A FISH CALLED ROB

“Did Einstein actually say that?” Percy asked, squeezing into the booth and sliding glass of beer across to me. He nodded his head towards the chalkboard plaque attached to the wall behind me. Every week the pub inscribed a new alcohol-promoting quote, supposedly attributable to someone famous and influential, onto the chalkboard above all the photos of celebrities who had honoured the establishment with their patronage over the years. I turned my head to look. ‘Alcohol,’ it read, ‘is the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems’. Scrawled below that were the words ‘Albert Einstein’.

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“No” I said, turning back around. “I’m pretty sure it was Homer Simpson who said that”.

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“Thought so. Did he actually say that one about the kettle and the pretty girl?”

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“I believe so. You mean the one where he compares relativity to the way a minute seems to take an hour if you have your hand in boiling water, but an hour seems to flash by in a minute if you’re in the company of someone you find attractive?” Percy nodded. “Yeah,” I went on, “I’ve never been a tremendous fan of that quote. I know what he’s getting at, but most of the people who seem most enamoured of it often turn out to be the people who think relativity is something to do with psychology and how everyone’s point of view, by which I mean opinion, is an equally valid description of reality because reality is just a social construct, or something like that.”

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“Yeah I always though relativity was just the theory that nothing can travel faster than light.”

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“It is largely. Well, sort of.”

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“And that thing about how gravity is caused by warps in the fabric of spacetime.”

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“……sure. Something like that.”

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“How big is the galaxy?”

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“Somewhere between one and two hundred thousand lightyears across.”

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“That’s the number of years it takes light to cross it? So it’s absolutely physically impossible that I could ever travel all the way across and back in my lifetime?”

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“Um, well, no one else could ever travel across it and back within your lifetime if you were waiting for them back on Earth. And if you made the voyage yourself you would never get back within the lifetime of the people you left behind. But technically you could do it within your own lifetime, although the technology is nowhere near there yet, and when you got back you would find that hundreds of thousands of years had passed and you might not recognise the world you returned to.”

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Percy took a sip of beer. “That’s weird. Is this that time dilation thing? Time slows down when you move really fast?”

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“In a manner of speaking.”

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“Don’t be cryptic, just tell me.”

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“Yes it is. That’s the short version anyway. Time slows down on board your spacecraft, so less time passes on board and therefore, in principle, if you were going at almost the speed of light you could make a round trip of hundreds of thousands of lightyears, with hundreds of millennia passing by back home, while only a few years passed by on board your vehicle.”

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“But why does that happen? What’s the long version?”

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“How long do you have?”

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“Well, it’s Saturday tomorrow. So all night I suppose.”

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I laughed and drained the last of my drink, then slid the empty glass across. “Okay. But you’re buying.”