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
1 comment:
Actually, friend, you’re behind the times, the Macbeth exception was popularly believed through out the early nineties, but has been partially disproved. The recently late probability theorist from Princeton, Gil Hunt (famous among probability theorists for his foundational work on Markov processes), proved in 2007 that the phonetic pinion version of the Chinese translation of Macbeth will eventually appear. Sadly, Dr. Hunt died last month at the age of 92, and won’t be able to enjoy your hyperlink skills.
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