As I was nearly knocked unconscious by a falling CRC Handbook, I thought this would be a very amusing way to die for a chemist. So I was trying to think of the most amusing/ironic/fated way for a chemist to die. I came up with the ultimate cross of simple safety procedures being ignored, years of silly warnings having fallen on deaf ears, and something not breaking that always breaks: slipping on spilled water and being stabbed through the heart by a Pasteur pipette.
Similarly a Zamboni driver losing control of his car at high speeds on an icy highway.
So do you have any better suggestions for amusing deaths?
A physicist being slugged by a slug?
Um… I got nothing.
Marie Curie died as a result of long-term exposure to radiation.
Or is that the opposite of ironic?
I was at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on the weekend, and took in a presentation about inking by Jeff Smith. He was wearing a brace on his drawing hand. Apparently carpal tunnel syndrome is common among cartoonists.
Okay, maybe that’s not as ironic as being killed by a falling bottle of ink, but still…
Steve Irwin’s death from freak stab by a stingray barb was a pretty ironic way to go for a “Crocodile Hunter” who had made a career out of confronting far more lethal beasts.
Movie stuntman dying of a freak trombone accident.
For an engineer of any sorts, a death that results from failing to take into account some purely mathematical consideration would be delightfully ironic - say, getting fried because a certain conductor wasn’t smooth enough to satisfy Stoke’s Theorem.
For a quantum physicist, being pulverized by an explosion while partaking in a mexican wave at a sports event: “Oh look! Now he’s a particle and a wave!”
Best of all, naturally, would be a philosopher of metaphysics working himself to death… But come on, what are the chances of that happening?