I read a thread on why the chicken crossed the road. But it seemed the OP of that thread could not tell us the "actual reasons why the chicken crossed the road'.

So, below are what some great men think why the chicken crossed the road.


Albert Einstein: The chicken did not cross
the road. The road passed beneath the
chicken.

Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to
stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to
cross roads.

Wolfgang Pauli: There was already a chicken
on this side of the road.

Carl Sagan: There are billions and billions of
such chickens, crossing roads just like this
one, all across the universe. [Apologies for
perpetuating the misquote.]

Jean-Dernard-Leon Foucault: What’s
interesting is that if you wait a few hours, it
will be crossing the road a few inches back
that way.

Robert Van de Graaf: Hey, doesn’t it look
funny with all its feathers sticking up like
that?

Albert Michelson and Edward Morley: Our
experiment was a failure. We could not
detect the road.

Ludwig Boltzmann: If you have enough
chickens, it is a near certainty that one of
them will cross the road.

Johannes van der Waals: Some say it was a
sixth sense that led the chicken to cross
the road. I say it was a sixth power.

David Hilbert: I was standing on the side of
the road and a chicken came along, evidently
in some kind of strange state. I informed it
that it was nevertheless still in my space, so
it went across the road.

Blaise Pascal: The chicken felt pressure on
this side of the road. However, when it
arrived on the other side it still felt the
same pressure.

John David Jackson: You’ll find out after
you complete this 37-page calculation.

Henri Poincare: Let’s try changing the initial
position of the chicken just a tiny, tiny, tiny
bit, and….look, it’s now across the road!

Enrico Fermi: In estimating to the nearest
power of 10 the number of chickens that
cross the road, note that since fractional
chickens are not allowed, the desired power
must be at least zero. Therefore, at least
one chicken crosses the road.

Werner Heisenberg: Because I made darn
sure it was standing right next to me on
this side.

Richard Feynman, 1: It’s all quite clear from
this simple little diagram of a circle with
lines poking out of it.

Richard Feynman, 2: There was this good-
looking rooster on the other side of the
road, and he figured he’d skip all the games
and just get to the point. So he asked the
chicken if she’d like to come over to his
side, and she said sure.

Erwin Schrodinger: The chicken doesn’t
cross the road. Rather, it exists
simultaneously on both sides…..just don’t
peek.

Charles Coulomb: The chicken found a
similar chicken on this side of the road to
be repellent.

John Bell: Since there are no local hidden
chickens, any hidden chickens you find must
have come from far away. They therefore
surely must have crossed at least one road
on their way here.

Henry Cavendish: My dear chicken, I have
calculated with the utmost detail and
precision the density of your insides. Now,
for the sake of my precious sanity, I beg
you, stop that incessant clucking and be
gone!

Arthur Compton: There were a bunch of
chickens waving at me on this side of the
road, but then a car came along and they all
scattered to the other side. The funny thing
is that the ones that ended farthest away
were still waving at me a few minutes later.
So apparently, the ones that scattered the
most had the longest waves.

Hans Geiger: I don’t know, but I say we
count how many times it crosses!
Howard Georgi: It can cross all it wants,
but I’m going to sit here and wait until it
decays.

Edward Teller: I will build a more powerful
chicken, and it will cross the road with more
energy than any chicken before!

Oskar Klein: Actually, it can get to the
other side of the road without crossing it.

Satyendra Bose: An identical chicken
already crossed the road, so this one was
much more likely to do the same.

Wallace Clement Sabine: If you listen very
carefully, you can hear the pitter patter of
chicken feet, which implies that a chicken
must be crossing the road.

Sir David Brewster: Let me give you my
angle on this….

Galileo Galilei: The chicken crossed the road
because it put one foot in front of the
other and took a sufficient number of steps
to traverse a distance greater than or equal
to the road’s width. Note that the reason
is not because the earth is the center of
the universe. Oh, great… another jail term.

David Gross, H. David Politzer, Frank
Wilczek: The road is not wide. And at short
distances a chicken is free to do whatever
it wants.

Robert Millikan: It didn't. It made it part
way and then just sort of hovered there,
apparently feeling an equal pull in both
directions.

Nicolaus Copernicus: The chicken was
moving at a slightly different orbital speed
around the sun.

