Sunday, 6 November 2011

THE UNFOLDING UNIVERSE

I think that I’ve finally got it. A whole new pattern for how the universe actually works that actually makes sense, unifies everything and explains all of that missing mass that we’re all so bothered about. This one, I think, actually really works, and could change the entire course of the history of physics as we know it.

The idea came to me, as so many of them do, whilst I was thinking about something else entirely, probably about the worrying length of time that the traffic lights were on red, or about the panda-like eyes of the woman waiting at the bus stop, or maybe just that universal mystery of what I was going to have for my tea.

It is, after all, always a problem. What, for example, is still lurking in the freezer and can it be combined with anything still lurking in the fridge to make something reasonably acceptable, but which won’t be a lot of trouble to do? Equally, what do we have in that is already getting dangerously close to its “use by” date that needs eating but which hasn’t already been allocated for other planned meal making purposes?

Are, for example, the eggs already spoken for?

Then of course there is the knotty problem of time to contend with. If the start time of the meal making process passes a crucial moment, say the end of “NorthWest Tonight”, will the sheer quantity of minutes it takes to prepare cause it to pass beyond the latest time that it can be considered reasonable to sit down and eat? All sorts of other factors come into play at that point, like the possibility of indigestion or the “really can’t be bothered eating now” paradigm and the fall back position of simply having peanut butter on toast and a nice cup of tea, but that gets complicated slightly by there being a fair chance that I already had that for lunch.

Equally there is the impossible circle to square of “whether we both fancy what I decide to cook” as well as the infinite improbabilities of whether or not one or the other of us chooses to pop into a supermarket on the way home and picks up something for tea. That, of course, opens up a whole other can of worms of rearranging travel times and destinations in order to factor in the time that needs to be found to drop into a supermarket during peak travel times anyway, alongside the trickier little decisions involved with quite which supermarket to visit and how that fits in with the traffic flow and getting stuck in it.

If, for example I call in at the one nearest to work, it will delay me for so long that the journey home might be extended far beyond the optimum start time for cooking it. Equally, if I go to the local one nearer home, the traveling time part of the equation might be severely reduced, but they might not have the same range of options, and also might possibly be far more expensive, and the smaller size might make the queues proportionately longer and thus negate the advantages gained during the traffic phase of the process.

The “choice of sales venue” factor is more limited for the beloved, as the railway station only has two major retail food outlets, although there are others near to the bus route that needs to be taken to get to the railway station in the first place that need to be taken into account. But then there is also, of course, the possibility of her having had an unexpected lunch date which alters the whole concept of the evening meal in terms of necessary portion size alone, not to mention the unbalancing effect that the fact that she has already eaten a large lunch and that I patently have not might have on both of our digestive needs. These things remain unbalanced and in a state of flux.

Anyway, getting back to this whole theory of how the universe works.

If you think of our universe as one flat plate which is one in a series of layers upon layers unfolding in a planar way… Blah, blah, blah, I’m sure you get the drift...

I think that I’ve got some shopping to do….



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