Uber Truth

Granville Knowles is always right...
...and now he can prove it

Senior lecturer in mathematics develops formula to conclusively demonstrate that he can never be wrong.

Granville Knowles, a senior lecturer in Impure Mathematics at the Burger King Institute of Poncey Thinking in Salford, has spent more than forty years trying to develop a theory to finally and decisively prove that he is right about everything. Now he believes that he has succeeded in producing an equation that will mean he will never lose an argument ever again.

Ever since he had been a precocious, argumentative and thoroughly irritating child, Granville Knowles had always known that he had never been wrong about anything. Whatever the subject, no matter how many opinions were ranged against him, Knowles would insist that his judgment was correct, and would go on insisting until he had worn everyone down and they had given up. But knowing that one is always right and that everyone else is talking rubbish is a very different thing to proving it scientifically.

"It's far too easy to fall into the trap of quoting 'facts' and 'evidence'," Knowles memorably said during now legendary televised lecture in 1997. "But what, I ask myself, do I do when those so-called 'facts' and that apparent 'evidence' contradict the things I absolutely know to be true?"

The answer - Knowles went on to explain before anyone in his audience could be misguided enough to answer what was so obviously a rhetorical question - was 'uber truth'.

Knowles had realised many years earlier that in a world where truth was an inconstant and flexible commodity, what was required was a more reliable method of establishing absolute veracity than mere 'evidence'. To some degree he had been inspired by the work of Professor Mitch Mondrian, Senior Liar at the University of Palm Beach throughout the '40s and '50s. Mondrian had suggested that at a subatomic level truth could exist in a state of superposition - that something could be both true and not true at the same time. It was a radical idea but Mondrian had successfully relied on it several times to get him off tax evasion charges.

Granville Knowles has built on this idea, suggesting that what we know as 'truth' is actually a quantum fluctuation that can exist at several different energy levels. In everyday life we experience truth as the sum total of observable and verifiable events, but according to Knowles this is an unstable and ultimately imprecise version of reality. He believes that a more accurate version of the truth must exist at a higher energy state - not something that can easily be observed in everyday experience, but capable of being modelled mathematically. He has named this phenomenon 'uber-truth' (uT) and this week he revealed the formula that proves its existence.

It might look complex, but then if you'd spent forty years working on a fancy sum, you'd expect it to be a wee bit complicated. In the briefest terms, what it says is that where K represents Granville Knowles' opinion, and V represents the volume at which he shouts it at people, the product will be the degree to which it deviates from absolute truth. In every case the value is zero - in other words, uber truth.

"I have proven," Granville Knowles wrote in a recent article, "scientifically and undisputably, that I am always right about everything. And for those who doubt that my formula is accurate, I can say that I have tested my belief in the veracity of the formula using the formula, and the formula has conclusively proven that my belief in the accuracy of the formula is correct."

In spite of Knowles' assertion, however, not everyone is convinced. "The only thing Granville bloody Know-it-all has proven is that his own arrogance is of a magnitude never before seen in mathematical circles," said Dr Helena Bream of the Kentucky Fried Centre for Clever Dickery in Durham. "He is the kind of imbecile who cannot agree with anyone or anything, and will move heaven and Earth in order to uncover some specious reason to 'prove' he is not talking out of his ample backside. He is the kind of idiot who inserts words like 'undisputably' into articles and will argue with any number of spellcheckers, proof readers and editors who tell him the that word he's actually groping for is 'indisputably', until they finally cave in and agree to commit his egregious and embarrassing error to print. He is, in short, a tit, and if I'm entirely honest I'm starting to regret I ever married him."

Taken from The University of the Bleeding Obvious Annual 2020.

Order via Amazon UK

Order via Amazon Us