Fusion researchers: Because it knew that in
30 years it would get to the other side. [No
insult intended here. Well, at least not to
the physicists working hard with the meager
funds they've been given.]

George Francis FitzGerald: It had its
doubts, but after starting across the road,
the chicken observed that the distance to
the other side didn’t seem quite as large, so
it figured it would continue on.

Leo Szilard: First one chicken crossed. This
then caused a few more to cross, each of
which in turn caused a few more…

Johannes Kepler: I don't know. But I'm
glad it did, because as it waddled across, it
was kind enough to sweep the area of the
road with its wings. And it did so at an
astonishingly consistent rate.

Robert Pound and Glen Rebka: It was out
for a morning jog and wanted to get its
heart rate up by crossing over the crown of
the road.

Robert Hooke: At first, the chicken was
drawn across the road. But after passing
the middle, it felt an increasing desire to
return to the original side. It did end up
making it to the other side (just barely),
but then decided to return. I believe it is
still going back and forth on this.

Lisa Randall: The only thing about the
chicken we ever discuss is why it crossed
the road. There are many more dimensions
to it than that!

Norman Ramsey: I don’t know why, but I do
know that it took 4.71988362706153
seconds to get there.

Pierre de Fermat: Forget about why. I’ll
show you how it can get there in the least
amount of time.

Neils Bohr: In attempting to answer the
question by observing the chicken, I
collapsed its wavefunction to the other side.

Gustav Kirchhoff: It actually crossed the
road twice, due to a strange desire to form
a closed loop.

Louis de Broglie: Interesting, it always
seems to flap its wings an integral number
of times before it comes back.

Michael Faraday: No, again? How many
times do I have to tell it to stick to the
safety of its cage?!

Max Planck: It appears to be a white
chicken. Sorry, I deal only with black
bodies.

Sir William Hamilton: With regard to the
issue of crossing the road, the chicken
made it to the other side by taking as little
action as possible.

Hugh Everett: I don’t know, but there’s
another one over there that isn’t crossing
the road.

Edward Witten: 50 years ago, you probably
would have said there was no hope of
answering this question either.

Archimedes: I was running through the
streets yelling and screaming, and it was
only afterward that I realized I was
carrying a chicken.

Amadeo Avogadro: What, just one? I deal
only with very large chicken numberen does indeed cross the road.

Marie Curie: Good question. And one that is
much less hazardous to one’s health.
Willebrod Snell: I’m not sure, but I did
notice that when it stepped onto the road,
it changed its direction.
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss: Draw a pillbox
around the road, and consider the flux of
chickens through the box. If a chicken
leaves this side of the road, then assuming
that there are no chicken sinks or sources,
it must end up on the other side.
Johann Balmer: Why are there only two
lines in the middle of the road?
James Clerk Maxwell: Ok, Miss Chicken,
let’s figure this out together. Hold out your
right foot…. yes, that’s it…. good…. now curl
your talons…. right…. now look at your…. hold
on – you don’t have any thumbs!
Osborne Reynolds: No idea. But I can see
from the ruffled feathers that this was
turbulent chicken flow.
Karl Schwarzschild: The sad thing is, I know
I could have answered this question too.
[This one isn’t meant to be funny.]
Christian Doppler: It always sounds a bit
down when it’s heading over there, but
rather upbeat when it’s coming back.
Edwin Hubble: Strange, it seems to move
faster the farther away it gets.
Ernest Rutherford: The differential cross
section for forward chicken scattering is
quite large, so the chicken will most likely
cross the road if it was initially heading in
that direction.
Lene Hau: Well, I wish it hadn't. It cut
right in front of me while I was out for a
bike ride, chatting it up with a photon.
Stephen Hawking: Chicken fluctuations will
inevitably create a scenario where a chicken
ends up on the other side of the yellow line,
in which case there is a nonzero probability
that it will escape to the other side.
Lord Kelvin: I don’t know. But I think the
road actually starts back there a bit.
Daniel Bernoulli: Because it enjoyed flying
to the other side. Ok, wait, can someone tell
me once and for all if I’m relevant to all this
flying stuff or not?!
Robert Oppenheimer: Although it was
deemed appropriate at the time, people will
forever question whether it was correct for
the chicken to cross the road.

© 2008 by David Morin