It turns out that if you place a monkey with a typewriter on a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, it will necessarily produce the entire works of Shakespeare excluding Macbeth. This curious fact is known to probability theorists and physicists as "The Macbeth Exception," and has been documented a number of times since its discovery several years ago. It just goes to show you that no matter how much we learn about math and science, there will always be more surprising things out there waiting to be discovered.
The Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth_Exception
a recent article in Time Magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9671,1597441,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar
and several occurrences in Popular Science:
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2006-09/new-discoveries-in-math
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2007-07/monkeys-at-light-speed
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2008-06/the-future-is-now
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)