How the Martians Discovered Algebra

 

 

It is a little known historical fact that, early in the 20th century, Albert Einstein briefly established contact with beings from the Red Planet and learned of the extremely odd development of their scientific and mathematical knowledge, relative to our own.

 

It seems that a crash program was established to discover and develop alternative energy sources, and that the directives to the researchers were very simple and direct: identify the form of matter that contains the most energy. Moreover, due to the absence in the Martian civilization of any form of mathematics higher than basic arithmetic, no purely theoretical approach to this problem was possible. It would have to be done, sample by sample (in much the same way that Thomas Edison tried to find a practical light bulb).

 

On the plus side, the Martians were possessed of extremely finely nuanced sense organs, which were capable of assessing not only the mass of any given sample of matter, but also the potential energy locked within. The procedure followed for this research program was very basic: collect the sensory observations, divide the amount of potential energy observed by the respective mass, and display the amounts in a table. Once all feasible materials were examined in this manner, the answer to the Martian energy problems would leap from the table with all the power of direct perception: the numerically largest ratio would signal the material that would save their dying civilization.

 

Before even a modest fraction of the total possible samples were examined, however, an interesting observation was made. All of the ratios were identical! What's more, the values were equal to the square of the velocity of electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum!! In all cases, the amount of ENERGY locked in the sample DIVIDED BY the MASS of the sample was EQUAL TO the SQUARE OF the VELOCITY of ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION in a vacuum. Once it was suspected that this ratio held universally, regardless of the nature of the sample of matter, it was proposed that it be elevated to the status of a law of nature and expressed as an equation between the two basic values which varied and their ratio which was always the same.

 

But what a cumbersome equation! And the Martians didn't have a lot of energy to spare for such tongue-twisting locutions, so the Law of Conservation of Verbiage was invoked. It was proposed that letters be used in place of the words and phrases to which the arithmetically-bound creatures had hitherto been limited. This innovation spread like wildfire and led to the development of the method by which a deductive validation was eventually found for the Law of Mass/Energy Equivalence. Such was the strange account of the cockeyed development of the theoretical sciences on Mars, as revealed to Einstein by his visitors.

 

The burning question now being restlessly pondered by a small group of historians on our own planet is to what extent Einstein's own work in physics was made possible only by what he learned from the Martians. He was fond of saying "Chance favors the prepared mind." Was his extensive preparation in need of an extraterrestrial "jump-start," or could he have come up with E = mc-squared on his own? The most reasonable (though by no means decisive) indication that he could have done so is found in the power of what Einstein knew so well from his school days, but which the Martians were able to grasp through only the most excruciating efforts in an emergency situation—namely, algebra. This is the gist of the growing consensus among the few who are aware of the Martian conundrum. But perhaps this belief is itself merely an artifact of the bias in our own civilization toward deductive, abstract approaches in seeking new knowledge.....

 

--Gerbis Rosell, Director

Terran Historical Deconstruction

(Roger Bissell, October 29, 1997)