The next morning, he found Paige in the university library, reading a topology textbook upside down (she claimed it helped her visualize non-orientable surfaces).
Sheldon looked down at his spotless sneakers. “I don’t like getting dirty.”
“I’m Sheldon Cooper,” he said, clutching the TI-30 to his chest. “Dr. Sturgis is my mentor. We discuss string theory. What is your area of expertise?”
“Then… I will ruffle my own hair. In defeat.”
Sheldon paused. A markovian bath was the standard assumption. A non-markovian bath was… chaos.
Sheldon’s heart raced. A math emergency. Not a fire. Not a burglar. A math emergency. This was the greatest crisis imaginable.
Sturgis squinted. “It’s a second-order partial differential. The term should be negative, but I made it positive. That changes the neutron star’s magnetic field decay from exponential to… growth. It would imply a star that gets brighter and brighter until it explodes with the force of a billion supernovas.”