The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

by A. J. Jacobs

  So anyway, that was my introduction to relativity. Over the years--in high school physics classes and the occasional pop science book--I expanded my knowledge, though not as much as you might think. And since I haven't gotten to the R's yet, the Britannica hasn't helped me much. (The Einstein entry dealt with his life--his bad grades in geography, his love of sailing--but not his theories).

  Julie and I shamelessly eavesdrop on a tour for a visiting high school group. The tour guide--a nice Asian man who took frequent sips from his plastic cup of water--is trying to spice Einstein up for his teenage audience. He says things like, "Einstein was as famous as Justin Timberlake, J. Lo and Ashton Kutcher combined." The kids seem impressed, if skeptical.

  Our guide explains something called the Michelson-Morley experiment, which proved that a beam of light projected from a moving object does not go faster than one from a stationary object. Light's a weird animal, he says. As counterintuitive as it may be, it doesn't behave like a Frisbee or softball tossed from a moving pickup truck. It behaves like nothing else.

  "Einstein said the speed of light is the same relative to any observer," says our guide. "That's the special case of relativity. If the speed of light is the same, what changes? Time."

  Whenever I feel that I'm understanding something profound, I get a little head rush that starts in the back of the neck and shoots toward my forehead. I love that head rush--I used to get it all the time back in my golden intellectual days. And right now, I'm getting a powerful one. The special theory of relativity clicked. I get it. See? That Einstein wasn't in another league from me. If I had been presented with the same data, I might well have come up with the same theory. Right?

  On the other hand, the general theory of relativity, which we tackle next, is a bit more complex. The guide talks about how the universe is like Jell-O with an unappetizing fruit cocktail mixed into it--bananas, pineapples, strawberries, you name it. "That's the general theory of relativity," he says. The high school students nod politely. "Space is like the Jell-O. Space is beautiful. We are the blobs of fruit. We mess up space. We bend space. We are the blobs." The Jell-O metaphor isn't quite working for me. No head rush this time. Maybe it's true--I'm no Einstein.

  The room we're in has a bunch of his original papers on the wall--papers scribbled with equations and notations that are light-years over my head. Well, at least I know that Berserkers fought naked. You think Einstein knew that? Probably not. Did he know that Hawthorne was obsessed with the number 64 or that Caravaggio killed a man during tennis? Doubt it. As the general theory of relativity slips farther from my grasp, that cushions my ego just a bit.

  "You had enough?" I ask Julie. She has, so we increase our life span by walking home at a quick clip.

  migration

  Julie's going to Seattle this Wednesday to visit her college friend Peggy. A nice little five-day jaunt. She made the reservations several months ago--back when we were confident she'd be plumped up in second trimester by now. But she's not. Still zero signs of any in utero action. Insanely frustrating. Julie and I agreed that she shouldn't be held hostage by our never-ending fertility woes. Plus, she's 90 percent sure that she ovulated on Tuesday, and won't be releasing a single gamete while in Seattle. So off she goes in a cab to JFK Airport.

  And that's when I begin to worry. What if she's wrong? What about that 10 percent chance that she is, in fact, ovulating on Wednesday or Thursday or Friday? Should we gamble with this? Should we risk never having a kid because I wanted to stay in New York and Julie wanted to go kayaking with her old pal?

  By Thursday midafternoon, I'm on the phone with an airline ticket agent doing some serious damage to my Visa card in exchange for a round-trip weekend reservation to Seattle. I'm migrating. That's the way I think of it. I am migrating thousands of miles to spawn. I'm not so different from the North American eel, which, after fifteen years of paddling around in streams, suddenly sprouts enlarged eyes, turns from yellow to silver, and swims hundreds and hundreds of miles down the streams and out into the ocean and all the way to the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea (east of the Caribbean), where it does its reproductive business.

  That's me on Friday evening, with enlarged eyes, sitting in the aft of an American Airlines jet and migrating to another time zone. (Incidentally, Charles Lindbergh was the first pilot on what would become American Airlines).

