The Dimension X story I listened to the other day, featuring a male dissident and a typically attractive woman, involved people being reduced to a size way beyond the sub-atomic, and living their lives on a planet like electron orbiting a nucleus.
In the space of ten of our seconds, Einsteinian time dilation caused them to spawn an entire - presumably rather inbred - race that reached a glorious peak before dying out to leave one last message for folk in the our-scale reality.
*Note - Dimension X and X Minus 1 need an article to themselves one day.*
For some reason, this made me think about the curious property known as Quantum Flavour Number...
Sub atomic particles indeed have a flavour - leptons can be flavoured as electrons, tau particles or muons, ditto their corresponding neutrinos. Quarks are flavoured according to charm, strangeness, topness and bottomness.
As ever, this is essentially made up stuff designed to cover up immensely complex mathematics and the all but beyond understanding properties of these particles. You could call them "banana, strawberry, blackcurrant and lime" and it wouldn't make a difference.
But what if it really did? What if all the quarks, neutrinos and leptons did actually taste of something. Imagine being shrunk down to a size by which relative to you, an electron is the size of a lollypop. Lick it! Perhaps you might get a jolt of electric charge to add to the experience, but then the flavour bursts through. Is it sharp and citrusy? Or sweet and mellow. Will sucking the cranberry flavoured charmed quark ease an acid bladder? Perhaps a blueberry flavoured tau super neutrino will de-fur your arteries, and reduce your risk of a heart attack?
But the crazy thing is, even this wild surmising is nowhere near as fantastic as the universe of the super small actually is. I don't understand it, and I suspect the number of people on the planet who really do is barely in double figures.
It's a mad universe, however it tastes.
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