High Cognitive Minds

Autobiography of an Autodidact, Steven Utley

"For reasons which now escape me but must have been pretty darn important at the time, I once needed to know the definition of “Planck-Wheeler length.” Perhaps it was just the name. Perhaps I supposed that it must be something really special and magnificent if two people (named Planck and Wheeler, I also supposed) had been required for the job of measuring it."

"In school I was a total washout at science, never attaining even the minimal skill necessary to clear out the chemistry lab with a stink bomb. College-level biology (a required course) found me chronically incapable of recalling the four different kinds of purine or pyrimidine bases to which the RNA molecule’s string of ribose and phosphate groups are linked; uracil was, for some reason, easy to remember, but as for the others — adeline, guano, and ovaltine? The professor didn’t think so, and probably he was right."

"In any event, many long years afterward, for whatever damn reason, I looked up 'Planck-Wheeler length' and discovered, as had Planck and Wheeler and who knows how many others before me, that it is 1.62 x 10-33 centimeters, 'the length scale below which' (according to my source, Nova) 'space as we know it ceases to exist and becomes quantum foam.' "

Quantum foam naturally lead to singularities, and finally Utley was content, or so he thought. "I was content, that is, for a while. Then I began, irresistibly, to wonder what in fudge singularities might be — which brings up another problem with real actual science. Learning one fact usually means having to go chasing off after 837 or even as many as 83733 other facts.

"That, anyway, is how I became the compulsive autodidact I am today, helplessly pursuing my self-education wherever it may lead, and without a coed in sight."

And so it goes.

For the rest of the story: http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue185/autodidact.html