Odd-Man Hypothesis : Far-Off Men and The Eternal Father

By the 30th Century, Human Society was Highly Compartmentalised....

SpaceTech ROGIN : 

You know what'll happen when you cut that lock.

Teeth+Curls : 

There's no point in both of us being killed by the blast - 

Get into The Ark, man. 

SpaceTech ROGIN: 

You don't want trouble with the space technician's union, Doctor. 

Teeth+Curls : 

What? 

** THUMP **

SpaceTech ROGIN: 

That's My Job. 

The “Odd-Man Hypothesis” is a fictional hypothesis which states that unmarried men are better able to execute the best, most dispassionate decisions in crises—in this case, to disarm the nuclear weapon intended to prevent the escape of organisms from the laboratory in the event the auto-destruct sequence is initiated. In the novel, the Odd-Man explanation is a page in a RAND Corporation report of the results of test series wherein different people were to make command decisions in nuclear and biological wars and chemical crises.

Hall is briefed on the Hypothesis after his arrival at Wildfire. In the book, his copy of the briefing materials has the Hypothesis pages removed; in the film, he is criticized for failure to read the material ahead of time.

Dr. Hall is assumed to have the highest “command decision effectiveness index” among the Wildfire team; this is the reason why he is given a control key to the self-destruct mechanism. Hall initially derides this idea, saying he has no intention of committing suicide before he is told that it is his job to disarm the weapon, rather than to arm it: Stone then admits that the Odd-Man Hypothesis, while accurate (in the confines of the book), was essentially a false document used to justify handing over a nuclear weapon to private individuals and out of government control.