Affe #199

About Affe mit Waffe Deprecated

Stephen Macaquing was sure that he was not let down by all his friends due to lack of popularity. But in the end, no one came to the experiment, which included champagne, balloons, and banana hors d'oeuvres. Stephen let out a deep sigh. Well, it wasn't that bad, he was able to console himself last night with two large trays of banana canapés. As he sat at the breakfast table this morning – a little sadly – his wife scolded him and asked him what he had expected. He should decide what he wanted, either throw a dinner party with friends and family or do a physics experiment. She wasn't wrong when she said that Stephen would certainly have been disappointed if anyone had come. This was all the more depressing because today he had to do something he really had no motivation to do – which was to send out the invitations to yesterday's party.

Stephen Macaquing was probably one of the most famous theoretical physicists, cosmologists, and authors of the Monkeyverse. He was Director of Research at the Center for Theoretical Primate Cosmology at the University of Chimpbridge. In addition, he held the Doucasian Chair of Mathematics, a mathematics professorship known to be the most prestigious academic post in the Monkeyverse. And now he had demonstrated that time travel into the past probably wasn't possible – that was groundbreaking, but he couldn't tell anyone about it right now. Yesterday evening he had held a time travelers' party. Stephen had dressed up and was waiting at a certain place at the University of Chimpbridge. The invitations he would send out today provided precise GPS coordinates – in the case should there had been any confusion, or a monkey got lost as he sped through time and space. Sending out the invitations after the reception had passed, was a critical component of the experimental design: Only those primates that could travel back in time would be able to participate. "You are cordially invited to a reception for time travelers," read the invitation. But after printing, he had to admit that he had made a linguistic faux pas: Everyone was a time traveler, whether intentional or not. Each primate traveled through time at a constant rate of one second per second. It was Albert Affenstein's discovery of the "Time Banana Dilation", where time seemed to slow down when something was moving very quickly. As a consequence, there was the possibility of jumping into the future. Beside this wasn't the only way to produce a "Time Banana Dilation": A gravitational field could result in a similar effect – even the relatively weak field here on Earth's surface. Monkeys didn't realize it because they spend their whole lives down here, but more than 20,000 kilometers up, gravity was measurably weaker – and time passed more quickly, by about 45 microseconds per day. Even more dramatic were stronger gravitational fields, such as around black holes, where gravity was so strong that nothing – not a monkey, not a banana – could escape it. However, when his brother-in-law Louis called his stomach a black hole, it was pure nonsense and not a scientific expression. Although Stephen had to admit that what Louis could eat was impressive and could not be explained by any law of entropy. "Real" black holes could warp spacetime, another Affenstein concept that combined the three dimensions of space with the fourth dimension of time. The result of this distortion was a "wormhole", and at this point again not what one might find on apples, as he always had to explain to the ignorant monkeys. This wormhole was the result of spacetime folded on itself – a shortcut from one point to another. Unfortunately, it wasn't as practical as it might seem because the gravity of a black hole would rip everything apart – but in theory it was possible. The wormhole's exit could be at an earlier time than its entrance, meaning a monkey walking through it would end up in the past. These trajectories, looping back into the past, were called "closed time-like curves". A complicated name, but in the end, it was all about one thing – time travel.

Stephen's brain was in overdrive and his wife at the breakfast table raised an eyebrow critically. There was no denying that his experiment had other sources of error as well, which might be a simpler explanation for why no one showed up. Maybe he was just unpopular, or nobody had time yesterday. He should stop worrying. All he had to do was send out the invitations and see the reactions because after all everything not forbidden was compulsory, so anything was possible. He was sure that he could adapt to any new situation. Stephen Macaquing was smart, and intelligence was the ability to adapt to change.

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