  I get to Seattle by midnight--but the migration isn't over. I have to take a cab to the ferry, which will in turn take me to the obscure hippyish island on which Peggy lives. The ferry, it turns out, doesn't run all that often after midnight. So for an hour and a half, I'm stuck sitting on a dock with a couple of in-lust teenagers, an angry-looking burly man who resembles an extra in a sixties motorcycle gang movie, and an oddly well-appointed middle-aged woman. It's too dark to read my trusty Britannica. So I'm left staring at my fellow cast of ferry waiters.

  The teens grope some more. The angry man seethes. And the middle-aged woman applies some lipstick. I hope for her sake the lipstick is not made from cinnabar, like the red war paint of 19th-century Indians in California. Cinnabar is a type of mercury, and the Indians' red war paint--unbeknownst to them--actually made them sick from mercury poisoning. Maybe that'd be a good way to stop wars, I think. Camouflage paint that makes everyone sick.

  Well, it's not a particularly profound thought, my cinnabar rumination. But I have the pleasant realization that I'm not bored. I'm sitting here with nothing to do--no books, no TV, no friends, no deck of cards--and normally I'd be going out of my gourd, but I'm not. I'm fine. I've got my war paint to think about. Thanks to the Britannica, my brain is like a playroom, lots of little toys to keep me occupied. Or, to switch metaphors, my rambling trains of thought now have much more interesting landscapes out their windows.

  When I finally get to hug Julie hello, it's 3 A.M. And my migration isn't quite over. I still have to spawn. After a fourteen-hour door-to-door trip, I have no interest in spawning whatsoever. But if those eels can do it after swimming hundreds of miles, I can make the effort after a ferry ride. This had better work.

  Milton, John

  The British poet went blind because he read too late at night while at school. That's something I've learned: scholarship is dangerous. There's a platoon of men who've gone blind (sometimes in both eyes, sometimes in one), who've gotten curvature of the spine, who've suffered exhaustion from too much reading. It makes me feel like my quest--despite its couch-bound nature--is actually treacherous, which gives me a macho thrill.

  mime

  Poor mime. Everyone loves to mock the mime. Zima, Carrot Top, mime--these are the prefab punch lines of my adulthood. And admittedly, mime is not my favorite form of entertainment. But maybe mime would get a little more respect if people learned of its glorious past. Well, actually, it's not-so-glorious past. More like it's lascivious and demonic past.

  Mime started in Greco-Roman times and--well, maybe I should let the Britannica explain: "Though only fragments exist, it is clear that the usual mime plot, while free to indulge in biting topical allusion, centered principally on scenes of adultery and other vice. Evidence exists that acts of adultery were actually performed on the mime stage during the Roman empire. Execution scenes with convicted criminals in place of actors are on record."

  So there you go. Live sex acts, actual executions--I have to say, that does sound more interesting than a guy in white face paint wrestling with an invisible umbrella.

  minimalism

  In my defense, I'm exercising a lot of willpower. Julie and I were having lunch in a little town outside Seattle, and her friend Peggy--observing the darkening clouds--said: "Look at that moody sky."

  I did not say, as I was tempted to: "You just committed the pathetic fallacy" (which is when you assign emotions to inanimate objects). This wasn't easy. People need to realize that.

  miscellany

  A new trivia book is coming out called Schott's Original Miscellany. It's a slim and charming volume that features, among othe
r things, the complete list of Elizabeth Taylor husbands, a glossary of waitress argot, and a catalogue of rock star deaths. The publishing company wants Esquire to cover it, so they've invited me--and a handful of other journalists--to dinner with the author, a British bloke named Ben Schott. I figured, why not? Schott and I can trade trivia, maybe have a little brain-to-brain combat.

  The dinner is held at a high-decibel Italian restaurant called Da Silvano in Greenwich Village. Unfortunately, I am seated at the round table at the exact farthest point from Schott. The only way I can interact with him is if I call him on his cell phone, or maybe by engaging in the elaborate greeting ritual of the black-tailed prairie dog, which involves throwing its foreparts vigorously into the air, directing its nose straight up, and uttering an abrupt yip.

