You don’t get pistachios in regular trail mix. You get raisins, peanuts, hazelnuts, cashews, almonds, but no pistachios. It’s a principle as unshakable as the laws of physics. So when I found a pistachio in my bag of trail mix, not only was I amazed, but I felt––for a moment––like the chosen one.
However, I noticed at once that fate had acted with its own particular sense of humor. Yes, it had sent a pistachio my way, but a closed one, without even the narrowest slit in which to stick a fingernail and open the shell. Instead of a gap, there was a bulge––like the pursed lips of an obstinate child who refuses to say “good morning” to an elderly person.
Even though I knew it was pointless, I still tried to open the pistachio: first with my fingers, then with a penknife. These attempts had no effect except to make me increasingly furious. That cocky pistachio had no idea what a tough opponent it was taking on! I may have been buying cheap trail mix, but I wasn’t a penniless student. I was working as a night watchman at the Institute of Sciences and had keys to all the laboratories and workshops. Hammers, files, drills, hydraulic presses, thermic lances, pressure chambers––I had all this arsenal at my disposal, and I made the most of it.
The pistachio, however, withstood these attacks entirely unscathed.
I began to suspect that it was not in fact a pistachio, but some much hardier and more primitive entity. Maybe one of the quarks? As everyone knows, there are six of them: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. Just between us, at the Institute of Sciences, things are always going missing, so if someone had misplaced a quark––a down one, say––it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Then a thought occurred to me: what if I had accidentally discovered a seventh quark? No, that’s not possible. There is no seventh quark, so it couldn’t have made its way into my trail mix.
As I thought about this, I realized that there was one device at the Institute of Sciences that would definitely help me pry open the pistachio: the particle accelerator, sarcastically dubbed “the small collider.” Contrary to its nickname, it wasn’t small at all; in fact, it was huge––its circular tunnel took up an entire floor of the institute’s multi-story cellars.
The accelerator has rarely been used in recent years, although sometimes––due to the remarkable acoustics––rehearsals of the company choir were held there. Still, it was in good working order. I painted the pistachio with a metallic varnish so that it would react to the powerful electromagnets that accelerate the particles, and I dropped it into the tunnel. It dutifully accelerated, doing lap after lap at increasing speed. Its clamped-shut, defiant lips flashed past the window every few seconds, and I must admit that its perseverance impressed me a bit. If I were in a similar situation, I doubt I’d have kept my composure for long.
After a hundred laps, I pulled the lever, and boom! The pistachio fell into the side track where it smashed against the wall. I stepped inside the tunnel to inspect the remains. However, I didn’t find any fragments of shell or kernel. The result of the collision was quite unexpected: the disintegration of the closed pistachio had produced two sultanas and a peanut (which I ate immediately), and a slightly crumpled ten-euro bill.
On my way back upstairs, I wondered how the experiment could be rationally explained; I only got a reasonable explanation many years later thanks to a conversation with a scientist friend. Here’s what we came up with: the composition of the trail mix is precisely determined, so the appearance of the sultanas and peanut in place of the pistachio simply restored the natural state, eliminating the anomaly. And the ten euros must have been dropped by a choir member during rehearsal. So, as it turns out, there was nothing unusual about it at all.
Read similar:
