There were times that the janitors could make small talk with the physicists, or if nothing else, might stare upon their blackboards late at night -- chalky expanses filled with endless equations -- while blinking and comprehending little more than the little pigs. But both janitor and physicist enjoyed munching their cooked delights, oblivious to the vast gulf of epistemology that separated them.
Prior even to then, in an even more simple time, before chalkboards could possibly hold such illustrious expressions of calculation, there were also people known as physicians. These people worked in a manner that touched upon the physical world, rather than merely the spiritual, looking for facts from which their knowledge could be increased. They also had people about them known merely as servants or scrub women, since the word janitor was not then in common use. But it was very rare that a servant would share lunch with a physician. However, they still ate little pigs whenever it suited their income.
Yet, neither scrub women nor physician understood the reality that all animals, whether little pigs or living kings or anything else between, were all composed of vast forests and jungles of microbes, each battling, and eating, and dissolving, and evolving and depending on each of the others for its existence. There were ideas, of course, passed down from the ancients, that such components called "atoms" might comprise the world of physical things. But scrub women might not have known much more than there were particles of dust and grime everywhere, her constant grief, and the source of her employment.
But the education of physicians increased, beyond the old science towers such as Galileo and Newton. Beyond the early dabblers and alchemists. Beyond even physics itself, to a time of Einstein and Bohr and Fermi and Feynman and so many others. The term physicist made one a different kind of person than a physician, and scrub women (though still existing) became known as "cleaning people" and "janitors", or in a greater dignity as "maintenance engineers."
But whatever you called anything, it was becoming more more complex and subdivided, to the point where physicists might be subdivided in groups who provided theories regarding strings as little bits of essence, or theories regarding boson fields responsible for sorting particles into their various masses, or theories which attempted to merge all such theories into grander theories, all the while munching little pigs.
It might have one day appeared to a physicist that his knowledge of the world was losing grip. He could look across the lunchroom and view the janitor, a man who might be paid somewhat less but who provided a far more observable service to the world. Where the physicist was busy bashing protons or nuclei together, making such a mess of things, the janitor was busy keeping the place clean and in working order. One could remove a physicist from the building with much less effect than by removing janitors.
One day in the land of not long long ago, there became an ever heated argument amongst the physicists (although not amongst janitors). The arguing became so heated that the very air itself became stripped of molecular oxygen and was replaced with very warm carbon dioxide. They argued over things that seemed silly to janitors -- whether sparticles were required to explain 10 dimensional strings in a 5 dimensional brane. Are black holes merely giant capacitors, absorbing matter and energy, packing it into containers known as singularities, and awaiting the "long, long from now" period in which they will emit all those containers into the coldly expanded space about them, to disappear themselves?
But, as little pigs scurried about the lunchroom in a confused manner reminiscent of Brownian motion, the physicists threw their pencils and chalk and laptops at one another. The number of theories of everything had grown to large, and might soon approach infinity, which is against the rules. Science demands that things be elegant and neat, not strewn with a mishmash of badly named entities that one day are the favorite toys in the playroom and the next are thrown to the janitors to dispose of.
Janitors, knowing not whether tensor waves might require a massage or a pill, just ignored most of the squabbling, keeping an eye out for splintered pencils, broken chalk or an occasional mistreated laptop, and simply ate their little pigs in silence.
The physicists themselves grew tired of such outbursts -- they were not physical men, despite their titles. They longed for simpler days when one could get the Nobel Prize for discovering X rays, something that had an effect, but was so mysterious it had no name, so that X would have to do. They longed for simpler math, such as that of Newton, where the calculus of movement was linear and only developed limps when attempting to resolve 3 bodies at once.
It was never to happen, though, since time is seated in linerar causality, where death always proceeds from birth, not the reverse. The world would never be simpler, but due to entropy would only become warmer, or at least more uniformly colder, depending on your point of view.
And there would come a time in which there were no more little pigs for the janitors and physicists to eat. Instead, there grew a giant pig, a very big, happy pig, who ate everything about, including janitors and physicists and even little unhappy pigs. It grew larger and larger until it could no longer eat anything more, whereupon it fell asleep, happily engorged with the entire universe. And it stayed happy and full forever, since there was no one else around to make the pig unhappy.
The physicists of that time long long before, in which squabbling filled the land, had actually predicted such a large, happy, pig. And they were right about one thing. That since the pig grew so big and so full, it had run out of other possible things to eat until it was forced to eat itself, happily forever after.
