There’s a new website called “LOL My Thesis,” where people who have written a thesis in university reduce their thesis to just one sentence. The results can be pretty funny, for example:
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“Sometimes organic farmers should fertilize their potatoes, sometimes not.”
“In the 15th and 16th century it was hip to write birthday poems for dead people.”
“Confessing to witchcraft in the 16th century wasn’t likely to save your life but it did give you a chance to spill somme juicy gossip about your neighbors.”
“We hate nails scraping on a blackboard because it simulates the sound of a baby crying, but way better.”*
And that’s just from the first few pages. There are several more pages of amusing one-sentence summaries like that.
Dopers who have written a thesis, would you be able to condense it down to 1 or 2 sentences?
All college theses and dissertations boil down to the same single sentence.
“See, I’m just as able to write 500 pages of meticulously-formatted bullshit as you all were, so gimme the fuckin’ [del]piece of parchment[/del] job ticket.”
At least these conclusions stand up. I wrote a final paper for a political science class my freshman year in which I concluded that the turbulent, violent situation between the Spanish government and ETA would never change.
One week later? Ceasefire declared. Thank goodness it had already been graded.
“Sesbania sericea does everything like an average legume but we were lucky enough to find out that it develops mycorrhizal associations under water so it looks like I might actually graduate.”
Unless I can break a law of quantum mechanics, my experiment will never succeed; I’ve proven that the law of quantum mechanics is incorrect, but my experiment will still never succeed.
My dad was in military civil service for most of his postwar life, and he boiled the endless papers and reports down to one story:
Researchers taught a grasshopper to jump when they said, “Jump!” Then they cut off its front legs. “Jump!” The grasshopper jumped, a little awkwardly. They cut off its middle legs. “Jump!” The grasshopper flopped over in an attempt to jump. They cut off its rear legs. “Jump!” The grasshopper did nothing.
It was an erroneous application of the uncertainty principle that caused people to underestimate the ultimate limit of detection for a classical force operating on a harmonic oscillator. Quantum mechanics imposes no limit on this, as long as you have the freedom to arbitrarily prepare the initial state of the oscillator.