  With Schott out of reach, I'm stuck talking to my table mate, a woman who says she works for a small New York paper. She is unusually attractive for a journalist, with long black hair and a face that wouldn't look out of place in a Tommy Hilfiger catalog. She is also, I decide, completely insane. Either that, or she's more hammered than I've seen anyone since my friend John drank fourteen Olde English 800s in college.

  "My mother loves Ben," she confides to me.

  "Oh, how does your mother know about Ben?" I ask. I figure this is a fair question, since the book hasn't been released in America, and Ben resides full-time in London. But she chooses not to answer it directly, instead saying this: "My mother loves him so much that she bought a house so she could communicate with him."

  She smiles at me and bites her lower lip. As the dinner wears on, I figure out that was sort of her trademark: make a cryptic statement, then smile and chew on her lip. She also enjoys rearranging her hair so that it covers her face completely, giving her a little private time to come up with new cryptic statements.

  But anyway, back to her mother, who had me truly perplexed. "I'm sorry, I don't follow," I say.

  "She bought a house so she could communicate with him," she repeats.

  I still shake my head.

  "In Costa Rica," she says. Her tone indicates that she thinks this will clarify things once and for all, and that maybe I should stop asking all these dumb questions.

  I don't care how much knowledge I have, there is just no way to process this information. So the dinner is looking to be quite the waste of time. But a couple of hours--and several plates of carbs--later, I do finally weasel my way into a seat next to Ben Schott. So in the end, I suppose I didn't need a semaphore to communicate with him.

  Turns out he is a lovely chap. That's what I'd call him, a chap. Very genteel, much like the Britannica itself. He is well groomed and sharply dressed, self-effacing, and he seems just pleased as punch to meet me.

  We trade some talk about our favorite defenestrations--he likes the second one in Prague that kicked off the Thirty Years' War. Then I figure I'll impress him with some of the Britishisms I've picked up in my Britannica. If you recall, I'd already scored a big success in this department with the Coriander/Cilantro Incident of 2003. So I feel I am in safe territory.

  "So do you think we'll have an old wives' summer this year?" I ask Schott.

  He looks at me much the same way I had looked at my dinner companion after she told me about the Costa Rica house.

  "You know, an old wives' summer. Isn't that what the British call Indian summer?"

  "No, actually we call it Indian summer," he says.

  Oh. That's not good. The Britannica said it was called old wives' summer in England--but it's hard to argue that to a man who actually speaks the Queen's English.

  "Well, I hope the timothy grass didn't give you allergies this year."

  Again, confusion.

  "Timothy grass--that's what causes allergies in Britain, right? In America we've got ragweed. There you have timothy grass?"

  I can feel him about to turn away to talk to an actual journalist who might be interested in discussing his book. So I quickly throw out a final question:

  "I was just wondering--what do the British call those machines in Vegas?"

  "Oh yes, one-armed bandits."

  "No, fruit machines," I say, frustrated.

  "Oh yes, we do call them fruit machines. Because they have fruit on the little displays."

  I know why they called them fruit machines, dammit. I wanted to clarify to Schott that I'm not a complete dimwit. But too late--he is off and talking to someone else.

  I didn't get to impress him with any other British-to-American translations, so I'm printing them here.

  *Our "ladybug" is their "ladybird."

  *"Lumber" in Britain refers to old furniture.

  *What we call "English" in billiards, they call "side."

  *A surgeon in Britain is called "Mr." The honorific "Dr." is reserved for physicians.

  *Aluminum in Britain is called "aluminium."

  We barely speak the same language, I tell you.

  After my conversation with Ben ends, I see him having a chat with mysterious Hair Girl. I can't hear what they are saying, but I can tell from the look on his face that she is up to her old cryptic tricks, perhaps the same ones involving communicative Central American houses. I wonder who he finds more baffling: me or her. Sadly, I'm not sure.

  missing links

  Julie and I are having some friends over tonight. No particular occasion--though it is Paraguay's Independence Day (May 14), so that's more than reason enough.

  "Honey, can you get out the cheese knife?" asks Julie.

  I could if I knew where it is. I open five drawers before I stumble on the cheese knife. I pick it up and look at it. And look at it some more.

