It's everyone's worst nightmare.
You discover you've bought too many bananas.
Do you (a) eat them all and make yourself sick; (b) put them in a cupboard and probably forget them; or (c) stick them in the fridge?
For 170 years after Frederick Ridge invented the household apparatus that bears his name, the orthodox view was that option (c) was unworkable. The banana would gradually develop brown spots eventually covering its entire body, rendering it unattractive even to the most desperate chimpanzee; the opposite of Michael Jackson in fact (at least Bubbles liked him). How many people succumbed to option (a) as a result is unknown. A conservative estimate is several millions.
And so matters rested until 2010 when the wife of a certain S. B. from Hong Kong discovered that bananas wrapped in a green polythene bag survived for up to a fortnight in a refrigerated state. This Special Theory was a revolution. Almost immediately, amateur scientists took up the challenge of developing a Generalised Theory. Two schools of thought contended. One team wondered whether different green wrappings - leaves, the green baize used on snooker tables, green socks, small environmentalists, etc - might all be equally effective. Another speculated that the material, rather than the colour, was crucial. Nightly experimentation proved the latter to be correct. Polythene of any colour, or indeed of none, did the trick.
It has been discovered that, just as there is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics, neither is there for this branch of science.
You discover you've bought too many bananas.
Do you (a) eat them all and make yourself sick; (b) put them in a cupboard and probably forget them; or (c) stick them in the fridge?
For 170 years after Frederick Ridge invented the household apparatus that bears his name, the orthodox view was that option (c) was unworkable. The banana would gradually develop brown spots eventually covering its entire body, rendering it unattractive even to the most desperate chimpanzee; the opposite of Michael Jackson in fact (at least Bubbles liked him). How many people succumbed to option (a) as a result is unknown. A conservative estimate is several millions.
And so matters rested until 2010 when the wife of a certain S. B. from Hong Kong discovered that bananas wrapped in a green polythene bag survived for up to a fortnight in a refrigerated state. This Special Theory was a revolution. Almost immediately, amateur scientists took up the challenge of developing a Generalised Theory. Two schools of thought contended. One team wondered whether different green wrappings - leaves, the green baize used on snooker tables, green socks, small environmentalists, etc - might all be equally effective. Another speculated that the material, rather than the colour, was crucial. Nightly experimentation proved the latter to be correct. Polythene of any colour, or indeed of none, did the trick.
It has been discovered that, just as there is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics, neither is there for this branch of science.
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