A genius high school chemistry student takes a test, gets his score back, and is dismayed to find that he missed exactly one question and thus would not be accepted to his University of choice. He is especially bummed because the question he missed was “how many valence electrons does a Hydrogen atom have?” In his haste to complete the test, he had answered 2.

Depressed and despairing, he takes a walk alone along a beach, and is lost in thought when he trips on a metal object in the sand. Picking it up, he finds it to be a brass oil lamp, and as his fingers brush the surface a genie suddenly appears! The genie thunders, “I can grant you any one wish, but you must answer now. What do you desire?” The student immediately replies, “I wish I had gotten that question right,” and the universe explodes.

• 🔬Scientist