  It strikes me at that moment that cheese knives must have quite a story to tell. No doubt, cheese knives have an inventor. Who was he? What was he like? And what about the titans of the cheese knife industry? Who are they? What are the cheese knife legends and rumors? And there must be an eccentric but lovable cheese knife designer who revolutionized its look, right? And then there's cheese knife science--the blade shape best for cutting cheese, the debate over what metal to use in the blade, and what wood varnish to use on the handle.

  And I have read none of this in the encyclopedia.

  I am staring at the cheese knife for a good twenty seconds, thinking about this, slack-jawed, like someone who dropped too much bad brown acid at Woodstock.

  "Great," Julie says, as she returns to the kitchen. "I'll take it."

  "Oh yes," I say, snapping awake. "Uh, here's the cheese knife."

  The cheese knife revelation sends me into a mini panic. Everything in the world is packed with facts. Just look around the apartment--the little knob on the cabinet, the toaster, the lipstick on Julie's lips, which are right now asking me for the ice tongs. And ice tongs--they have their own history too.

  What do I know of these things? Nothing. I am in the Ms, and I know nothing.

  Montaigne

  I like this 16th-century French writer quite a bit. I like that he coined the term "essay," which translates to "attempts," or a little "project of trial and error." That's what I want my Esquire articles to be. Little attempts, even if my attempts happen to involve more Wonderbra jokes than Montaigne's attempts. It just takes a lot of pressure off when you call them attempts.

  But even better than the origin of the word "essay," I like the story of how Marie de Gournay--a French intellectual at the time--fainted from excitement when she read Montaigne's work for the first time. She fainted from reading. What a great image. We've become far too jaded. I've been intrigued, bored, titillated, annoyed, amazed, but I've never even come close to fainting while reading any book.

  Which is sad. I wish ideas could still get people so excited that they fainted. I wish people--including me--had a more visceral reaction to reading. The closest I've come to fainting during Operation Britannica was when I felt queasy after reading about the botfly, which lays eggs in horses' nostrils, and I had to stop eating my ice cream sandwich.

  moron
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br />   I think I'm starting to lose my sense of humor. I was watching a Friends rerun with Julie, and there was this scene with Joey, the show's certified moron (Moron, by the way, is also the name of a town in Cuba). In the scene, Joey observes his costar turn a lock. He marvels at this, and says: "It's amazing how keys open doors." It gets a big laugh. It's supposed to show that he's got the IQ of a candelabra.

  But all I can think is that, yes, he's right, it is amazing how keys open doors. I think back to the diagram in the lock section, with all the pin tumblers and springs, and am proud that I finally understand how keys work. I don't understand keys as well as Joseph Bramah--the famed locksmith who created a lock that remained unpicked for fifty years, despite his promise to reward the picker with PS200--but still, I understand them. Joey and I--we both know that keys are amazing.

  Morozov, Pavlik

  Here we have one of the most odious little schmucks in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A truly horrible little human being. And, I'm afraid, one who reminds me a lot of myself as a youngster.

  Pavlik was a communist youth who eventually became glorified as a martyr by the Soviet regime.

  The son of poor peasants, Morozov was the leader of the Young Pioneers' group at his village school and was a fanatical supporter of the Soviet government's collectivization drive in the countryside. In 1930, at age twelve, he gained notoriety for denouncing his father, the head of the local soviet, to the Soviet authorities. In court Morozov charged that his father had forged documents and sold favours to kulaks (i.e., rich peasants who were resisting the collectivization drive). Morozov also accused other peasants of hoarding their grain and withholding it from the authorities. As a consequence of his denunciations, Morozov was brutally murdered by several local kulaks.Morozov was subsequently glorified as a martyr by the Soviet regime. Monuments to him were erected in several Soviet cities, and his example as a model communist was taught to several generations of Soviet schoolchildren.

  I know I should have felt sorry for young Pavlik. He was, after all, the victim of Stalin's psychotic brainwashing regime. But I couldn't help feeling a bit of glee when I learned he got his comeuppance, the sanctimonious little fuck.