Slow News Day: A History in One Act

Lots of things happened on April 11, 1954. They must have. But the claim by a University of Cambridge-trained computer scientist that his supposedly super computer program has determined that the second Sunday in April 1954 was the most boring day since the dawn of the 20th Century is getting some attention on the Web.

Two information specialists sit at adjacent computers.

IS1: “What’s today’s date?”

IS2: “The 18th.”

IS1: “The 18th of November, 2010. Today will be significant.”

IS2: “Why?”

IS1: “We’re going to query the database.”

IS2: “We query it every day--what’s special about today?”

IS1: “We’re going to ask it to identify the least significant day in history.”

IS2: “How's that?”

IS1: “Every event in the database is associated with a particular date. So we just list the dates by the number of events associated with it, then find the one with the lowest number."

IS2: "Okay, here we go." IS2 types the query and hits Enter. Both ISs look at the result.

IS1: "There it is. Only three events occurred on April 11, 1954--the least significant day in history."

IS2: "Well ... 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. Our data set starts with 1900."

IS1: "Okay--the least significant day in the last 110 years."

IS2: "I don't know that I'd measure significance with events, necessarily--and we're only looking at events. And for that matter, the number of events doesn't necessarily correlate with significance. You could have one significant event on one day and three insignificant events on another day."

IS1: "We prejudged the significance of events when we entered them into the database. My birthday isn't in there."

IS2: "Mine is."

IS1: "It is?"

IS2: "I had to do something to entertain myself while I was doing the data entry. My dog's birthday is in there, too. And the day the music died."

IS1: "So you pissed in the pool before we went for a swim?"

IS2: "I guess you could say that. But then, I still don't think you can base significance on events. History--and news--doesn't just happen instantaneously. It unfolds."

IS1: "The action doesn't unfold neatly along the lines laid out by an arbitrary system of time and dates?"

IS2: "Exactly! I remember when I was a kid and I spent a lot of time with my coloring books, coloring careful inside the lines. Then one day--I realized that people don't have lines. Nothing in the real world does. I even asked my mother what kept colors from spilling into each other if there were no lines."

IS1: "What did she say?"

IS2: "I think she changed the subject."

IS1: "So what do we have for April 11, 1954?"

IS2: "Drum roll, please!"

IS1: "Bbbbdbddddddddddddddd ....."

IS2: "On April 11, 1954, Abdullah Atalar was born."

IS1: "Who?"

IS2: "Abdullah Atalar. He's a Turkish academic of some note."

IS1: "Very little note."

IS2: "It says here that he's the Rector of Bilkent University."

IS1: "Where's that?"

IS2: "Turkey, I assume."

IS1: "And event number 2?"

IS2: "Jack Shufflebotham died."

IS1: "Wow. That met the threshold for significance?"

IS2: "He's an English football player."

IS1: "Was ..."

IS2: "Right. Well, virtually he still exists."

IS1: "Did he at least die playing football?"

IS2: "His career ended four decades earlier."

IS1: "Well, so far April 11, 1954 is still getting my vote for least significant day ..."

IS2: "There was also a general election in Belgium"

IS1: "Possibly not even of interest to Belgians. So we have a Turkish academic ..."

IS2: "Who hadn't done anything yet. As of April 11, 1954, he was of no significance. Not even a rector. Where does that fit into the scale of infamy? Who ranks higher, nearly significant or the not yet significant?"

IS1: "An English footballer ..."

IS2: "Who did nothing that day other than ... Urkkk..." IS2 slumps over in his chair.

IS1: "And a Belgian election."

IS2 straightens up. IS2: "Not even that is an outlier--Achille van Acker had been prime minister in three previous cabinets."

IS1: "I can imagine the nightly news--'Obscure Turkish academic born--film at 11.'"

IS2: "Hey! Schrodinger's Cat!"

IS1: "Whose cat?"

IS2: "Erwin Schrodinger. He proposed a thought experiment. A cat is in a box with a vial of poison and a Geiger counter with a radiation source. The Geiger counter is rigged so that when the radiation source decays, a hamnmer is tripped, and that breaks the bottle of poison, killing the cat. After one half life of the radioactive material, there's a 50 percent chance that the device has tripped, killing the cat, and a 50 percent chance that it hasn't."

IS1: "And he did this on April 11, 1954?"

IS2: "No, he never actually did this. The point was that you wouldn't know without opening the box whether the cat was alive or dead. So until you open that box and see, the cat is simultaneously both alive and dead--a quantum state."

IS1: "So he thought of this on April 11, 1954?"

IS2: "No! The point is that by observing the cat, he forced it out of this simultaneous state and into either an alive state or a dead state. Observation affected the state of the cat. Or at least that's one interpretation."

IS1: "I'm still not following."

IS2: "You said that November 18, 2010, will be significant. And it is. Because before today, April 11, 1954, was the least significant day in the 20th century ..."

IS1: "And the beginning of the 21st ..."

IS2: "Right, and now it's not!"

IS1: "It's not?"

IS2: "No, because we've observed it--or identified it--as the least eventful day, now it has significance within the context of the time period we measured."

IS1: "You're right, even if it was the least significant day before we measured it, now, because we have, it's not."

IS2: "We changed history!"

IS1: "We invented a time machine!"

The ISs give each other high fives as the curtain falls.