Infinite Monkey Theory

Infinite Monkey Theory
Current mood: amused
Category: Blogging

It was late last night before I finally settled to bed and I was giggling off to bed with snippets regarding The Infinite Monkey Theory. My poor wife must have thought I'd been up reading Fear and Loathing, huffing ether. It was almost 1am when I finally entered my room to settle into bed. She was sitting there clicking away at her computer. My first thought was the stupidity of typing about monkeys a floor below while she sat there. She is beautiful.

My smirk begged a question from her: "What have you been up to?"

"I wrote a blog. I don't even know what it is about. It does however, involve the a reference to the inifinite.... HAHAHA!" I couldn't even bring myself to say it. If you put an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet. Something about the idea of monkeys typing out some of the best literature I've read is unspeakably funny. Koko is a clever ape. She signs well. Even paints. I liked Magilla gorilla. He was a snappy dresser. Chicks dig an ape with a hat and tie. Still, my first contact with the species was the ape house at the Detroit Zoo in the 1970s. These were your typical tire-swinging, feces-throwing apes. Like human prisoners, I wouldn't imagine a sonnet coming out of them. Just excrement.

So I tried to compose myself and explain the infinite monkey theory. I'd heard the theory before but couldn't remember where. It was maybe something Carl Sagan mentioned in the foreword to A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. At the time I just considered another interesting thought experiment. Statistical mechanics are not the sort of thing I visualize well and this helped make a scalar relationship to something I knew and respected. I didn't give it a second thought until last night. It wasn't funny until I looked it up.

It turns out, for instance Emile Borel was the person who came up with the idea as the explaination of how a kind of statistical tool worked. I don't think he could have imagined the cult this theory has spawned since. One story proudly pointed out that Borel's theory was wrong: it had been tested. They put a typewriter in a room and wanted to see what would happen. Not suprisingly, they hit it with rocks, urinated on it, and eventually got around to hitting a few keys, mostly A and S. This is why The Life of Brian is funny. Sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor. Sometimes you have to admit you can only imagine the perfect circle and not draw it.

So at 1am, in bed with my beautiful wife, we did it. We talked about infinite monkey theory. Eventually I could describe it finally without laughing. Then it was quiet for a minute. "What are you thinking about?", she said.

"Something about infinity doesn't make sense to me."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. You know infinity... well as I see it you could have within each individual number, like 1, you could have an infinity of numbers that approach 2, but never reach it. You know, by just adding another digit 1.9, 1.99, 1.999, etc. One is suppose to be a finite number. The only one that seems to be not like this is zero. Its just zero."

We talked for a minute whether or not this meant anything. Who knows. It was late. I was laughing still at the thought of the cast of Planet of the Apes acting out bits of Romeo and Juliet. Eventually it all faded to black. No infinity, no monkey, no theory. Just nothingness.