The universe ceased to exist on Wednesday, when UC San Diego’s Spam Quarantine notification quarantined itself. The system tried to notify a student of new Tapingo spam, but also quarantined the spam notification email. This set off an infinite cycle in which the quarantine flagged itself as spam, attempted to notify the student that it had flagged spam, but was flagged as spam again. The cycle disabled first UCSD’s email system, then the Internet, before finally destroying the space-time continuum.
Norm Chomsky, a doctoral candidate in the Physics Department, said that this is the first time the universe has stopped. “We came pretty close when a newly admitted student celebrated being admitted to Revelle College,” he said. “But the recursive nature of the email was too much. It tore a hole in the fabric of our reality.”
Information Technology Services (ITS) tracked down the offending email: a chain of three Tapingo offers that all came within 20 minutes of each other. One email had the subject line “Secret to Good Grades? Food!” ITS Director Kathy Bouman said that a Week 5 email about preparing for finals “hit a cosmic sweet-spot” of irony and pain, causing the universe to explode.
There is currently no word about when the universe will be restored.
Patrick Alexander is the Opinion Editor and The Conch Editor of The Triton.