SUGAR CUBE

The new month started with a new dentist… or rather with me finally getting to meet my new dentist for the first time since my previous one retired after our last meeting and our new one found herself stuck in Poland “…visiting family…” during our last scheduled encounter.

First meetings like this are, of course, slightly tricky. After all, your relationship with your dentist is a fairly intimate one, and how you get along during your first appointment, and how painful or pleasurable an experience it turns out to be, can shape the manner in which you spend the rest of your time together, which could of course be several years which pass in the blink of an eye with those six-monthly meetings.

Granted, even on that scale, I’ve spent more time with my dentist in recent years than with some of my closest friends, but that’s life for you. Anyway, she seems young enough to probably see me out before her retirement although, with that tricky little matter of having family overseas, and with that unfathomable youthful thing called “ambition” to guide her career, that remains to be seen.

Other than that the appointment itself passed rather uneventfully, with the usual familiar blather about flossing and that added occasional “extra” of taking some X-ray pics which revealed my receding bones…

Incidentally, it always seems odd to me how the staff all run out of the room as the countdown to the zapping of the X-ray “gun”continues on to doomsday... like the end of a James Bond film when the base is about to blow up.

If I’d ever become a dentist, I wonder how long I’d have been able to resist at least one “No Mister Bond, I expect you to die…!” as I left the patient lined up in the sights of my X-ray gun…?

Meanwhile, I had been reading my science book as I waited for the appointment, and I became rather intrigued by the theory that, with the amount of space inside an atom, the entire human race could be compacted down to the size of a sugar cube…

A particularly dense sugar cube of course (no surprises there, ho, ho…)

But it is apparently true. If you took all of the space out of all of the atoms making up all of the bodies of all of the people in the world, the remaining stuff when sqished up together in a terrifyingly intimate manner would barely be big enough to take up the size of one sugar cube.

And people complain about overcrowding.

In other words 99.9999999999999% of each and every one of us is made up of absolutely nothing at all…

It is one of those facts that, when you find it out, just utterly, utterly blows your mind… and even when it gets rationalised up to the scale of a solar system (The actual “matter” in an atom being no more than the planets are in relation to the heliosphere) still messes with your mind when you look at all of the solid seeming “stuff” all around you and you realise how empty it all really is.

It kind of makes you think, doesn't it?

Neutronhumanity, for I suppose that is what it would have to be referred to as, could be compacted and shipped off to anywhere and, presumably, if we got the science sorted out, then could just add water (or, perhaps more necessarily, energy) and be reconstituted just like in that old "Star Trek"episode where the crew got converted into white blocks of crumbly stuff and the ones wearing the red shirts got, er, crumbled… although it turns out that crewman Dispensible would have been fine after all, just so long as Dr McCoy had a good enough vacuum cleaner and who knows where Dyson’s are going to be technology-wise in another two hundred years…?

Still, once reconstituted, there we'd all be again, albeit perhaps with slightly more understanding of ourselves and each other, you might hope, given that level of intimacy.

Still, after having my mind blown and my teeth polished, I headed off to work and resumed by battle with the awful traffic which had plagued my entire morning… and once I arrived there, my first coffee of the day tasted of tooth polish (which is never good…) and I paused to reflect once more upon that “sugar cube” theory (the roads would be much clearer) and how much my bright young thing of a new dentist would probably disapprove of sugar cubes anyway.

Everything, you see, is interconnected… although I still wouldn’t want to end up that close to all of you.

That’s nothing personal, by the way, because I’m sure you’re all very lovely and all that, it’s just that I’m simply not that fond of the prospect of quite that level of proximity with all of you, which I’m sure you all quite understand.