Reality

So I was listening to NPR and they were talking about a recent discovery of a book that Archimedes had written and it had been erased and written over by a monk as a book of Christian prayers. So this rich guy bought it and wanted to have the text revealed but it was too old for the usual UV method so the people he had hired to do it decided they needed a particle accelerator. This was Uwe Bergmann's lucky day.

Poor Uwe Bergmann probably spent his entire youth busting his butt to be a scientist. He probably had dreams of new discoveries that would revolutionize the world and take his mind to new levels. In his dreams of tomorrow, he never thought about who would actually pay him to do this stuff. The hard reality was that a scientist studies whatever the person who is forking out the money wants him to. So he and his incredibly advanced skills of detection and discovery, together with a particle accelerator were hired to study spinach. Yup, spinach. There are people using particle accelerators to try to achieve teleportation and they're actually getting somewhere, but his benefactors were interested in the iron content of spinach. I don't know why, maybe they wanted to know if they could make a spinach robot that would be strong like Popeye and take over the world or something, but that's not important.

So this guy is probably bored out of his skull, using his bazillion dollar equipment and skills to study spinach for some eccentric wealthy person when he read about the Archimedes discovery and they were talking about trying to pick out forgeries and that somehow iron in the ink was significant. Man, the heavens must have opened and shone down into that guy's lab that day. He called up these folks and said that he was studying iron with a particle accelerator and could he pretty please leave his crappy job for their cool one. Lucky him, he got the job.

Can you imagine? All that potential and they're bound by whatever retard has the money to fund a study of dust bunnies or whatever that particular rich wackadoo is obsessed with. Oh man, what a life. THAT'S why there are mad scientists. Aren't there?