[Kabar-indonesia] 2 of 2: New Yorker: Two Critiques of String Theory.[+Woody Allen Strung Out]

[Joyo at aol.com]

-2 of 2-

The New Yorker Magazine 
Issue cover dated July 28, 2003 

STRUNG OUT 

by Woody Allen

I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally
explainable. I was beginning to think it was me. As it
turns out, physics, like a grating relative, has all
the answers. The big bang, black holes, and the
primordial soup turn up every Tuesday in the Science
section of the Times, and as a result my grasp of
general relativity and quantum mechanics now equals
Einstein's—Einstein Moomjy, that is, the rug seller.
How could I not have known that there are little
things the size of "Planck length" in the universe,
which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of
a billionth of a centimetre? Imagine if you dropped
one in a dark theatre how hard it would be to find.
And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease
suddenly would certain restaurants still require a
jacket? What I do know about physics is that to a man
standing on the shore time passes quicker than to a
man on a boat—especially if the man on the boat is
with his wife. The latest miracle of physics is string
theory, which has been heralded as a T.O.E., or
"Theory of Everything." This may even include the
incident of last week herewith described.

I awoke on Friday and because the universe is
expanding it took me longer than usual to find my
robe. This made me late leaving for work, and because
the concept of up and down is relative the elevator I
got into went to the roof, where it was very difficult
to hail a taxi. Please keep in mind that a man on a
rocket ship approaching the speed of light would have
seemed on time for work—or perhaps even a little early
and certainly better dressed. When I finally got to
the office and approached my employer Mr. Muchnick to
explain the delay, my mass increased the closer I came
to him, which he took as a sign of insubordination.
There was some rather bitter talk of docking my pay,
which, when measured against the speed of light, is
very small anyhow. The truth is that compared to the
amount of atoms in the Andromeda Galaxy I actually
earn quite little. I tried to tell this to Mr.
Muchnick, who said I was not taking into account that
time and space were the same thing. He swore that if
that situation should change he would give me a raise.
I pointed out that since time and space are the same
thing, and it takes three hours to do something that
turns out to be less than six inches long, it can't
sell for more than five dollars. The one good thing
about space being the same as time is that if you
travel to the outer reaches of the universe and the
voyage takes three thousand earth years, your friends
will be dead when you come back, but you will not need
Botox.

Back in my office, with the sunlight streaming through
the window, I thought to myself that if our great
golden star suddenly exploded this planet would fly
out of orbit and hurtle through infinity
forever—another good reason to always carry a cell
phone. On the other hand, if I could someday go faster
than a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per
second and recapture the light born centuries ago,
could I then go back in time to ancient Egypt or
Imperial Rome? But what would I do there: I hardly
knew anybody. It was at this moment that our new
secretary, Miss Lola Kelly, walked in. Now, in the
debate over whether everything is made up of particles
or waves Miss Kelly is definitely waves. You can tell
she's waves every time she walks to the water cooler.
Not that she doesn't have good particles but it's the
waves that get her the trinkets from Tiffany's. My
wife is more waves than particles, too, it's just that
her waves have begun to sag a little. Or maybe the
problem is that my wife has too many quarks. The truth
is, lately she looks as if she had passed too close to
the event horizon of a black hole and some of her—not
all of her by any means—was sucked in. It gives her a
kind of funny shape, which I'm hoping will be
correctable by cold fusion. My advice to anyone has
always been to avoid black holes because, once inside,
it's extremely hard to climb out and still retain
one's ear for music. If, by chance, you do fall all
the way through a black hole and emerge from the other
side, you'll probably live your entire life over and
over but will be too compressed to go out and meet
girls.

And so I approached Miss Kelly's gravitational field
and could feel my strings vibrating. All I knew was
that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her
gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum
tunnelling. It was at this point that I was rendered
impotent by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. How
could I act if I couldn't determine her exact position
and velocity? And what if I should suddenly cause a
singularity; that is, a devastating rupture in
space-time? They're so noisy. Everyone would look up
and I'd be embarrassed in front of Miss Kelly. Ah, but
the woman has such good dark energy. Dark energy,
though hypothetical, has always been a turn-on for me,
especially in a female who has an overbite. I
fantasized that if I could only get her into a
particle accelerator for five minutes with a bottle of
Château Lafite I'd be standing next to her, with our
quanta approximating the speed of light and her
nucleus colliding with mine. Of course, exactly at
this moment I got a piece of antimatter in my eye and
had to find a Q-tip to remove it. I had all but lost
hope when she turned toward me and spoke.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I was about to order some
coffee and Danish but now I can't seem to remember the
Schrödinger equation. Isn't that silly? It's just
slipped my mind."

"Evolution of probability waves," I said. "And if
you're ordering I'd love an English muffin with muons
and tea."

"My pleasure," she said, smiling coquettishly and
curling up into a Calabi-Yau shape. I could feel my
coupling constant invade her weak field as I pressed
my lips to her wet neutrinos. Apparently I achieved
some kind of fission, because the next thing I knew I
was picking myself up off the floor with a mouse on my
eye the size of a supernova.

I guess physics can explain everything except the
softer sex, although I told my wife I got the shiner
because the universe was contracting, not expanding,
and I just wasn't paying attention.

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