GEQ***T
When Tom Nash bought a new Porsche 911 Carrera 4, he wanted to give it some personal flair. So he applied for a custom license plate: GEQ8PIT.
“I’d never had a vanity plate before,” Nash says, “but I thought it might be fun. And it fit perfectly!”
To his surprise, the California Department of Motor Vehicles denied his request, pronouncing it “offensive to good taste and decency” and “misleading to some of our citizens.”
“I was astonished,” Nash recalls. “I didn’t understand how this could be interpreted offensively by even the most distorted of minds.” He immediately called the agency, which told him to submit a written appeal.
So Nash, a retired Fermilab physicist and member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory scientific collaboration, wrote to explain that the message represented Albert Einstein’s gravitational field equation, G=8πT.
The equation describes how the distribution of mass (stress energy tensor, or T) affects the curvature of space-time (G), encapsulating Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “This is one of the most important equations in all of science,” Nash wrote, “and is used to predict the future course of the universe.”
When two months passed without a response from the DMV, Nash called Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office. “Then things started to happen,” he says, “and several very efficient people got on the case.”
According to an e-mail from Steve Haskins, a communications officer for the agency, “GEQ8PIT was originally refused because it appeared to read 8 with PI (pie). The Special Processing Unit refuses any configuration with 8 (ate) in it, if they are not sure of the meaning, as it appears to be of a sexual connotation.”
Haskin says Nash’s original application apparently did explain that the numbers and letters represented Einstein’s field equation, “but it’s safe to say that our technicians, not being gravitational physicists, simply didn’t understand what he meant. When it was later explained in more detail, the configuration was approved.”
On Oct. 18, five months and nine days after his initial application, the plates finally arrived. In spite of the delays, Nash is happy with the outcome. “Apparently there had been a change of personnel in the Special Processing Unit and my first letter was lost,” he says. “So the DMV has no hard feelings about Einstein, and I have no hard feelings about the DMV.”
Lizzie Buchen
Click here to download the pdf version of this article.
