Albert Einstein, global nuisances, and the Greatest Show on Earth

It is still not too late: Ripple Dissolve is coming to an arsehole near you

While markets were gyrating up and down earlier this week, an event of truly historic proportions took place. In a coordinated press conference across three continents, scientists announced that the gravitational wave predicted by Albert Einstein had been finally detected. The Slog takes a contrarian look at the potential advantages of this discovery for Earthlings everywhere.

It says a lot about the nature of Homo sapiens thinking Man hahaha that the most spectacular thing we have yet done with quantum physics is create a Smartphone for the Internet of Things. We are indeed monkeys clattering away on typewriters, but so far we’ve a long way to go before making the genuine leap from physical to metaphysical.

At school, I was a dunce at physics. Or rather, I thought I was: in truth, I was frightened of it. Science was for people with pointy heads who knew one end of a periodic table from the other.I didn’t. Just as with woodwork, double physics on Thursday was a looming dread from Tuesday morning onwards.

But then in the fourth year, I was lucky enough to encounter Les Lumley, a teacher who actually enjoyed being asked awkward questions. And as this practice was my defence mechanism in physics, we got on rather well. I did Arts in the Sixth Form, but in the run-up to O-levels, Les encouraged me to doubt stuff. For that reason alone, he had a seminal influence on my life.

Over the years, I vaguely kept abreast of big bangs and black holes, light speeds and relativity. Not for me the pulp sci-fi: it was spoilt by all the silly names – and an eternal sense that the authors probably liked Tolkien. But when I retired from the advertising business sixteen years ago, I at last had the time to piece together some half-baked learnings from neuroscience, Buddhism, sub-atomic physics, and – late in the day – the fact that there was far more to gravity than apples falling on pointy heads.

Gradually, I pulled these threads out from the wooly jumper that is my cerebral material:

• Time, Space and how things ‘seem’ are illusions, simplified to enable our feeble brains to grasp the incoming data without having an explosive nervous breakdown.
• Buddhist insights and accelerating neuroscientific/anatomical discoveries seemed to support the idea of reality, belief and perception chasing each other about in a somewhat random manner
• In the sub-atomic/quantum realm, experimental outcomes lacked the consistency of the bigger physical world we inhabit: changes in environment – perhaps even thought patterns – could produce wildly different results. Even homoaeopathic theory (I felt) was being vindicated in some ways
• The Space/Time relativity thing allowed electrons to be in two places at the same time; and it looked like it was in fact one electron, but merely part of the illusion
• Einstein felt sure there was a sort of ‘rippling rope’ of gravitational waves in the Time/Space continuum, along which one could travel and defy the speed-trap of e = mc2.

This is all head-hurting information. But Einstein himself said towards the end of his life that God was “not a chess Grand Master who cheats”: he believed all could be explained in the end. Time is proving Big Al right – although I’m still confused – but very obviously, the ramifications for any species that has already gone beyond personal movement (and onto machine-powered acceleration) of electro-magnetic gravity surfing are infinitely fascinating. The sorcerer’s apprentice might be about to boldly go; that’s a terrifying thought for me because, as most of us are complete cocks, the damage we might do to the Universe – always assuming the bloody thing exists – could be irreparable.

So for the purposes of here and now, I’d rather come back to Earth and think of all the useful things we could do with a readily available gravitational wave. And in the context of contemporary events, it’s not hard to find them. The key collective term, I fancy, is banishment.

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While this may seem a negative use of ripple-surfing to many of you, I suspect the mistake you’re making is that it ought to be some kind of recreational thing in which Richard Branson travel services would just love to play a high-profile role. To me, that’s flippant: it’s bad enough giving Branson the NHS to tinker with. No….the creation of a quantum penal colony is an entirely positive concept from which those of us left behind could only benefit.

Whoever the Scottie was beaming reprobates up (or down, or something else) the first rule would be to take the atoms of each arsehole, and splatter them into millions of separate dimensions, directions, spaces and virtual whatnots such that they could never be reassembled. Using the simple equation  [(-5000% x 36,000 mps) + (n x quantum outcomes x black hole impacts²)] would probably guarantee success, but being merely a layman, I’d be quite happy to take advice on the matter. The bottom line is, no way could a pan-Galactic Australia ever result from the process.

The following would be my starters for ten in terms of single-ticket bums on seats:

Gary Cohn, Julian Assange, Jeremy Hunt, Peter Tatchell, Mossad, Hamas, Recep Erdogan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Dianne Abbott, George Osborne, Andy Burnham, Hillary Clinton, Rupert Murdoch, Piers Morgan, Mario Draghi, Wolfgang Schäuble, Ros Altmann, Francois Hollande, Jeroan Dijesslebleom, Evangelos Venizelos, Vladimir Putin, My Little Pony, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, Keith Vaz, George Soros, Harriet Harman, Boris Johnson, John McCain, Peter Mandelson, Jeffrey Epstein, John Bercow, Sally Bercow, Donald Trump, Lloyd Blankfein, Nick Clegg, Ed Balls, Bob Diamond, Rebekah Brooks, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Kim Jong-un and Guy Verhofstadt.

The beauty of Ripple Holidays© would of course be that, as physicality is of no consequence when travelling in the Time/Space continuum, you could all choose as many banishment candidates as you wanted. I see the potential here for the greatest TV smash-hit in history: a global, nightly game show – working title Ripple Dissolve – in which, on a 24/7 basis – a selection of the infantile sociopathically horribilis would have to beg, plead and grovel in order to avoid eternal de-atomisation. The real entertainment in all this would be that, they having agreed to the most appalling life-fates rather than cease to exist, we would follow the humiliating atonement of the gargoyles…creating the potential for infinite repeats on every Channel known to Man.

Yes: I know, youre right, you’re all right: in wishing for such revenge, we would be stooping to their level. But now and then – in the face of undiluted evil – perhaps one must briefly stoop in order ultimately to conquer.

Yesterday at The Slog: Turning the EU carthorse into a dead donkey

Filed under: Uncategorized, Vindicating Einstein: is it the end of the Age of Gargoyles? Tagged: Albert Einstein, Gravitational Waves, The End of Evil