[ WP ] “ …in this world nothing can be said to be certain , except taxes . ”

Professor Hollinsworth had a need to understand. It's what brought him to the top of his field in theoretical physics. It's also what found him at his desk at 3 in the morning, pouring over 74,608 pages of U.S. tax code. The same urge that sent him to his garage to tear apart the engine of his car if he did n't understand what the mechanic was telling him was wrong, and had driven him study the technical manuals for his DVD player when it started skipping, now compelled him to *understand* why his most recent grant had somehow ran afoul of some obscure tax regulation. No matter that the university had accountants and attorneys sort this sort of thing out, talented experts and professionals who had assured him that it would be fine, and that it was just a matter of some extra paperwork... Hollinsworth had to *understand*. 
 
 There was nothing unusual in his focus, or in the hour. On any other night, he would have been pouring over his real work. He knew he was close, closer than anybody had been before, but when it came to the fundamental nature of reality an existence, close was n't good enough. It was all or nothing. Either he managed to identify the singular `` theory of everything''... or he did n't. 
 
 He had n't expected his foray into tax code to have any bearing on his usual work. It was just another curiosity he was compelled to satisfy. But after the fifth hour or so, he felt it. The wordless, almost formless, half thought in the very back of his head, whispering `` there's something here''. He could n't shake the feeling that the something in question was n't related to his grant. 
 
 An hour later, he pulled out his handwritten physics notebooks, and opened to a page of penciled formulas. It could n't be... and yet it was. The missing piece of the puzzle he and his small army of graduate students had been struggling with for years. How? 
 
 He opened his laptop, and started typing in to the search bar. `` Tax code of.'' Almost at random, he picked the United Kingdom from the list of suggested searches. A few clicks later, and an hour of reading, and he found it... buried in a subsection related to agricultural emission subsidies. China and India next. The English translations were not as precises as he needed to verify his findings, but were close enough to suggest a match. He started pulling up tax codes from every English speaking nation he could think of. It was all the same. 
 
 The unified theory of everything... was taxes. The uncertainty principle did n't apply. It would take years to verify the findings to the satisfaction of the scientific community, but he already knew he had the answer. Where General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory had comes so close, but ultimately failed, where string theory tried, but could n't quite bridge the gap... the tax code had succeeded.
