I am the Einstein of Cheese!

I am the Einstein of Cheese!

(the "m" stands for "MMM!" and the "c" stands for cheese!)

       A while back, the sexy nurse was making me watch educational programming about Albert Einstein.  I’m not usually up for that sort of thing, but I started paying closer attention when it got to the part about Einstein’s thought experiments.  The way I remember it, he would imagine a scenario and try to predict what would happen.  The ones I remember most was the one with the clock and the one with the elevator.

       The Clock:  Einstein imagines himself on a train or something traveling at the speed of light.  As he looks at a clock tower behind him, the clock appears to stop. Thus making time relative to the observer.  This made me think of passing cars on the freeway.  When you speed up to pass a car going slower than you, the slow car almost appears to be standing still.  Not light speed travel, but a more easily observable example.

       The Elevator:  It begins with Einstein watching a window cleaner on a scaffold cleaning the window of a skyscraper.  He wonders what would happen to the cleaner if the scaffold fell.  Then he changes the thought experiment to be a man in an elevator that has been cut free of its cable and is falling.  What happens to the man inside while he is falling?  He would go up towards the ceiling of the elevator as the death trap around him plummeted to the bottom.  The elevator was falling faster than the man?

       Somehow, I couldn’t help but think that I had also done some thought experiments of my own from the time I was a child. Two of them came to mind right away: my finger webbing thought experiment and my grandfather’s “Do-Nothing” machine.  It made me wonder if that made me a genius like Einstein.  Let’s see…

       Finger Webbing:  When I was about four or five years old, I used to stare very carefully at my hands and wonder, what if my fingers were webbed like a duck, but instead of flesh, the webbing was made of cheese?*  Brilliant, I know.  I would begin my tracing the outline of my fingers with a pencil, imagining that I could remove the offending cheese by cutting it off.  I would wonder to myself, could I eat this cheese?  Well, some people eat their boogers, so why not finger cheese? Would the cheese grow back? That depends.  If the cheese grows like hair and fingernails, maybe it would.  If the finger cheese grows like skin, then maybe there would just be scar tissue outlining my fingers. Would the scar tissue be made of cheese?  The world may never know.

       Grandpa’s Do-Nothing Machine: My grandfather was a classic Jack-of-all-trades.  There wasn’t anything he couldn’t build or fix.  Where he was born in Hungary, he had been apprenticed as a cabinet-maker.  Perhaps he drew upon those skills when he built this… thing… which does absolutely nothing.  The way it works is, you turn the crank, and the wooden “blades” (for lack of a better word) move through the tracks in a crisscross pattern.  The wood “blades” never touch.  When I was a kid, I tried to imagine a use for the machine.  The only thing that came to mind was using it to divide a square slice of (you guessed it) cheese into four smaller pieces. I don’t know why cheese is always on my mind, but there you go.  The only thing wrong with this idea is that you can’t remove the “blades” from the tracks.  So that put an end to that thought experiment.  Can you think of a use for the Do-Nothing Machine?  Does it involve cheese?

       So there you have it.  I think up thought experiments, just like the genius Albert Einstein, except for the fact that my experiments always involve cheese.  And that makes me the Einstein of Cheese.  Hell yeah!

*In case anyone was wondering, the cheese in all of my thought experiments were individually wrapped slices of Kraft American Cheese.  When you are a poor kid growing up in a trailer park, you not only think that Kraft American is in fact real cheese but the only cheese…  Until one day when you see a commercial for Velveeta and you think, “So this must be the fancy cheese that goes with wine?”