An exciting day over on Cracked, where I’m cutting loose the limiters and seeing just how much nerdy glory the internet really loves with 5 Mind-Blowing Mathematical Formulae. No claims of sexual solutions, no promises of insight into the perfect cup of coffee or bacon or coffeebacon, flat out mathematical beauty and an experiment in whether I’ll get to write more of these.

The idea that the universe is understandable is incredible. That our brains’ processing power and the structure of reality should overlap in a strings of symbols is the most amazing aspect of existence. Life itself is a sure thing compared to the coincidence of being able to deduce the rules behind your reality. Which makes it all the more tragic that so many don’t. People promulgate the idea of science and mathematics being amazing but impossible, sorcerous incantations mastered only by an elite few. This doesn’t give it an aura of power. It reduces science to the level of any other cult of authority, claiming ascendance by dint of being terrifying.

But we don’t need to be terrified of anything. We used to worship the sky because it shouted at us and set things on fire; now we can steer lightning with lasers, and don’t even have to, because a stick of copper can do the same job. We used to sacrifice living things to the gods of the harvest, because we were frightened of dying ourselves, and now we fertilise so many plants we get to choose which continent’s cuisine we want to have each night. We don’t need to be scared of anything that we can understand. And we can understand everything up to and including the edge of the universe itself. (We understand it so well that I get to use the borders of creation as a gag at the start of that article.)

We literally have the universe’s number(s). But because people think it’s boring, or hard, science is seen as just one more opinion in an argument, as opposed to the process which renders all argument obsolete, replacing it with results.

Which is very grand way to talk around an article where I make a 543 digit long dick joke. Which would be both hard and scary, too, but at least that’s the sort of thing people use the internet to look up already.