Caltech Laboratory Animals Discover Secret to Life, the Universe, and Everything

March 28, 2006

Taking the campus completely by surprise, physicists at the California Institute of Technology announced today that a pair of white mice from one of the biology laboratories has discovered the secret to life, the universe, and everything. In a sudden epiphany, they also announced a reorganization of the department's research groups, with the elimination of the elementary particle physics group as its primary goal.

Known only as "Boris" and "Natasha," Caltech's rodent prodigies said they were inspired last December by the second problem on the Physics 1a final. The solution to the previously unsolved problem implied their Grand Unified Theory.

According to Natasha, "Followers of late author Douglas Adams's teachings believed that 42 was the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, but that's really only true in appropriate units--basically, one needs to measure everything so that the speed of light, Planck's constant, 2, and pi are all unity. Then one has to apply the miracle operator twice. (A few of the Phys 1 students actually figured out this last part on their exam solutions.)"

Added Boris, "The really hard part was deriving from first principles the question that goes with the answer. Many years of hard work by experimental and theoretical physicists have left hardly any clues, so we kind of had to start from scratch on this one. After a few months of knocking our brains together and listening to new wave music, we managed to figure out that the question is 'Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?' It's pretty trivial, actually."

Through a spokesperson, Boris and Natasha released the following statement about their prospects of winning Nobel Prizes: "We don't go to bed thinking about it or anything, but it would be nice. After all, it ties the theory together. Besides, who can refuse a free trip to Europe?"

Asked what would be done with the money liberated by reorganizing the physics department, an anonymous member of the faculty said, "I'm not entirely sure at the moment, but my preliminary thinking is that we should increase the salaries of the postdoctoral scholars in our condensed matter group." Speculation around campus is that the displaced physicists could start working on problems in biology or perhaps become extras on Numb3rs.

No other members of Caltech's physics faculty responded to interview requests, but an excited exclamation of "Hawking owes me two dollars for this one!" was overheard in Lauritsen.

Contact: Mason Porter '98, Postdoctoral Scholar, Condensed Matter Physics, (Apr) ilF-ools, mason@caltech.edu