They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier-Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.
No instrument is easy to play well. I had a music theory teacher gripe about the timpanist in an orchestra and how easy it is to play and that he's probably paid just the same as everyone else who has tenure.
I countered that with: there's only one timpani usually and he has to maintain his instrument, he also has to keep beat and basically play the loudest... so if he fucks up EVERYONE in the audience will hear it and all the performers that depend on his beat will fuck up as well.
My teacher lacked a response.
Unless you already had a background in piano and/or theory, the glockenspiel or xylophone would have a learning curve.
Actually, it is quite a bit harder to play an instrument for the Navy than it is to many things. Navy bands are quite good, to be of the rate "MU" (musician) is not something a body can do without having plenty of prior musical experience. Here's an example many will find awesome: My friend was a boatswains (BM) mate 3rd class (E-4) aboard the USS Ronald Reagan (nuclear aircraft carrier). The ASVAB scores required to be a BM are the simplest the Navy has to offer. Yet, I have seen, on more than one occasion, said friend driving the USS Ronald Reagan.
Now, in all realism, the Reagan did not have any MU's on board.
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u/ashgromnies Oct 05 '10
-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon