(July 2, 2017 at 9:40 pm)Losty Wrote: (July 2, 2017 at 1:12 pm)LastPoet Wrote: Everyone knows its 42. Duh.
I plugged in 42 in my handy dandy stimulator and discovered that helicopters really do have the same mass as the entire water content of earth
Here's a true story, only very slightly embellished:
It was a dreary friday afternoon in November, and grad student Alex K was still in his sparsely decorated office studying for his thesis defense. The smell of ramen noodles hung in the air. Everyone else had already left, but Alex K had decided to re-derive the age of the universe since the big bang as an exercise in order to familiarize himself with the Friedman equations, and he wasn't going home before that was done. Sipping some atrociously bitter lukewarm covfefe that had been sitting in the office covfefe maker since breakfast, he contemplated the few short lines of code he had written in order to solve the equations for the time. This is it, he thought, plugging in the numbers such as the temperature of the cosmic microwave background, the dark energy and the current expansion rate. Outside, the rain had just intensified, and even the flock of crows that always occupied the campus in the flat hills above the meandering Main river and the adjacent fields, had sought cover under the dimly lit bicycle stand across the path. He clicked the "evaluate" button on his trusty 2009 Dell notebook and waited. The computer awoke from its slumber when after a few moments, finally, a short beep signalled that it had found a solution. Alex K looked up from his notes and froze, almost forgetting to swallow the atrocious covfefe remaining in his mouth. In front of him, a black number was looming on the pale background of the 15" monitor.
6000 years.
The aspiring physicist closed his eyes and opened them again. He had read that in dreams, written numbers and text would always change if you looked away for a moment because of the brain's inability to retain such abstract visuals. But no, there it still was, unchanged. As the enormity of his discovery began to dawn on him, he broke out his Sony Ericsson mobile phone and texted his wife: "Creationists right after all. Friedman eq. age of universe 6000 years. Atheism finished". Where was a cup of fresh covfefe when you needed one. He moved his folder with Richard Dawkins fanfic into the trash, opened the netscape web browser and typed the words "templeton grant" into the altavista search engine. Screw godlessness, he thought. He was going to become rich and famous after all. It was dark now, but he could hear that the heavy rain had reduced to a drizzle on the tin roof of the cheaply built extension building into which the grad student offices had been moved the year before. He looked back down onto his notes, when it suddenly hit him. Ah, the Hubble constant was a dot over a, not a dot. He put two characters into his computer code and reran the algorithm. 14000000000. The 6'2" tall physicist exhaled slowly and put down his cup. That was close, atheism, he mumbled to himself. That was close.