There Exists An Elephant Bigger Than a Mouse Hole

An exciting new result in computer science!

Computer scientists have long studied the question of what things can fit through mouse holes. Early on it was an open question as to whether there even exists a star which is larger than a mouse hole. That question got settled with a seminal result tackling an easier problem: Is there a planet bigger than a mouse hole? Because the mouse hole exists on a planet that planet must be bigger than a mouse hole. Because the mouse hole can’t fit through itself the planet can’t either. Because there are stars bigger than planets there must exist a star which can’t fit through a mouse hole.

The next question is whether there exists a continent which can’t fit through a mouse hole. This frustratingly remains an open problem. Because the earth is composed of continents and water and there are no mouse holes on water that would seem to imply that there must be a mouse hole on a continent and therefore the continent is larger than the mouse hole. But there’s a loophole: Boats are also on water and may contain mouse holes. While it is known that mouse holes exist it remains an open question whether they occur on continents, on boats, or both. (All mouse holes are known to be about the same size, so ‘a mousehole’ and ‘any mousehole’ mean essentially the same thing.) If it could be shown that there there exists a continent larger than all boats, which is widely believed to be the case, then we would know that there exists a continent larger than a mouse hole, but for now all we can prove is that there is either a boat larger than a mouse hole or a continent larger than a mouse hole.

Several years ago there was a breakthrough result showing that there exists a blue whale larger than a mouse hole. This is a very exciting result not only on its own merits but also because it breaks the so-called recursion barrier: Blue whales are the first things known to be larger than mouse holes which cannot themselves contain mouse holes. Unfortunately whether there exists a continent larger than all blue whales remains open so this result can’t be used to resolve the question of whether there exists a continent larger than a mouse hole.

Now there is an exciting new result showing that there exists an elephant larger than a mouse hole. Unfortunately this result comes with a large caveat: While it’s known that blue whales don’t exist on other planets the question of whether elephants exist on other planets remains open. So it’s still possible that there doesn’t exist a continent larger than a mouse hole or even possible that there exists an elephant on another planet larger than the entire earth which would make this result trivial, although that isn’t believed to be the case. If it could be shown that there aren’t elephants on other planets, or that they aren’t any larger than the elephants on earth, then it would be known that there’s an elephant on our planet larger than a mouse hole.

This is an exciting time in mouseholeology with important results coming in quickly. The coming years are all but guaranteed to bring new breakthroughs in our understanding of which things can fit through mouse holes.