When eminent physicist Stephen Hawking announced that science is bogus and that scientific phenomena are little more than the whims of “twisted, magical gnomes, whose penchant for mischief is exceeded only by their alcoholism,” college student Jennifer Jareau was not surprised. She witnessed two of the gnomes firsthand, six days before Hawking’s shocking revelation, bullying her chemistry professor, Dr. Spencer Reid.
“After several frustrating exams, I’d gone to Dr. Reid’s office, hoping he could clarify some points about chemistry,” Jareau said. “For starters, what is chemistry? Is it a myth? The story of students who will never succeed in pushing the rock up the hill, no matter how hard they try? It ain’t understandable, whatever it is.”
When Jareau entered Reid’s office, she realized the myth was more real than she had imagined. “Dr. Reid had an executive desk toy on his desk, the one with a row of steel balls hanging in a frame. The gnomes had shoved his face into the frame, with half the balls on each side of his head, and the outermost balls taking turns thwacking the sides of his head.” Jareau starts laughing. “Sorry,” she says. “The sight of that was really funny. And the gnomes…they were funny, too. They had voices like helium, so when they were screaming at Dr. Reid, it was all kinds of awesome.”
According to Jareau, two wizened, six inch tall figures stood on Dr. Reid’s desk, berating him. “We must have more tears,” the gnomes shouted, but between their high pitched keening and the balls wedged in Dr. Reid’s ears, he could not hear them. Reid finally exclaimed, exasperated, “You need more physics for that! I am not a physicist! But this would be a fitting ordeal for one. Why don’t you shove Dr. Hawking in here?” “Fine! We will! Good day, sir,” one of the gnomes said as the other kicked Reid’s coffee cup over in a huff, soaking Reid’s papers. Then the pair ripped a hole in the fabric of reality itself, closing it behind them as they exited, as gnomes do.
Jareau continues, “After I helped Dr. Reid extract his face from the desk toy, I asked him, ‘What’s up with the gnomes?’ ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘If the truth comes out, my cushy professor gig will be over! Can’t let that happen.’ Then he saw his coffee drenched papers and cried, ‘My notes! How will I keep the lies straight without my notes!’ Then his hands flew up to his mouth, as if he could keep what he’d said from flying out. Then he said, ‘Of course, “cushy” is a relative term. Sometimes I yearn for the easy life of a writer.” Jareau, an English major, sighs. “If people knew that writing is 99% b.s, the cushy life I’m trying to build for myself would evaporate. We agreed not to spill the beans about each other’s phony baloney career scams. And things were great until Stephen Hawking opened his big mouth and ruined everything. Err. you know what I mean.”
Hawking’s announcement, aside from a good deal of skepticism, raised two questions. First, why Hawking? As Hawking himself puts it, “I announced the truth about science through the voice synthesizer that allows me to speak while surrounded by the machinery that keeps me alive. I will never be the most convincing spokesman for the idea that science is bogus. But every other scientist turned the gnomes down. Understandable, not wanting their sham lives exposed.”
Hawking resisted the gnomes himself, only giving in when his pride was grievously injured. “I am the smartest human being alive,” he says, “and that makes me a proud and easily humiliated man.Hawking takes a moment to collect himself. “When my daughter Lucy told me she was going to be a novelist, I could not allow her to waste her life. I put my foot down. Err, you know what I mean. Our conflict escalated until I exclaimed, ‘Lucy, I am your father!’ in the voice of Darth Vader. The gnomes messed with my voice synthesizer! Lucy collapsed on the floor, she was laughing so hard, and I knew that I had lost her respect forever. I agreed to do as the gnomes wished.” Hawking made his announcement the following night.
The second question is why did the gnomes reveal themselves at all? Dr. Reid sheds some light. “The gnomes are drunks, but the only liquor that satisfies them is distilled from the tears of frustrated students. The greater the frustration, the higher the proof, so all of ‘science’ was concocted to push student aggravation to the maximum and produce excellent gnome booze. The periodic table, e equals mc squared, sp3 hybridization, all nonsense designed to make students cry. And the system worked when students were eager to prove themselves. But when they stopped attaching their worth to accomplishment, their tears dried up and sober gnomes aren’t happy gnomes. Basically, pop psychology will doom us all.”
When asked if our doom will arise from pop psychology's contribution to the moral decay of a decadent society, Reid says, "No. What I mean is that if the bulk of the world's students aren't regularly weeping in frustration by 2029, the gnomes will crash an asteroid into the planet and kill us all. We need to focus on getting students excited about science again---and make it even more incomprehensible. Our students' failures will save us!" Reid seems taken aback by what he has just said. "Holy cow," he says, "this world is stupid!"
Jareau agrees. "So they just made science minors mandatory for everyone who isn't a science major," she says. "I was weeks away from being done with science forever! Excuse me," she says, as tears fill her eyes. "I think I'm going to cry."
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