It took me a couple minutes, 28 October 2022

Reading bumperstickers is an old hobby of mine.  I have been reading them for years.  I do not know why as most are pretty boring.  "My child is the honor student of the week", or someone's favorite politician, or "Wall Drugs".  So when I run across an interesting one, it is a secret pleasure.

In the parking lot of a nearby grocery store, an unusual bumpersticker was found.  It took me a few minutes to work it out, so I will delay the reveal to give you, dear reader, a chance to read the secret message.

Another odd hobby of mine is to read license plates.  Well, not merely read them, but interpret them.  Today, personalized license plates are common and "reading" a plate is a common game.  However, at one point, license plates were not personalized and they all seemed to use a single format:  AAA NNN, or three letters and three numbers.  I suspect this simple rule was the result of sample bias, but it held true for many years in my experience.  I used to interpret the AAA letters as computer instructions.  "BRA 565" became 'BRAnch", "BNE 354" became "Branch if Not Equal", "ADC 757" became "ADd with Carry", "LDA 324" became "LoaD Accumulator", and so.  Not all three-letter groups had actual instructions that correspond to anything I had seen or used, so part of the game was to make up instructions that fit.  A famous example would have been "HCF 523" for "Halt and Catch Fire".  A silly little game that kept me alert on many long highway trips.

In my first reading of the curious bumpersticker, I thought about convenient substitutions that might resolve into something, and that thought is partially right.  I finally realized the entire expression does not resolve into one thing, rather there are independent pieces that resolve into separate things that, in turn, combine into the meaning.  The key was to realize that there is nothing one can do to reduce the square root of minus one except i.  Yes, one could stick in Euler's formula (e^(i*pi)+1=0), but that is more complex rather than simpler.  So we have, potentially, three tokens and the middle one is "i".  (As an engineer, I might try to put in a j rather than an i, but let us put that aside.)  That leaves the E/c^2 and the PV/nR.

Well, the first E that comes to mind is Einstein's - E=mc^2.  This immediately reduces to mc^2/c^2, or m.  This give us "mi" plus a third token.

By inspection, it is clear the third token is a play on the ideal gas law: PV=nRT.  If you take the ideal gas law and rearrange it to put the P, V, n, and R terms on one side, we are left with T.

Our solution is: miT, normally written MIT, and that is consistent with the playful spirit of the puzzle.  Do you have an alternative solution?

Jibe 1 - sloppy use of cases, and an educated person would use formulae that have uppercase M and I.

Jibe 2 - a graduate of a proper engineering university would know that j is the correct terminology for imaginary numbers and this was clearly created by a mathematician rather than an engineer.