Physicists Examine The Eurovision Song Contest

I missed this when it was news earlier this month, but a group of physicists at Oxford University have published a paper on Connections, cliques and compatability between countries in the Eurovision Song Contest.

The paper is quite interesting, but what has been really fascinating are the howls of anguish from social scientists who have got quite huffy about physicists muscling in on their turf. As Henry Kissinger is reputed to have said: “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

Really, life is too short…