Underpants On The Outside

One of the worst things about being a scientist (aside from the crippling loneliness) is that you will often struggle to explain any of your accomplishments to people outside of your field.  When scientists made a bar of copper invisible to microwaves it was very cool, but the only way they could convey that was by suggesting that one day in the near future, anyone would be able to buy their very own Cloak of Invisibililty.  (Bringing me one step closer to my life-long dream of actually becoming my D&D character.) 

Back in college, my hardest project, by far, was building a CD player.  By comparison, the second hardest project was building a robot car, and that was so frustrating we gave it the Tourette-like name of  “Cockfuck!”,  the bizarre profanity one of my lab partner’s kept yelling whenever the car would veer off course and collide at full speed with some stationary object, like his ankle.  For the record, the rest of us never questioned the origin of Cockfuck - the project was so frustrating that no previous combination of obscenities seemed sufficient.

And that was nothing compared to the shitcunt of a CD player I had to build.  At one point, my lab partner and I worked for thirty hours straight with nothing but a 3 a.m. trip to Denny’s for a break.  Never have I ordered a Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity with such dejection.  Yet my girlfriend couldn’t understand what was so hard. 

“We’re building a CD player.”

“Is that dangerous with the laser and everything?”

“Well, no.  We’re not building that.  We already have a CD drive from a PC.  We have to turn it into an audio CD player.”

“You have to build the speakers?”

“…no.  Just the controls.  You know, play, stop, skip forward, skip backwards…that stuff.”

“What’s so hard about that?”  [Starts pushing buttons on her CD player randomly, as if I don’t understand the inherent ease of buttons.]

“For the record, we also have to do volume control.”

“Oooh.”  [Starts turning volume knob on her boombox back and forth.]  “Move over, Professor Hawking.”

I wasn’t about to explain how we were actually controlling the volume digitally.  It was a good deal more difficult than an analog control, but the explanation would have required me to admit that we were still using buttons, and she had already established that those were even easier than the knob.

I was reminded of this conundrum by a story yesterday on CNN.com.  More, after the jump.

PALO ALTO, California (AP) — An international team of mathematicians says it has cracked a 120-year-old puzzle that researchers say is so complicated that its handwritten solution would cover the island of Manhattan…

You see???  Paper CAN beat rock.  Still, you have to wonder about any scientific breakthrough where the most interesting aspect is how much work went into it.  I’m pretty sure the person who discovered fire didn’t turn to the next guy and say, “Hey, I figured something really great out.  How great, you ask?  Let me put it this way: if you added up all the twigs I used figuring out this thing, you’d have over three trees!  What?  No, don’t worry about the thing; I’ll get to that in a second.   Did you hear what I said??? THREE TREES!!!”

Lie (pronounced Lee) groups were invented by 19th-century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie in his study of symmetrical objects, especially spheres, and differential calculus.

The E8 group, which dates to 1887, is the most complicated Lie group, with 248 dimensions, and was long considered impossible to solve.

I said the same thing about Zork.  Now while I’m sure the high-fives flew fast and furious, I wonder how many knew what they were high-fiving about, and how many heard the commotion, came over, and just got into the contagious high-five spirit:

“To say what precisely it is is something even many mathematicians can’t understand,” said Jeffrey Adams, the project’s leader and a math professor at the University of Maryland.

Oh.  Well, since I’m too dumb to understand it, I wish there was some way they could illustrate how amazingly awesome this is…

The problem’s proof, announced Monday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the researchers four years to find. It involves about 60 times as much data as the Human Genome Project.

Which as we all know, required processors 2 kajillion times faster than the average PC, which as we all know, has more computing power than NASA needed for the moon landing.  Think about that, morons.  And just in case that’s not clear enough for you…

When stored in highly compressed form on a computer hard drive, the solution takes up as much space as 45 days of continuous music in MP3 format.

So they built a big iPod?  I’m still confused.  Isn’t there some simile they could use?

“It’s like a Mount Everest of mathematical structures they’ve climbed now,” said Brian Conrey, director of the institute.

Much better.  Conrey continued, “Only slightly less significant is the effort put forth by our interns in compiling these statistics, without which we’d never get any grant money.  They also inform me that in terms of man-hours, these statistics took longer than the Sears Tower.   And more paperwork than the tax returns for the entire state of Wisconsin.  Wow.  I never realized.  That really is something.”

Surely this discovery will usher in a new age, one of enlightenment and technological marvels we’ve only dreamed of.  We are on the verge of the next step in mankind’s evolution!  Prepare yourself, Planet Earth!

The calculation does not have any obvious practical applications but could help advance theoretical physics and geometry, researchers said.

What I meant was, prepare yourself…for March Madness!  A couple days ago, I’d have bet a lot of money that a bunch of nerds at MIT wouldn’t ever give me blue balls.  Shows what I know.

But no matter how difficult it is to explain today, it has to be nothing compared with what ol’ Sophus went through.

“Honey, I came up with an amazing theory today!”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t understand. But it’ll be a hundred and twenty years before anyone is able to figure it out!”

“Swell.  Meanwhile, I have dysentery.”

“It’s never enough for you, is it?”