Did you know that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a Ph.D. and used to do research in quantum chemistry? I did not. (Via Jennifer Ouellette)

  • Brainspore

    [Insert "budgetary black hole" joke here.]

    • digi_owl

      How about some quantum accounting?

  • http://twitter.com/JeremyTaxman Jeremy Taxman

    Meh.

  • http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com robcat2075

    I did not know that.  Who would be some other current or past world leaders with advanced degrees in a science?

    • Jonathan Badger

      Goodluck Jonathan (awesome name), president of Nigeria, has a Ph.D. in Zoology.

    • TrevorSweet

      Thatcher was a chemist before entering politics.

      • dnebdal

        Working on ice cream, of all things – I think she got a patent on something for making cold ice cream softer  or some such.

        • digi_owl

          Now that’s one way to sweeten the pill…

  • René Knecht

    Yes, and her husband is a world renown chemistry professor.

  • http://www.aarongilliland.com/ Aaron Gilliland

    So Europe simultaneously is and is not in zur scheisshole?  How Zen.

    • TheMudshark

       Did you mean “im Arsch”?

      • http://www.aarongilliland.com/ Aaron Gilliland

        I’m not arsch.  YOU ARE.  

        Also, I don’t speak German.  I dance it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/nelladarren Christine Hintermeyer

    Don’t know what the contempt of the headline is supposed to express. Physicists make bad politicians because only bad actors are good at being leaders?!

    • Brainspore

      You saw the headline as contemptuous? I saw it as genuinely interesting.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      Thank you for taking the BB Rorschach test.  Your results are in the mail.

  • dioptase

    Chemist, eh?  That gives me an idea ….

    Walter White for President!

    • ocker3

       He’s got a Brilliant plan to generate new revenue in the first quarter of his administration

  • arsphenamine

    Not the first time a quantum physics/chemistry-type jumped ship to Economics.  Koopmans derived his eponymous theory about electron orbital energies and ionization potentials, turned 24, then entered economics, eventually winning the 1975 Nobel Prize in the field.

    • digi_owl

      Nobel prize my ass, bankers patting their pet economists on the back is what it is.