Richard Feynman joke?

One day in class, Richard Feynman was talking about angular momentum. He described rotation matrices and mentioned that they did not commute. He said that Sir William Hamilton discovered noncommutivity one night when he was taking a walk in his garden with Lady Hamilton. As they sat down on a bench, there was a moment of passion. It was then that he discovered that AB did not equal BA.

Can someone explain this joke to me. I don’t understand it.

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ab did not equal ba hamilton

Tags: Bench, Lady Hamilton, Moment Of Passion

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Garden Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Richard Feynman joke?”

babygirl2112112 Says:
May 4th, 2010 at 12:45 am

all i can say is…..its not funny! lol i dont get it either!
Jazka S Says:
May 4th, 2010 at 10:01 pm

It implies that one of them was attracted to the other, but that attraction was not reciprocated. So, let’s say that Sir Hamilton is A and Lady Hamilton is B. It could imply that he was attracted to her (i.e., AB), but she did not reciprocate it (i.e., not BA). Or vice versa.

That’s how I interpreted it when I first saw it at least.