Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Deep Thought

I'm kind of bummed that all of the easy stuff has been discovered already. Like the guy, Blaise Pascal, who discovered that air pressure decreases with altitude. You know how he figured it out? He stood at the bottom of a mountain while his brother-in-law climbed to the top, and at the same pre-determined time, they both checked their barometers. I totally could have done that! I was born 350 years too late, is the problem.

Nowadays, all the really good discoveries require PhD's and complex laboratories burrowed inside mountains in Switzerland. There's no chance that some nobody like me is going to finally crack chaos theory or whatever it is that super-geniuses work on. It's too late to be immortalized for finding the double-helix pattern of DNA, or for figuring out gravity, or knowing that water boils at 212*. Basically, anything that could be discovered by thinking really hard, it's been done, and now you have to know math and science and own a microscope to do ground-breaking work.

Maybe I should buy a microscope.

2 comments:

rachel said...

Maybe you should explore the mind. You can't use math or a microscope for that, and that is very uncharted territory :)

Michaelbrent said...

There are lots of things left to discover, but most of them revolve around breaking wind and just aren't socially acceptable for most "serious" academics. At least, that's what the Journal of Scientific Studies told me when I tried to get them to publish my "Whoopie Cushion Theorem of Singularities."