h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Based on the observations herein, it could be surmised that the crumb would be a fractal representation of the original food. With that, it may be possible to assign a dimension instead of a fraction to a crumb. It must be noted, however, that, in order for the crumb to be fractal, it must retain all the qualities of the original food. A nut from a piece of nut bread would not be a nut bread crumb.

Interestingly, a crumb of fruit cake has the bizarre property of having the same weight as the original cake from which it was born. Thus the density of fruit cake crumbs increase as they crumble. Their only stable form is in that of the original fruit cake. No one has ever observed a fruit cake decaying into sub-fruit cake particles, although a group of physicists in Japan have placed a fruit cake at the bottom of a really deep mine in the hope that they may be witness to such a feat.

Given, then, that a fruitcake crumb's weight changes in inverse proportion to its mass, at what point could a buttered fruitcake crumb be reliably predicted to fall and land fruitcake-side down?

Given a sufficiently small fruitcake crumb, its mass would be such that it would not actually "land". Instead, it would penetrate the chintz table cloth, mahogony table, several floors of the flat supporting the table, and proceed to coalesce at the center of the earth after many oscillations about the center of mass. This leads to the remarkable theory that the earth's core is not composed of iron, but rather a primordial fruit cake. Due to the fruit cake's density being much greater than iron, this should result in a smaller core than originally calculated.

Oh, I like that! It may yet someday be proven that black holes are not only composed of incredibly compacted fruitcake, but that indeed, as many have suspected, black hole fruitcakes function as the gateways to parallel universes, which may help to explain why a fruitcake never really disappears, but rather unfailingly reappears, usually when we are least prepared for it.

Quite so. In fact, the Eistein-Rosen bridge is nothing more that a Harry and David fruitcake. A network of wormholes connecting every Grandmother's oven to every other Grandmother's oven is a direct result of extruded fruitcake matter (FCM) generated during the Big Bang (which is, obviously, a misnomer and should have been called the Big Bake). The reoccurrence of fruitcakes is simply the manifestation of a single lump of FCM instantaneously transported through this network.

Wow. I'm not much of a physicist, so all I'll says is "Wow." That has curiously not made me hungry for fruitcake.

There good with butter. Mind the crumbs, though!

As I said, I'm no genius with science, but it seems to me that if the crumbs of fruitcacke maintain the same mass as the entire fruitcake, then I've just got to wonder what happens when someone digests (or at least attempts to digest) fruitcake! As you masticate (I love that word, even though I'm not sure I spelled it quite right) you create smaller and smaller peices of fruitcake. Are these peices crumbs? Because if they are, then each piece retains the mass of the original fruitcake. So you end up consuming HOW many times the mass of the total fruitcake once youve eaten just a small slice?

And this is exactly why one should not actually eat the fruitcake. Those in the know (and this includes anyone who has ever attempted to eat fruitcake) will tell you that the only correct thing to do with a fruitcake is to pass it on.

But Knight Errant said they were good with butter... why is it I only end up more confused after people clarify things for me?

Fruitcake, like physics, is best kept in the realm of the purely experimental. "Fruitcake is good with butter" is as unrelated to reality as "wormholes link dimensions" - that may very well be, according to theory, but very much impossible to practically observe.