Bad Will Hunting

Story Sent in by Marcia:

Ben and I met online. We were students at two different colleges in the area, himself at a community college and myself at a private campus. We seemed to have a lot in common: bad professors, too much work, and limited time for a social life. In retrospect it seems stupid, but again, we were in college.

At our dinner, he asked me, "Do you think any less of me because I go to a community college?"

"Of course not," I assured him, and I really, really meant it. That satisfied him, and the rest of dinner went smoothly.

Afterward, he asked me if I'd ever visited his campus. I hadn't, and to himself, he muttered, "Of course not," then asked me if I would want to take a walk with him, around it.

Our walk was nice, and his campus was very pretty. It had plenty of trees, study areas, and a really big library. After a circuit around the grounds, he said, "Want to see something I came up with?"

I told him that I would, and we wound up inside a classroom. He went right for the dry erase board in the front of the room and wrote down formulas, equations, and all sorts of mathematical expressions.

I followed along for a little bit, as I was, in fact, a math minor. But after a little bit, I realized that he was just writing down random equations that he must have simply memorized from math and physics texts. The more he wrote, the less it made sense.

He finally turned to me, after covering most of the board with his notations and said, "Well?"

I replied, "I think you have a miscalculation, somewhere."

"What do you mean?"

I pointed, "You have one of Maxwell's equations here, and you have two of Newton's velocity equations here. You also have an integral here, but it doesn't make sense for you to equate it with–"

"This is right. I know it is. It's... it's a theory of everything."

Smile and nod, Marcia. Smile and nod.

He launched into a long-winded explanation that I won't repeat. Suffice it to say, he spent the better part of 20 minutes trying to convince me, essentially, how gravity and light were the same thing.

Once he was done, I said, "You should show that to a professor."

He said, "And let them steal it? It took me hours to decide whether or not to show you, but I wanted to impress you, so..."

So... you succeeded in showing me that you're a little crazy. But that's okay. We all have our fancies, our beliefs that sometimes are completely wrong.

"You're not going to steal it from me, are you?" he asked.

"No."

He erased it and said, "Not bad for a college freshman, eh?"

He had told me previously that he was a junior, but I wasn't about to start anything with him. He was pretty agitated, and I ultimately called the night to an early close.

He sent me a few emails after that, all of which seemed composed by a drunk person:

"ud better not steal my equation of i will sue you so bad haha jk but yeah dont steal its wrong"

I didn't write back, and his emails tapered off. I heard, a few months later, that he had dropped out of school. It's too bad, really.