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Pasta Al Einstein

11/25/07
Despite any evidence to the contrary, I have a tendency to be picky and frugal about my use of drugs. I'm a one-beer date, a one-toke party animal. After all, I tell people, I live by my wits and I need to keep them sharp.

Heedful of recent scientific evidence that cognition is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition, I attempt to engage myself in acute, even extreme, intellectual pursuits, even if I wind up resembling the dog perennially chasing cars without a clue of what to do with one if they caught it. I litter the house with leftover physics and calculus and philosophy texts, treatises on zoology and biology and more generalized subjects with no discernible -ology at all.

One of my favorite Mt. Everests of the mind is the inscrutable beauty that is General Relativity. While Albert the patent clerk could cook up its Limited Edition forerunner Special Relativity with nothing more than high school trig and a cockeyed world-view, GR is considerably more interesting, if by "considerably" you mean "several orders of magnitude" and by "interesting" you mean "byzantinely indecipherable." You don't snowboard Einstein Peak without passing through calculus, vector analysis, Riemannian geometry and tensor algebra — and those are the bunny slopes.

There are layman's versions, of course. Just as there is Quantum Mechanics and Popular Mechanics, so are there Relativity For The Drooling Masses books lining the walls of dying bookstores nationwide. But after fretting my way through earnest expositions of curvature and non-Euclidean space with precious little detail and no aha! moments to light the way, I resolved to go directly to the source and pulled Einstein's own introductory manual, Relativity: The Special And General Theories, out of the library. Just a little light bedside reading, you understand.

Well and good. Einstein, even in translation, is a model of humor and clarity in his exposition of his own theories. His reasoning constantly refers to concrete measuring devices as the final authorities. I followed him though the special theory easy as a summer breeze.

And then came the howling gale of gravity. As in daily life, the laws of universal attraction invariably screw things up. Uncle Albert does his best, gusting gently through the flying elevator of the Equivalence Principle, but even he can't come up with a concept sufficiently solid and down to earth to describe Gaussian coordinates as a substitute for Cartesian space/time. He describes a construct of lines, arbitrarily passing through a continuum, points on the lines constituting a reference frame (still with me? didn't think so). Describes it all in great earnestness. Then the bald hand of the German/English Dictionary steps in and renders what Einstein calls this conglomeration as a "mollusc."

A what?

That's what it says all right, mollusc. The Learned Doctor, icon and touchstone of scientific vision, reached in his wisdom into the bottomless font of his cosmos-envisioning imagination and labeled the ultimate expression of unchanging reality-view as ... a snail. Ohhhh Kaaaay, Mister Official Canonical Translator Man, whatever you say. I'm sure that if Einstein said something auf Deutsch that Anglicizes that way, it's exactly what he intended, a true reflection of his innermost thoughts. Far be it from me to question the authority of the MOLLUSC? MOLLUSC? BWAHAHHAHAHAHA!!! HOHOHOHOHO!!! YAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!! Whew...

Sorry, it was a reflex. Anyways, having attempted (and attempted only, mind you) to fathom Einstein's deep sea approach to deep thought, I did hie me to the Intarweb, there to plumb the tubes for some clue as to the actual meaning of MOLLUSC!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! HAHAHAHAA! HEHEHEHEHEHEHEH!!! Oh gawd...that hurts so good...

And, surprisingly enough, I actually found a semblance of explanation. Some authorities spoke of the formless nature of the mollusc, its ability to grow or shrink at will. Others felt it was only a convenient term. But the most profound insight came from where it always does, in the turgid entrails of a masters thesis somebody had the gonads to post online. The vanity of the graduate student exceeds all concept. The "charming" appellative mollusc (g. Molluske), this guy writes, can be interpreted as more of an octopus or squid, a means to convey the convulsively wiggling qualities of the lines the Gaussian coordinates are strung on.

It was at that moment that I had my Road To Damascus moment, my blinding flash of illumination: Albert Einstein was a Pastafarian.

Far be it from me as a certified Spiritual Philosopher to exclusively cling to one credo or cant as The One True Faith — why, they'd throw me out of the Guild for something like that. Still, I have had occasion in the past to express my admiration for the truly blessed teachings of the saintly Bobby Henderson (Northwest boy, too!) concerning the Flying Spaghetti Monster (pbuh), He who created all of space and time with His Noodly Appendage and blessed us with his Eight I Really Rather You Didn'ts. Despite my requisite neutrality (termed spagnosticism by the sect) on the tenability of all this splendid silliness, I cannot help but be drawn to such a succulent feast of ideas.

While there is no evidence of any informing regarding the FSM prior to the Profit, uh, Prophet Henderson's first discourses of the early 2000's, nor specifically any conceivable rational link between Albert Einstein and the tenets of Pastafarianism, surely the free spirit of the Nobel laureate, his intense individuality, his defiance of convention, his support of liberation worldwide, his propensity to stick out his tongue at photographers and go about without wearing socks, speaks volumes concerning his true sentiments, sentiments which could never be seen to be at odds with a cult that extolls the importance of pirates in preventing global warming.

But most of all, it must be seen that Einstein's mollusc, his ultimate frame of reference with its tendrils of coordinates extending throughout space and time, transcending all other frames of reference, invariant amidst gravitational flux and tension, warp and woof, is that self same Noodly Appendage that all true Pastafarians feel the touch of in every aspect of their lives.

Argh! RAmen!


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