A MIT Hack.

The Infinite Corridor at MIT is so named because, as you might have guessed, it is very long.  On May 12, 1997, an anonymous group of hackers decided to see how long it really was.

Students and administrators awoke to find Lobby 7 and the Infinite Corridor adorned with banners, signs, and posters proclaiming that "because there is one infinite corridor of finite length, infinity must equal 47.2 rods."  In addition, signs were placed throughout the corridor marking it off in units of rods.

The text of some of the posters found during the hack is reprinted below:
 

  • Length of Infinite Corridor: 246,344,665 Gallons/Acres
  • An M.I.T. student can rollerblade down the Infinite Corridor, an infinite distance, in about a minute. This is faster than the Enterprise at Warp 10!
  • Length of Infinite Corridor: 447.918 Farad-Ohm-Knots
  • Length of Infinite Corridor: 96,675.13 Calories/Smoot2 inHg
  • One can never go outside of an infinite space, therefore it is impossible to leave M.I.T.
  • East Campus and West Campus dorms are separated by an infinite distance. This means that people from East and West campus can't socialize with each other. Empirical data supports this conclusion.
  • In order to reach Harvard starting from the center of the universe (Lobby 10), one must travel an infinite distance over 13 times! Since everything is within the universe, it is impossible to reach Harvard and therefore there can be no life there.
  • The speed of light has been proven to be finite. Since something moving at finite speed can never escape infinite space, light cannot escape from M.I.T. This explains why so many M.I.T. students appear to be wearing black.
  • Length of Infinite Corridor: 655,633.4 Points
  • Since the corridor is infinitely long and of nonzero width, its area must also be infinite. The average number of people per unit area is functionally zero. This proves that you will never see another person in the corridor, unless, perhaps, you haven't slept in a long time.
  • It takes the average student three minutes to walk from Lobby 7 to Lobby 8, down the infinite corridor. Since half of an infinite distance is the same length as an infinite distance, it would take two minutes to walk from Lobby 7 to Lobby 10, and another two minutes to walk half the remaining distance, and so on. It is therefore impossible to reach the eastern end of the corridor.
  • The Harvard Bridge is approximately 120 rods across, so one must travel 2.5 times an infinite distance to walk across it. This might explain the attendance records of people from some of the ILGs across the river.
  • When travelling down the Infinite Corridor, one travels an infinite distance in a finite time. One is therefore going very fast, and time dilation will be significant. In fact, for each day experienced by an M.I.T. student, 65,536 years will go by for the outside world. Therefore, M.I.T. students can sleep only once every 65,536 years.
  • The Infinite Corridor will fit an infinite number of monkeys and their Athena workstations. These monkeys could write any conceivable paper. Here at M.I.T., we call them Graduate Students.
  • Length of Infinite Corridor: 214,935,769 BTU/Hectare atm
  • The infinite corridor has an infinite volume, and therefore if all the air in the universe were in it, it would still be at a lower pressure than atmospheric. This explains why M.I.T. sucks.

You can find more information at http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1997/infinity_rods/

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