Nobels in the Street

Laugh me down from these great heights.

I’ve been living for a while now with this crazy, persistent hunch that there are Nobel Prizes just sitting there by the side of the road and everyone’s driving past looking at their phones. Anyone could simply pull over on the way home from work, pick one up, drop it in the trunk and abscond with it. But nobody does.

So I’m gonna try it myself—right here, right now. All six of my attempts should be easily digestible by any curious reader of English with a high school education—even if they didn’t pay attention. None will be any harder to read than this About page is. Though they will be longer.

They’ve all been completely written. They’re queued up and ready to go.

1. What is the shape of the thing the universe is inside of? (10/14/2024)
   — wherein I posterize the world’s smartest scientists.

2. What is religion? (10/21)
   — wherein I turn your brain inside out.

3. How does the mind work? (10/28)

   — wherein I rewrite Psych 101 with a simple, intuitive and workable model.

4. How does the universe function? (11/11)

   — wherein I describe the simple principles behind everything and how they play out around us.

5. How will we survive disinformation? (11/18)

   — wherein I single-handedly save humanity from the disinformation tsunami.

6. How will we fix education? (11/25)

   — wherein I earn myself an international holiday for triggering the greatest release of joy in human history.

Scientists Can’t Think Big

Now, here’s my reasoning (for the Nobels in the street). We’re 30+ years into the Web. The information tsunami has washed all the scientists down into very deep knowledge crevices—into the subfields of subfields of subfields of fields you and I have never even heard of.

Way down there in their little knowledge cracks, all the scientists are too busy chiseling away to climb up and look down for abstractions. Every branch in the mountain of cracks above them is an ancestor. Scientists could be asking, “What have I discovered in my crack that’s also been discovered in my subfield’s siblings’ cracks? Or in my great second cousins’ cracks? What did I inherit from up here, and what is unique to my crack?”

But they don’t climb, and they can’t ask—for very good reasons.

First of all, down where they toil away in those bottommost cracks, it’s a brutal life. I’m serious; all jobs run you ragged. Whenever the scientists get the rare chance to put down their pickaxes, they have to immediately jump onto a hamster publishing wheel. And don’t forget about the basic human need to doom scroll every now and then! There’s simply no time to climb Mt. Abstract.

And even if there were, they’d be afraid to climb it. They’re afraid of being called kooks. The big idea they climb down the mountain with won’t just get them laughed at, it’ll almost certainly get them sidelined, or cancelled. Even if their big idea is right, but not immediately-and-obviously-right, they’re doomed. This is how science protects itself. Assassinate first, investigate later. Bill Bryson’s book made this perfectly clear. Not to mention that quantum physics has its own mafia—which it’s used.

And if all that weren’t enough, scientists are so damned persnickety about facts! Every. little. claim. needs to be proven, with source cited. How can scientists possibly climb very high when they need to lug with them the tools and responsibility for dotting every i and crossing every t every step of the way? It’s absolutely exhausting. Never mind that some of the i’s and t’s are bogus, and no one knows which ones! One i, or one t, that can’t be dotted or crossed—or one that is and shouldn’t be—dooms the whole climb!

Neither Can Philosophers

So, if the scientists are out, who else is available to climb that mountain? Philosophers are the next-best prepared, you would think, but they’ve got their own mountain, and their own cracks, and all the same problems the scientists have. Plus, they all seem to be densely clustered around the morality subdiscipline these days. So the philosophers, too, are unavailable for climbing.

Nor Can Anybody Else

Next in line are the science journalists. They spend their time down in the cracks with the scientists, trying to translate the various arcane findings into readable prose for the person on the street like me. (I love you guys!) But they, too, are struggling to publish and to eat. And even if they had the time, pontificating from on high would doom their careers.

Everybody else, as far as I can determine, is either typing “No you’re wrong!!!” into their phones or is mesmerized watching other people do it. And it’s always about what was just discovered in today’s new crack.

Except Me

That left one big empty mountain of abstraction, which I now stand atop.

The Nobel attempts will come out for six “straight” Mondays starting on 10/14/2024, at precisely 4:20 AM PT, skipping the week of the American presidential elections. On Wednesdays and Fridays I’ll be entertaining you by bathing the big Nobel ideas fleetingly, yet revealingly, in the arts. Nothing too taxing on those days. And that stuff can all be skipped, of course. But then you’d be missing all the fun—that’s where you can really laugh at/with me.

Two more things.

I’m not hiding. I just want people to call me “Slip”, or “Slippin Fall”, or, best of all, “that damn Slippin Fall”. Because once I’m famous, I’m gonna wanna hang with the hip-hop artists—and I’m gonna need a name. (OK, the real reason: Should I pass as a ship in the night, as I expect I will, (but only because of that damn Mr. Beast!), I’d like to prevent the random person from stumbling across my real name here and triggering something that would end in one of my family members having to experience the sentence, “So I hear your crazy brother/father/husband finally totally lost his marbles.” Famous crackpot under my real name would be fine. Lone wolf crackpot would not.) I’m pretty sure you could figure out all the boring details of my complete unknownness with little trouble. After all, if you can’t do it, then how are the Nobel nominators and Committees gonna do it?

And finally, Slippin Fall doesn’t defend. Because he would answer every attack with the same response, smiling, laughing, throwing his hands in the air: “It’s all wrong. But it’s mostly right.”