May 10, 2013

• The Scientist and the Crazy Lover

  In the beginning there was data, and it was good.

  A torrent of data, seeing, feeling, hearing data, constant and complex, filling the senses to satisfaction. Finally, the sample size was large enough, the study could be run. The scientist smiled, taking it all in, laughed, then exulted. The lover continued responding, initiating, creating. It was intoxicating, it was fulfilling, and finally the neurons fire and tingle and the information rushes from the senses to the brain and the scientist is delirious with data, enthralled with emotion...

  In the middle there was data, and it was noisy.

  Noisy data, confusing in its patterns, contradictory in its conclusions, and the scientist rebalanced his spreadsheet, reloaded her computer. Certainly there was logic, certainly this was just a matter of more study, redoubling one's efforts, recalculating one's steps. The scientist must try harder to understand. The scientist was disappointing himself, disappointing her lover, why couldn't this work? Perhaps there was a mistake, there were books to study, there were colleagues to inquire from, the experiment must work, the scientist was so close, the lover was providing so much data, why couldn't he just solve for X...

  In the end there was data, and it was X, and the value of X did not exist.

  The scientist broke down, sobbing among her papers, looking up at the whiteboard. The whiteboard held the last calculations, performed in the absence of the crazy lover. No data, no memories, no grand theories, just a series of arrows, arrows that should lead from point A to point B, but that instead led in a loop to E, the End, the end of the experiment, the realization that X did not exist, that there was no solution to the mystery and magic, that behind each door was another door to the vast cavern of nothingness....End was reached. X did not exist. The crazy lover was not X, to be known, but EX...the end of X.

  • 5:06 pm
  • 1 Comment