Time Spiders

Einstein meant to include this in his Theory of Relativity. He had it all worked out. He spent countless hours diagramming the complex physics and simplifying the concepts for ordinary mortals. Unfortunately, someone cleaned his chalkboard and the proof vanished into chalkdust. Some reports say that when he walked in and saw the bare chalkboard, he had a screaming fit, scribbled, E = mc2, and yelled, “Fine! This is close enough!”

What he meant to say was that time also slows as one approaches a spider web. Oh, you may not notice the effect with those wispy thin cobwebs. On the other hand, test subjects have reported a substantial time dilation effect when walking face first into massive, sticky, high tension webs. To an outside observer, the subject’s hysterical flailing (usually accompanied by a high pitched squeal of terror) appears to move very quickly. In many cases, the event may be documented and posted on the Internet before the subject’s breathing has returned to normal. From inside the web, however, the experience is somewhat different. The extent of the time dilation varies depending on the amount of web that ends up in the test subject’s nasal cavities.

There’s a very simple reason for this phenomenon. Spiders are Time’s minions. Time can’t be expected to do everything herself, you know. To save time, she’s outsourced some of the menial tasks to arachnids. “Why does it have to be spiders,” you ask? I’d like to say that the answer is philosophically profound or meaningful. The fact is that they also are uniquely talented as back-scratchers.

You know how much you love a good back-scratch? Yeah. Just imagine having hundreds or even thousands of tiny spiders crawling all over and scritching away…

You’re welcome.

Filed under: Ponderings Tagged: fantasy, fiction, Humor, time, writing