The rabbit sat on the small mound of earth, gently assisting Mother Nature's attempts at balding the patch of its already sparse toupee of grass. Suddenly, it paused: whiskers twitching as it raised its head slightly. Those who weren't well informed would have imagined the animal to be sniffing the air in search of predators, but they would be mistaken. A thought had just crossed it's mind. In its defence, this was not wholly surprising. However, this particular thought seemed to linger around and - unlike the other thoughts that frequented the brain in question - was not a permutation of three verbs and two nouns, of which the rabbit's entire vocabulary consisted.
The rabbit sat up on its haunches, whiskers still twitching. Unlike its usual thoughts, this particular one did not seem to fade away. It shook its head, raised a paw and flattened its whiskers. It was fully formed, the thought, and it had lots of '='s and a miscellany of other symbols. Thankfully, these were no stranger to our rabbit than some of the words, so it did not notice. What it did notice, however, was the fact that the thought simply refused to leave. And so, being a good host - it prepared it a comfortable corner in its head and promptly forgot about it - or at least tried to. Periodically it was reminded of its existence by the thought metaphorically clearing its throat, but it played no part in our protagonist's day to day existence.
The rabbit kept the thought and took it to its grave, never telling anyone. Not that there was anyone it could tell. However, it is interesting to note that a few kilometres away from where the rabbit had been on that fateful day, was a big room with a large number of men who were smashing a lot of tiny balls that were moving very fast into each other in the hope of discovering just what our little friend had accidentally stumbled upon. Needless to say, smashing little balls is an altogether inefficient - not to mention fruitless - exercise for anything other than making interesting patterns for t-shirts and so it isn't surprising they did not progress very far for the next century or so, until someone came up with a slightly better idea.
The human world would probably have been saved of a lot of trouble if the little rabbit had bounded off to the room and explained exactly what it had stumbled upon. Sadly, this would probably have no productive outcome, as humans could not understand rabbits which would lead to the obvious conclusion that science had been metaphorically barking up the wrong tree: if they hadn't been spending so much time bouncing little balls and had a spent a little more time on more productive enterprises - such as learning Rabbit - they'd probably have gotten to their theory a lot earlier.
Nevertheless, they did get it - after quite a while. But the rabbit was dead by then. As it was approaching its inevitable end, it found itself - like most of us - being introspective. And as it looked back at itself, all it could really see was the thought - given the vast emptiness that was its mind. Needless to say, this wasn't a very pleasant or comforting sight: all those '='s and whatnot piled up on each other. And so like many humans the thought got it into a reasonably foul mood. If someone had been able to capture our protagonist's last thought, they would probably have found it to consist of three words the first of which would be one of the aforementioned verbs and the other two the words 'Quantum Gravity'.
No comments:
Post a Comment