You may often wonder what the most boring day in the history of Earth is, and often suspect you have encountered it. Not in recent history, of course as the world begins heating up to unleash a whole new slew of issues to debate and technology reaches fevered singularity that suggests change is imminent, but rather a day quite possibly in the 80’s or 90’s that you thought was most definitely the most boring day in the history of the world. Well, if you’ve ever wondered what the most boring day in the history of mankind was, then we’ve got a surprise for you.
Scientists at Cambridge University asked this very question and developed a criteria for developing the most boring day in the history of mankind. And they have come to a conclusion. April 11th, 1954 was most conclusively the one that met the scientists’ criteria and won over as most boring day ever by a long shot. But how did they come to this conclusion? And just what happened on that day that had people watching the grass grow?
Well, nothing much really happened at all. So why is this news? Well, in addition to the strange method by which the scientists came about discovering which day it was, it seems almost like almost too much didn’t happen. William Tunstoe-Pedoe discovered the method when he looked at the wild headlines of the past one hundred years and thought what the most interesting day was, and finding it virtually impossible to objectively judge, went for the next best thing. Whereas the most interesting day would most likely depend on one central event or cluster of events all related to one another, the least eventful day would be far more all encompassing.
So what would cause absolutely nothing to happen in a single day? Sure ordinary things happened, commerce didn’t screech to a halt, and people still did fairly interesting things, but they didn’t do anything too interesting. A day where absolutely nothing happened in the entire world would be – after all – unique and therefore interesting. April 11, 1954 was instead, a day when nothing out of the ordinary happened. And as a result, no one really took much notice of it.
However, it seems paradoxical to suggest any one thing is the most interesting. By being uninteresting, this in effect immediately makes it interesting. The very fact of its uninteresting nature makes this very day unique, and therefore in itself interesting. It’s an old mathematical adage, in fact, to suggest that there are no uninteresting numbers, because the least interesting number would be unique and therefore interesting. Of course it might sound ridiculous, but such is the nature of paradoxical logic.
But the criteria of Tunstoe-Pedoe was more to discover on which days the fewest events transpired while the day was going on to make it uninteresting, likely barring this paradoxical way of thinking. Of course it will be interesting to note what the next most uninteresting day of this century will be.