Lawrence ChickenLivermore may reveal that the chicken blood comes from a release of binding energy due to the dissociation of the chicken parts. Quantum Mechanics is useful in disproving the well-known but overly simplistic scientific dictum "parts is parts".

Chicken Singularities:

In cases where the black hole is extremely small (diameter less than road width), it may occur that the chicken disappears into the black hole and reappears on the other side as an anti-chicken with negative spin and a "fowl" flavor. This fowl flavor is the net sum of the flavors of all the sub-nuclear particles which were re-assembled into the chicken. To a casual observer it appears that the chicken CROSSED THE ROAD, but close inspection will reveal that it is not the SAME chicken, and if you eat it, it tastes different.

Often a burst of light occurs when the virtual chicken reaches the other side revealing a shift in the frequency (the "lamb" effect). There is no known "chicken" effect if a lamb crosses the road, just mutton.

Also, as a quantum chicken, when it appears on the other side of the road, it's just like all the other chickens on that side of the road..not bigger, not smaller, same color..and if the right chickens are used (within a very specific spectrum of energy) it's possible to have two large and three small chickens cross the road and wind up with six medium chickens on the other side. Research is underway into the development of Chicken Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or CHASER. Often Ferric Oxide crystals (FoX) will create a good CHASER environment, causing chickens to cross the road without a joke, and at high speed, and in a dense mass. It is well known that frightened chickens increase their density to the point where a critical mass occurs. At the point of critical mass, the chickens on the bottom are smothered, and the ones on the top are scared to death, so there is a super-dense mass of dead (in the conventional sense of the word) chickens exhibiting similar attributes of a black hole, and there's nothing you can do about it, except go fishin'. It's well known that a critical mass encourages Fishin'.

To add to the complexity of this phenomenon, consider the concept of imaginary time, which goes at right angles to our (real) time. The implication of this is that not only is the chicken across the road not the same chicken you told the joke about, it may very well be a virtual chicken from down the road, where someone else was telling the joke yesterday. Your chicken may be instantiated later today somewhere up the road. This explains why it is that you may be driving down the road and see some chickens on one side of the road and none on the other..THERE NEVER WERE ANY CHICKENS on the other side of the road - at least not where you are, at this time, quantum-mechanically speaking.

Now, here's the hard part: we have just addressed the chicken crossing the road from only our viewpoint, but in fact there are an infinite number of possible viewpoints from which to tell a chicken crossing the road joke. Let's presume that for every chicken-crossing-the-road joketeller there is another doing the same on the other side of the road. As each dispatches his/her virtual chicken across the road, there is some possibility that the black hole has a Schwarzchild radius (where the event horizon is) which just matches the road width / 2. As each chicken enters the event horizon the other is ejected just where it came in, thus making it appear that the chicken DID NOT cross the road. Of course, classical chickens do not behave this way; it's important to have a quantum chicken as previously described. Also, it's significant that this has only been observed to happen when the black hole actually looks like a road...usually a black road, or possibly a street with a BAD pothole. Reports are beginning to surface (no pun intended) of cars disappearing into potholes, and potholes suddenly appearing in roads, even when no chickens are present, so it's certainly likely that when we tell a chicken-crossing-the-road joke there's probably a black hole nearby that we don't even recognize.

In the old days, under Newtonian physics, there were only brown dirt roads and no one observed this phenomenon. Euclid had some inkling of this, as he noticed that no matter how many chickens he ate, there were always more than before. Indeed the second law of thermodynamics indicates that if you cook a chicken and eat it, and the available energy is left to distribute itself in its' own way, entropy increases, the net available energy in the system decreases, and you fall asleep.

It wasn't until Nobel Prize Winner and chicken-eater Richard Feynman created his diagrams about how to dress a chicken that quantum chickens were understood. There are six parts to the quintessential chicken (using simplifying assumptions) : two breasts, two wings, two legs. Feynman's essential book on introductory physics is entitled "Six Easy Pieces" .. a coincidence - I think not!

Einstein's Breakthrough

While Albert Einstein had many amazing insights into relativistic physics, many other Physicists of the time contributed greatly to out understanding of the nature of quantum chickens. Werner Heisenberg contributed his famous uncertainty principle, which states that you can't know both a chicken's energy and it's precise whereabouts at the same time. You could know, for instance, that it is in the hen house, but not be sure if it's laying eggs or not. It also makes a difference whether you are considering the chicken as a particle or as a wave. Famous experiments have been done trying to get chickens through a slit in the hen house door, and most physicists agree that it makes little difference ; a chicken goes through anyway. Eggs, however, are another matter and must be treated as particles. Anyway, few people know that during the thirties the Nazis were trying to develop a "chicken in every pot" and there is still uncertainty about Heisenberg and how he helped or hindered the Nazi chicken effort.

Einstein was successful in describing some fundamental laws about quantum chickens, as the following equations will demonstrate:

Let's describe a chicken (as mentioned above) as having two breasts, two wings, and two legs. This might be expressed as c = 2b + 2w + 2l. Since skinless chicken is better for you, let's make it c = 2b + 2w +2l - s. A trivial proof of this concept is left as an exercise for the student. Energy wise, the legs together are about equal to one breast (b=2l) and the wings are small on today's cultivated chickens, so we'll assume two wings equal a leg (l=2w). Therefore c = 2b + (b) + (1/2 b) or 5.5 Breast Thermal Units (BTU).

An average chicken is about 2KG or 4.4 pounds, and Einstein discovered that available chicken energy was proportional to the square of the accumulated energy of the parts (including inter-atomic bonds) when the parts are broken away from the chicken, times the mass of the chicken.

To find out how much to cook the chicken (on this side of the road), multiply 5.5 BTU times 252 to get calories (5.5 * 252 = 1386). 1386 squared is 1,920,996 calories, times the chicken MASS (2kg) or 1,920,996 * 2000) = 3.8 x 10^9 calories. This seems like a lot, especially since we know that a hobo can cook a chicken over a fire by a railroad track with only a small can of steam. It only goes to show how much extra energy there is in a chicken which goes unreleased most of the time. In any event, Einstein is remembered for the simple expression for maximum theoretical chicken energy - E = MC^2. Luckily for us most of the world's nations only use chickens for peaceful purposes, except maybe Haiti. Alert readers will notice that there was some simplification of the more complex aspects of Chicken Physics, but so what?

Summary and Conclusion

It's evident from the foregoing that telling chicken-crossing-the-road jokes could cause instability in our universe, and confuse people without a deep conceptual grasp of virtual quantum chickens. On the other hand, expertise in this area should be prima-facie evidence for holding tenured positions in Physics (or even metaphysics). For the metaphysical and Existential implications of chickens crossing the road, see "Jean-Paul Sarte : Chickens - Being and Chickenness".

With the advances in Theoretical Physics, which produce roads which can support black holes, we can now observe the TYSON effect (four-breasted virtual quantum chickens sort of crossing the road), and it gives us a better understanding of the origin of the universe in general, and Chicken Cordon Bleu for four in particular.

copyright 1998. Kent Phelps. All rights reserved.