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IIn this day and age, it has become common for movie stars to develop their own little side hustles. For example, Gwyneth Paltrow has Goop and Rob Lowe has a podcast. And then there’s Terrence Howard. Terrence Howard’s side hustle is developing new hydrogen technology to defend Uganda’s sovereignty.
It almost feels like a shame to back this up with details as ugly as detail, but here it goes. Last week, actor, singer and aborted war machine Terrence Howard was invited by Uganda’s Agriculture Minister Frank Tumwebaze to give a speech to help attract investment from people in the Ugandan diaspora.
This in itself is fairly common. Getting a famous person to say a few harmless things about an issue or issue has long been part of the awareness toolkit. However, this time there was a problem. The problem was that Terrence Howard wasn’t exactly harmless. No, Terrence Howard only does impenetrable batshit.
“I went out to explore a new way the universe works,” he told the crowd in a video quickly shared by UBC Uganda. “I was able to define the grand unified field equation they were looking for and translate it into geometry. What I’m saying is that we have invented a new form of flight that I want to bring here to Uganda to replace the drones, replace the helicopters, replace the airplanes… That’s the geometry of hydrogen.”
He went on and on and somehow managed to cram several decades of ramblings into two short minutes. He spoke about his new Lynchpin drone system, which appears to be able to use unlimited hydrogen bonding and supersymmetry to form swarming colonies that can defend countries and remove plastic from the ocean.
Well, that obviously sounds wonderful, because who doesn’t want safer borders and cleaner seas, backed by the power of supersymmetry? So I googled “Super Symmetry” and found a website called Super Smetric Systems that just babbles on about how humanity’s purpose “was intentionally burned into our genetic code. Like a subatomic, interwoven prime directive for us to search for the Greater Truth, recall lost echoes of past conversations, and uncover that which has never been uncovered.”
So I started clicking around and found a link on the site called Terry on Wave Fields. This led me to the page where Terrence Howard explains his infamous (and arguably inaccurate) claim that one multiplied by one equals two. It includes a video titled “Terrence Proves Gravity is an Effect, Not a Cause,” with an explanation of phenomena such as “hyperbolic geometric inertial frames” and “non-Euclidean chiral asymmetries of force in motion.” It also includes another video of Terrence Howard singing the second song from an album he released in 2008.
Anyway, long story short, I am now convinced that Terrence Howard is the smartest man in the universe. It has to be him, for sure. Because I don’t understand anything he says. And after everything else anyone else does.
Below the UBC tweet are dozens of people, all painfully unsure how to react to his solution of the uniform field equation. All of the coverage it received far from attracting diaspora money to Uganda only achieved a kind of stunned inability to process anything. Even the people around Howard in the clip look actively uncomfortable the more he talks, just as you do when you realize you’re too deep in conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness to politely back down.
Oh well, listen, one of two things is going to happen here. Either Terrence Howard has gone insane and has responded to the shattering of his personal reputation (he has been repeatedly accused of domestic abuse) by falling down a hole of obscure mathematics that will ensure he is never taken seriously again. Or he’s right and will one day have an army of armed super-symmetrical murder drones at his lonely disposal. And I don’t exactly want to get on his bad side when that happens, so excuse me for being on the fence.
