It's amazing: my calculator couldn't manage to translate the phrase «from the fence to lunch». Said I was an idiot myself, and my jokes were idiotic. That it’s nonsense, an idiomatic expression meaning “somehow, aimlessly.” And he translated it literally, claiming he’d preserved the absurdity: “From fence to lunch” — no sense, no end.
Meanwhile, my ensign back in the army — a man with two spans in his forehead — handled the task beautifully. He said: “You’ll dig the ditch from fence to lunch!”
Long before Einstein, he understood… no, not “long before,” of course. More accurately: completely independently of Einstein, he arrived at the concept of eternalism (i.e., the block universe). In his model — their model, the ensign’s and Einstein’s — spacetime is a single, frozen four‑dimensional monolith. The past, present, and future all exist within it simultaneously and equally. All events that ever happened or ever will happen simply “sit” at certain coordinates inside this block. As Einstein said, as Zarathustra said, as the ensign said: “For you, you eagle‑excavators, the difference between past, present, and future is nothing but a stubborn illusion.” Then he’d raise his index finger toward the sky, as if trying to gauge the wind direction, and say with a meaningful gasp: “Monolith! And in this monolith, today you are digging a trench, tomorrow you’re filling it in, the day after tomorrow you’re digging it again. Not ‘you will dig’ — ‘you dig!’”
That’s relativity for you…
Now picture this: two photons are sitting on the couch in the evening, drinking coffee, watching a science documentary. At some point, the announcer’s anxious voice says: “And so, the closer we approach the speed of light…”
The photons are totally relaxed: “Well, that’s out there, far, far away — black holes, quasars — nothing to do with us, right?”
But relativity is relative precisely because of that! Whack! — at that very moment, you go rushing past them (or we do, with shovels over our shoulders). And at that famous speed of light. You zip by so fast that the photons don’t even get a proper look at you — just some blurry blob in a home T‑shirt.
They flinch, wipe the spilled coffee with a napkin, twirl their fingers at their temples, and say to each other:
“Good Lord, thank goodness none of this physics applies to us, and we don’t have to tear around at the speed of light like those lunatics…”
So next time you’re given the task of digging “from fence to lunch” at work or in life — don’t get upset. Just remember that you are located at a tricky point in the spacetime continuum. For someone, you haven’t even started digging yet — but for someone else, you’ve already finished! And the fence — well, that’s just an illusion in the eye of a coffee‑drinking photon.