Hawking: I think about women most

I need to disabuse you. Men do not think about sex every seven seconds, as some would have it.

However, they do think about their target sex--be it men, women or other--constantly.

As living proof, might I offer renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. He shouldn't be offering living proof of anything; when he was diagnosed with motor-neuron disease at the age of 21, few thought he would last another 49 years.

Still, in a 70th birthday interview with New Scientist, Hawking finally admitted that physics, Einstein, the Cosmos, aliens--oh, it's all so much dogged piffle when compared to the most fascinating scientific problem: women.

Naturally, I paraphrase. For his precise words, when asked what he thinks about most during the day, were: "Women. They are a complete mystery."

Hawking has enjoyed a couple of marriages. His first wife, Jane, even wrote a book detailing their marriage, the revised version of which was called "Traveling to Infinity, My Life with Stephen."

Yet it seems that Hawking's mind travels daily to infinity and still cannot find the remotest solution to a problem that has bothered man ever since Adam first embodied the word "gullible."

Perhaps the essence of the pain is that, ultimately--when it comes to women--facts, figures and logic just don't help in the way they do when you're thinking about, say, conformal field theory.

It might well be that Hawking's is the primal scream of so many nerds who try to approach their target sex with rational fervor, only to be rebuffed for such irrelevancies as socks with Birkenstocks or polo shirts with a start-up logo.

This dilemma was so touchingly portrayed at the beginning of "The Social Network," when a young Mark Zuckerberg--despite what he considered to be his vast brain--found it difficult to impress an attractive lady.

It's true that women can send you gifts and jealous notes, while simultaneously telling you they're not interested in being with you. They can leave you and, within days, text you that they're missing you. They can ask you to tell them honestly if a dress makes their shoulders look like Gisele's, when the last thing they want from you is honesty.

Such mercurial instincts can be too much for even the finest scientist to bear. In science, you believe that--one day--you will find the solution.

What perhaps frustrates Hawking most is that, in the case of women, there isn't one.