SIMPLE IS HARD


BIG RING


Student-people take normal matter drops and make them fly around the Big Ring almost as fast as light. (Image courtesy of CMS Experiment/CERN)


LESS IS MORE Ten one day in January 2013, I stumbled on the Ten Hun- dred Words of Science challenge—a website collecting people’s descriptions of their jobs written using only the most common 1,000 words in English.


Te format was inspired by a cartoon by Randall Munroe, the creator of the XKCD website. Tis is a humorous site with geeky sticklike cartoons, often revolving around physics, maths, com- puter science and other technical subjects. Randall had drawn a picture of the Saturn V moon rocket (or “Up-Goer Five”), and labeled its parts using only the 1,000-words list.


Tat got me thinking: Perhaps this was the new language I had been looking for! And perhaps it could be used to talk about everything in the universe, not just my job.


IN SO MANY WORDS ... “Te Edge of the Sky” is the result of that small eureka moment: a short book that follows a female scientist (“Student-Woman”)


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as she spends one night at one of the largest telescopes (“Big- Seer”) on Earth (“Home-World”), and recounts the tale of how we got to understand the universe (“All-Tere-Is”) and of its many outstanding mysteries. All of it using only 707 words out of the allowed 1,000.


In the simple, straightforward language of my book, this is how the Higgs boson was discovered:


Tere is a city in a land full of safe places to put your money in. People there know how to make sweet, dark bars that make your mouth water. Tey build tiny wood houses that tell the time with the song of a little flying animal, also made of wood.


Near that city, student-people have built a large ring under the ground. It would take you over five hours to walk around that Big Ring.


Student-people take normal matter drops and make them fly around the Big Ring almost as fast as light.


Army AL&T Magazine


January–March 2015


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