Indie scientists create new, ultradense superirony

Researchers at the Institute of Indie Rock and Science (IIRS) startled the worlds of theoretical physics and youth culture with their announcement of the discovery of a new, superdense form of irony responsible for everything from the now-dead trucker hat fandom to the most cutting-edge of art and music.

The IIRS research team was smashing indie rock and Generation X atoms together in a particle accelerator in a routine demonstration for grad students when computers picked up a faint flicker of a subatomic particle researchers are calling the "Beck iRon." The man behind the particle's name, Dr. Conor Heisenberg, explained, "Of course 'iron' is already a word, but calling it an 'iRon' sounds like all the other subatomic particles like gluons and bosons, and if we do a little 'i' big 'r,' it's hip like that. You understand."

The results have created a buzz in the field of indie rock physics as researchers speculate about the Beck iRon's role in the Higgs-Malkmus Theory of Ironic Matter. It takes years of theoretical physics and built-up scene cred to fully grasp the theory, but Heisenberg attempted to explain it in layman's terms.

"Bad art can be separated into two subcategories," he said. "Good-bad and bad-bad art have been at odds - a concept we call the Mothersbaugh Paradox. The Higgs-Malkmus Theory, though, suggested that there was a unifying force that bound together the broader-scale bad-bad forces and smaller good-bad forces. This six-string theory, as it's called, was troublesome because bad-bad forces in art would become so powerful as to create emotic plasma, which would be laughed straight off the musical spectrum. The naturally occuring bombardment of emotic plasma with these iRons, though, would allow bad-bad forces to act as good-bad ones and restore balance.

"This is all speculation, of course," he cautioned, "until the theory undergoes a rigorous peer review, being ridiculed at record stores long enough to get refined. After the review process, the scientific community will claim to 'like the theory's old shit, before it went mainstream'".

The find is expected to revolutionize the worlds of facial hair, thrift store clothing and repackaged 80s and 90s kitsch memorabilia.

"We have to be extremely careful, though. Misapplication of the Beck iRon could lead to endless layers of recursive irony and self-reference, sucking the universe into a great big, meaningless black hole."

E-mail the author at angry@govt.com.

Be the first to comment on this article!

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out