Jigsaw Puzzle.

[retepsnikrep]

Hawkins and Dawkins are getting the World, The Universe, and Everything else, sorted out, rationalised, understood, best-sellered.

Setting aside for the moment the question of whether we really want or need to know what it's all about, Lawkins and Pawkins have just lately jumped out of a puddle to work it all out for us.

The questions are three....What are atoms? What is space? Why does stuff do what it does?

The evidence is nearly all in If the whole thing, from Big Bang to Whimper and back again were a jigsaw puzzle, it's nearly done. A couple of bits of edge, where the pieces are the same shape, are wrong. There's a patch of sky not done as it's all too much the same colour, and a little bit of table cloth ditto. But the kittens in the top hat are finished OK.

Kawkins and Wawkins are analogy junkies and live to boggle our minds with their fruit and vegetable universe. The sun's an orange in Huddersfield, the Earth a pea in New York, and the nearest galaxy is a pile of grapes on Uranus.

Time is a favourite with Zawkins. We see the long ribbon of Carboniferous and Tertian and Lithics of various sorts and the fine BIC line of modern man. But time depends on what you are. If you were a stone.....'Blimey, there I was up this mountain minding my own business and the sea nipped in, shoved me and quick as a flash rolled me into sand, and I got put into cement and was blown up by a man called Hitler, and here I am now, dust on a pantry shelf. Life's funny like that. I remember when I was molten lava. Now that was a hot time alright.'

On the other hand some microbes live only a few minutes. This is relativity, not The Relativity, just a relativity. Everything is relative anyway, i.e. smaller, larger, wetter, more retrousse. Einstein's Relativity Theory should be called, 'The Faster The Shorter Fact'. We can dispense with the word theory now, the proof is in, it was the cat's whiskers, fully interlocking.

Peter