This one time, at math camp

May 1, 2009

You might wonder what the odds are I'd have a photo of Rodin's Balzac. Heh-heh, I said Balzac. PHOTO: Leigh Hedger, Nov. 20, 2006

There comes a time when the bad jokes of our past come back to haunt us. Such as bad jokes used to get out of figuring out probability equations.

One scorching summer back in the eighth grade, some wizened elders had felt it suitable to lock their children up at Hanover College for a week of AC-less math during a 17-year locust riot.

Who could blame us for getting tired of wondering about someone’s sack full of two yellow, three red and four giant, hairy blue balls? When asked what the probability was of pulling out one yellow, one red and one blue ball, the instructor was not impressed by my response: 50/50, you either will or you won’t. Pure logic.

The instructor was less impressed when I became only the first student to start giving that answer.

When they pulled out the giant-bubble maker, it momentarily entertained us to see it swallow fellow students whole, but not enough to put our minds back to task.

I still was chosen last for basketball teams — yes, at math camp — but I have happy memories of my minor rebellion. As we know, though, it’s all fun and games until reason gets chopped off at the probability-ball sack. Never in my wildest dreams would that kind of intellectually uncurious logic be used to argue against real science — real science like, oh, particle physics. Much less to be coming from a science teacher presumably earning tax dollars to wreak havoc on the brains of our youth.

Will it rain today? It’s a 50/50 chance — it will or it won’t. Ha, ha. But what are the chances that the large hadron collider will collapse into a micro black hole and convert the entire planet into a bit more sizable black hole? Or perhaps into a never-ending conversion of everything we know and love into strangelet particles?

Science-ish teacher Walter Wagner answered that question in an interview with The Daily Show’s John Oliver. As Wagner put it, “If you have something that can happen and something that won’t necessarily happen, it’s going to either happen or not happen. So our best guess is one in two.”

Beautiful logic. For a locust-weary eighth-grader to poop on. They did show Wagner pointing at a Periodic Table — at something in the transition metals — so that proves he knows what he’s talking about.

Later in the interview, Oliver applies Wagner’s theory to breeding: If the two men end up being the only humans left, they might as well try breeding. As Wagner’s Theorem predicts, there’s a 50/50 chance it’ll work. Oliver didn’t make that point to start an argument, though. As he put it, “I don’t want my last words in this life to be, ‘Oh shut up, Walter.'”

If only he would.

Enjoy the full interview here:

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