One day, all of the world's famous physicists decided to get together for a party (ok, there were some non-physicists too who crashed the party). Fortunately, the doorman was a grad student, and able to observe some of the guests...

• Everyone gravitated toward Newton, but he just kept moving around at a constant velocity in an elliptical orbit.
• Einstein thought he had a relatively good time.
• Coulomb got a real charge out of the whole thing.
• Cavendish wasn't invited, but he had the balls to show up anyway.
• Cauchy, the mathematician, managed to integrate well with everyone.
• Thompson enjoyed the plum pudding.
• Pauli came late, but was mostly excluded from things, so he split.
• Planck showed lot of energy; but in discrete packets.
• Pascal was under too much pressure to enjoy himself.
• Ohm spent most of the time resisting Ampere's opinions on current events.
• Hamilton went to the buffet tables exactly once.
• Volta thought the social had a lot of potential.
• Hilbert was pretty spaced out most of the time.
• Heisenberg may or may not have been there.
• The Curies were there and just glowed the whole time.
• van der Waals forced himself to mingle.
• Wien radiated a colourful personality.
• Millikan dropped his Italian oil dressing.
• de Broglie mostly just stood in the corner and waved.
• Joseph Weber returned the wave with gravity.
• Hollerith liked the hole idea.
• Stefan and Boltzman got into some hot debates.
• Everyone was attracted to Tesla's magnetic personality.
• Hawking looked radiant. Weakly.
• Wilhelm Weber & Gauss argued as to had a more magnetic personality.
• Compton was a little scatter-brained at times and thus got along very well with C V Raman.
• Rutherford kept searching for gold foils to shoot at.
• Bohr & Van Allen ate too much. Bohr got atomic ache while Van Allen had to loosen his belt..
• Watt turned out to be a powerful speaker.
• Hertz went back to the buffet table several times a minute.
• Faraday had quite a capacity for food. But his son, Pico Farad only had a billion billionth of the quantity his father ate.
• Oppenheimer got bombed.
• Penzias and Wilson were the first to detect the microwave radiating in the background.
• After one bite Chandrasekhar reached his limit.
• Gamow left the party early with a big bang while Hoyle stayed late in a steady state.
• Schrodinger theorised this was more a wave function than a social function.
• Popper said this theory was not falsifiable.
• Erdos was sad no epsilons were invited.
• Born thought the probability of enjoying himself was pretty high.
• Instead of coming through the front door Josephson tunnelled through.
• Groucho refused to attend any party that would invite him in the first place.
• Niccolò Tartaglia kept stammering throughout the evening.
• Pauling wanted to bond with everyone.
• Keynes was keen to question the marginal utility of this party.
• Shakespeare could not decide whether to be or not to be at the party.
• John Forbes Nash wanted to play a n-person zero sum game.
• Pavlov brought his dog; which promptly chased Schrodinger's cat while Maxwell's Demon looked on.
• Zeno of Elea came with two friends: Achilles and the tortoise.
• Bill Gates came with windows.
• Sir Humphrey Davy came with a miner's lamp.
• Bertrand Russell kept wondering if the cook only cooks for the guests, who cooks for the cook?
• Witten brought a present all tied up with superstrings.
• Mendeleyev beautifully laid out the food on the periodic table.
• Riemann hypothesised about who would arrive next; to which Newton retorted, 'hypotheses non fingo.'
• Chadwick was handing out neutrons free of charge.
• Everyone was amazed at Bell's inequality.
• Watson and Crick danced the Double Helix.
• While Fermat sang, 'Save the Last Theorem for me.'
• On which Eddington remarked, 'I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a man from behaving in this absurd way!
• Gamow's Mr Tompkins argued with Dawkin's friend, the selfish Gene.
• Russell and Whitehead insisted on checking the arithmetic in the bill for completeness and consistency.
• Godel said it was incomplete and it can never be proved otherwise.
• Epimenides the Cretan announced that all Cretans were liars.
• Rontgen saw through everybody.
• Descartes cogitated, 'I think I am drunk. Therefore I am at the party.'
• Lotfi Zadeh thought this logic was a little fuzzy.
• Degas, Monet and Renoir were there to make an impression.
• Prof Abdus greeted everybody with a 'Salam'
• Alan Guth discussed inflation with Alan Greenspan.
• Vera Rubin showed off her rotation curves.
• The law firm of Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle was represented by all four Senior Partners.
• Steven Weinberg arrived in the first three minutes.
• Kip Thorne announced that he had taken out a year's subscription to Penthouse in the hope of seeing a naked singularity.
• Penrose gently consoled him that Cosmic Censorship would make sure he didn't. Failing that, Mrs Thorne would.
• MGM led a special unitary group discussion on the eight-fold way.
• Music was provided by the Boris Zeldovich Quintet - Belinsky, Braginsky, Starobinsky; with Sakharov on drums.
• Martin Gardner expounded on CRAP - the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle.
• Bondi, Gold and Hoyle expounded on the Perfect Cosmological Principle.
• Minkowski announced that this was the last party he would be attending; because, henceforth, there would be no space and no time.
• Lifshitz and Landau took a route through a classical field, Gauss and Weber got lost in a magnetic field, Hoyle and Narlikar came via the C-Field.
• P C W Davies suggested that matter is a myth to which Samuel Johnson retorted, 'I refute it thus'.
• Zwicky added that maybe all matter was dark.
• Gribbin went in search of the Big Bang while Feynman lectured.
• Barrow grumbled that his salary was a constant of nature.
• Hubble worried that his constant was constantly changing.
• Kekule came with his fiancée who showed off her benzene ring.
• Heaviside insisted on eating a layered chocolate cake.
• Galileo kept tossing peanuts out of the window to check the time of fall.
• Archimedes could not make it as he was taking a bath.
• Geiger kept writing down the guest count.
• Hardy told Ramanujan that the taxi he came in had an interesting number 1729.
• Szilard tried to convince Fermi that the Manhattan Project was not in Manhattan but in New Mexico.
• Benjamin Franklin did not come as he went kite flying.
• Alexander Graham Bell could not come as he was on a long-distance phone call to Marconi.
• Darwin naturally selected the best dishes.
• Mendel was interested only in wrinkled peas.
• Edison thought the party was illuminating.
• Morse said 'I'll be there on the dot. Can't stop now, must dash.'
• Coriolis kept forcing people sideways.
• Cantor came dressed as a transinfinite.
• Glaser kept blowing bubbles in his beer.
• Halley announced that he will return in 75 years.
• Zweig's aces were disallowed by his peers.
• Shannon could not communicate as there was too much noise.
• Wheatstone had to cross a bridge to get to the party. and finally
• There was a lady named Bright who left early and returned the previous night.

Any further party ideas? Help us grow this list ... send your idea to: click here to contact us

Special thanks to the following for contributing ideas:

Pervez Appoo from Sydney, Australia
Adrian Liu
Anton Skorucak