Incidentally | 30 June 02007, 13:09 |
| Those of you who know me know that I've been on a quest of sorts, for at least a few years. The quest is for knowledge, but a specific bit of knowledge. I'll recap:
We've all heard the phrase "it's not rocket science." Somebody says that when they're describing an intellectual task that is far from challenging. For example, one might say "He can't even make microwave popcorn? It's not rocket science or anything." That's fine for most people, who (presumably) view rocket science as something far beyond their mental capacity. (There's a variation on this, "it's not brain surgery." I'm going to ignore that for now but perhaps I'll come back to it later.) But what about a rocket scientist? Somebody who does rocket science for a living? One hopes that rocket science isn't beyond a rocket scientist, so what is? What does a rocket scientist say instead of "it's not rocket science?" I've searched for years to find a rocket scientist who could answer the question, but was hampered somewhat by the fact that I don't actually know any. I even e-mailed a public address at NASA with the question, but never heard back. A few years ago, I ran in to someone who knew a rocket scientist, and we called him on the phone but he couldn't think of anything. More recently, a friend of a friend, whose husband is a rocket scientist, told me that he says "it's not a vertical layered shimmy" - that's OK, and certainly such a feat is beyond me, but I don't think it really qualifies as an intellectual task, and besides it was thirdhand information so I don't know how reliable it is. So what's the point of me bringing this up now? Look two posts down: I start working for NASA on Monday. Surely they have one or two rocket scientists there! So watch this space, the world may just get a bit smaller ... 
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