The reason why Chicago accepted me

Excerpt from the Journal of Theoretical Physicist, Ryan Mandelbaum III
November 18th, 2088AD
Well, Journal, I found you in the back of grandfather’s closet, so I don’t know if you’re up to date with the current state of science. It’s almost the eightieth anniversary of the Large Hadron Collider’s failure to discover the Higgs boson, the ultimate panacea for the standard model. Because it was never discovered, your old owner, my grandfather Ryan Mandelbaum Sr., dedicated his life to proving its existence and to explaining how and why this universe works the way it does. Sadly, because the Higgs’ existence was put into question, physicists have been scrambling to come up with new ideas to replace the standard model, and to ultimately find a Theory of Everything.
But I’m sure you know all about that.
The scientific community is not as worried about the demise of the Standard Model as it is puzzled by the collider my grandfather funded, the Mandelbaum Super Accelerator of Anything, Real or Imaginary (MSAARI, pronounced like the misery it’s been causing me). Unlike past colliders, this one will concentrate anything, not just particles, into beams and then accelerate them to 99.9999% the speed of light. Of course in order to discover the Higgs boson, and to try to explain the universe just after the Big Bang, the experiment would need to be a super high-energy one. But c’mon, Journal, you know as well as I do that an anything collider could never work, right?
Me? I’ve been following in my grandfather’s footsteps as a theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago. I loved my grandfather, but everyone’s been so critical of his ideas that it’s been hard not to disown him. I desperately hope this collider can yield at least a few useful ideas.

December 14th 2088AD
The official opening was today. I felt so bad for my grandfather that I sat quietly in the back of the ceremony and wept. No physicist was there for a serious reason; everyone just wanted to see if the collider would be as miserable as its name suggested. For the “grand” (more like miserable) opening, a tube of red paint was fired at a tube of green paint; visible through the detector screen was a small puddle of brown paint. I couldn’t bear sitting at ceremony and left as soon as I saw the result of the experiment. I am somewhat perplexed as to what my grandfather hoped to accomplish with an Anything Collider. While most scientists at the ceremony worried that there wouldn’t be any food left at the reception, my worry was that my beloved grandfather’s collider would fail and be the brunt of every physics joke for the next hundred years.

December 15th, 2088AD
“MANDELBAUM SUPERCOLLIDER NOT SO SUPER; GIVES PHYSICISTS SOMETIHNG TO LAUGH ABOUT.” That’s how my day began, with this caustic headline in The New York Times. I will not let this be my grandfather’s legacy. I must prove everyone wrong. I am going to do something big with this accelerator.

All right, here I am, Journal. I’ve got some rope to lower myself into the detector and some dynamite to blow a hole in this thing in case I get stuck. I’m going fix the MSAARI and make sure it does what it was meant to do: Explain how this universe works and how we all got here.

This journal belonged to University of Chicago Physicist Ryan Mandelbaum III (2051-13,000,000,000 BCE) grandson of physicist Ryan Mandelbaum Sr. (1992-2071). Mandelbaum Sr. had the accelerator built in order to find a theory to replace the Standard Model of Physics, but instead, managed to give birth to the universe. From the evidence that can be gathered, Mandelbaum III tieda rope around his waist and then jumped into the accelerator holding a stick of dynamite. The result was recorded on hologram, and was shown to physicists the next day.
The hologram was slowed down by six orders of magnitude to reveal to scientists exactly what happened. Mandelbaum III and the two objects were propelled to a speed just short of the speed of light. From the stationary detector, all that could be seen was a flash of light. However, from the moving detector, designed to travel at the same pace as the beam, Mandelbaum could be seen lighting the stick of dynamite as he rocketed toward the ball of rope dangling from the interior of the detector where he had entered. The exploding dynamite gave him an extra boost and pushed his velocity just over the speed of light, what physicists originally thought was the speed limit of the universe.
The collision condensed Mandelbaum and the rope into a super dense ball about one Planck length in radius, and the previously unattainable speed of the impact shot the ball thirteen billion years into the past. The super-condensed ball was very unstable and exploded in an enormous burst of energy, leaving only little pieces of vibrating string and Mandelbaum’s remains, spreading rapidly from the force of the explosion. After viewing the hologram one Planck second at a time, it is possible to see the result of the explosion. The energy of the bang caused each piece of string to begin vibrating at a certain frequency, depending on its size. Upon even further scrutiny, it was possible to see that the pieces of string that were located just near Ryan’s heart began vibrating exactly as the string theory predicted the Higgs boson would vibrate. For this reason, the scientific community unanimously voted to change the name of the Higgs boson to the “Mandelbaum boson.”
Through a paradox originally thought to be possible only in well-written science fiction, Ryan Mandelbaum III, in order to save the reputation of his grandfather did more than just that; he created the entire universe. It pains every physicist today to think for even a second about what would have happened had Ryan not put himself into the accelerator. Instead we thank Ryan for martyring himself for the sake of humanity. Just think, if Ryan had not attended the University of Chicago, the entire universe would never have been created!

Journal donated to the Chicago Museum of Physics by the Mandelbaum family.

This is the nerdy ass essay that got me into UChicago. Woo!