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

After an age of trying to understand ltuae, I was lying in bed one night. After the usual fumblings, I decided to think about the nature of the universe and a phrase came into my head all out of the blue-like.

Understand time and you will understand the nature of the universe

So here I go, the next two years concentrate on that very thing.

BTW This story may take a few installments!

I started with good old H G. It was him that wrote the famous book "The Time Machine". He looks at time as another dimension, we have the usual three and then his fourth dimension is to look at an object throughout it's existence as a whole. This starts to make great sense, as it takes us out of our snapshot style of existence and shows another possible dimension.

Talking of dimensions, my next journey was to "flatland" unfortunatly only the book which I can highly recommend to anyone.
This helped me understand the nature of dimensions.

The toughie is that we are stuck in this dimension and unable to move out of it. The best metaphor is one of a character in a video film. No matter how the tape plays i.e. speeding up, pausing, running backwards, we will only be able to see it at the one speed in the one direction. Bit of a bugger really!

So in order to understand time, we have to remove our biases.

Scientist bods love symetry and that is one thing missing from time, however by removing our shackles, it no longer has to! Time can run slowly, speed up and even run backwards. (My mate Ouspenski was convinced that time actually did run backwards!)

Next I turned to gravity as the big G always has to get a mention somewhere! The nearest comparison we have to gravity is the feeling that we get when we accelerate.

But, acceleration is an increase in distance over time. Problem is, that the Earth ot in fact anything else seems to have a constant speed or path in the universe, so the only other way would be for a DECREASE in time. Er...think I'm getting confused, but I'll keep going anyway. So in order for gravity to work, time needs to be slowing down.

OK, when if it slows enough it will get to a point where the speed of time gets pretty close to zero. This is though to happen in some places. Especially in black holes, where gravity reaches it's maximum point. Ever thing with any form of gravity will eventually become a black hole.

Next question, could gravity get to the point, where the acceleration goes into reverse and time goes backwards so far back to the big bang and indeed further back than that so that we get into negative time? If so, we will then get negative gravity, just enough to cause the Big Bang (again) and here we have it, the law of eternal returns and endless re-runs of our lives for us all, time and time again.

OK so I may have got lost in my own stupidity, but it gives a subject to talk about!

Erm, I think you'll find acceleration is an increase (or decrease) of *velocity* over time. Which rather puts a dent in your theory.



Relative to what? Speed is relative, yes?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Dang, P-C... you beat me to it

Welcome to the FFFF, voodoobluesman

Y'know I thought that 'L' in 'ltuae' was an 'I' for a minute. I thought you'd been pondering some kind of polynessian badger-god.

Excellent, that's what I needed, someone to show me the light in this fog of dumbness I call my brain. But, you can bet your bottom euro I'll come back with another possibly more ludicrous theory.

Long live the Badger God!

Yes, I'm quite taken with the idea of a Polynesian badger God too. What sort of things do you think it might like its followers to do? Dig burrows, perhaps, or is that too literal?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Well, it all started back in the mists of time, although time as we know it varies, so although it feels like twelve thousand years ago, it was in reality only five minutes ago.

The polynesian people used to worship a small rodent called Roger as their main God, although one day Roger decided that enough was enough and he was going to go on holiday. So he went with his wife Cybil to a lovely timeshare just near to the coast in Toremolinos.

This left the polynesians with a dilema. So as polynesians do when they have a dilema, they decided to hold a meeting/picnic on their smallest of islands, which unfortunately was a small rock about three metres square. As they clung on for dear life and tomato sandwiches, the High Priest known only as Dave (this translates as "the one who is to ba called sngfratfn on Sundays and on others days Dave" fell asleep and had a dream.

In this dream, the hero and everyone's hero, the one and only Martin Legskin was flying through the air on his amazing flying plug fighting the evil hordes of savage kittens with his trusty bowl of pudding by his side. Crying out in victory he claimed the supremacy of the Great Green Obstacle above all others and for all Polynesians to unite with the rest of the world in its worship, for only then can the world truly live in peace.

Unfortunatly, as Dave fell asleep, he fell off of the rock and as he fell, all the other Islanders could hear was a gurgle sound similar to "ituae". With that he drowned and the role of High Priest went to his son Simon who was scratching his left arm at the time.

Unfortunatly "ituae" means nothing in polynesian, its nearest comparison is "itunale" which means " the Badger who lives near the tree where Trevor lost his sandal the week before last" Simon, who was just itching (literally) to get off of the rock and have a really good scratch in private decided that it was a sign that the Badger is the new God and they should just get off the island and get on with it.

Since then, Badgers have been worshiped on the Polynesian Islands as Gods, although world peace was not achieved, the role of the Badger was really enhanced.

Have you ever read any Robert Rankin? If not take a look.