In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

This computer makes me all frowny with pure nougat-filled hatred!

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.

He didn’t see her face, not then. The view was strictly from the rear. But, oh, what a rear that was! It rolled in five directions. Ted had been married and faithful for seven years – but he wasn’t blind. And even though he was a scientist, he never once tried to estimate the relevant equations and boundary conditions for that rolling gait. (A quartic polynomial, since you ask, but there were transcendent elements in there, as well; and the complex and irrational. Unsolvable – as Galois proved. But that’s women for you.)

…one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Not if the use of the brain was the sexual characteristic. Homo erectus males would wander out onto the plains and start reciting the multiplication tables. Whoever got highest got swarmed by females.

Then it got out of hand, and eventually turned into calculus and the categorization of finite division algebras. Very much like peacock tails.

Except by then someone had invented money, and that had taken over as the secondary sexual characteristic which dominates our society.

Somewhere, deep in the heart of every mathematician, there is a niggling little recognition that something is not coming out right. But they blame it on whichever theorem they’re working on, and go back to work.

This explains a lot about mathematicians.

There are only two things in the universe that violate the law of conservation of energy; one is the Road Runner, the other is the Coyote. You can’t do it, and neither can I.

One thing they don’t tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions … like a state of sheer terror.

We have all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million
typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true.