Confused? You will be...
SOPHIST's CHOICE How time passes more quickly as we get older and why this should affect discussions of a new Super League
So it looks like we're in for a new Super League next August. No doubt soon they'll be wanting to cut down the number of teams in it, thus reducing the number of games and shortening the season. But don't they know that this is futile, for each year the season gets shorter as it is and what's more there's not a single thing anyone can do about it! Confused? Well, bear with me for a while and all will be revealed. Amid all the fascinating stuff on sub-atomic physics, black holes, and the origin of the Universe in Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time', there is also a very good explanation of just why it is that time seems to pass more quickly as we get older. As Professor Hawking points out, it's all relative. For a child of ten, a year is one tenth of his life thus far, and he experiences it as such. But when he grows up and reaches, say thirty, a year then represents a much smaller fraction of his past life - in this example, only one thirtieth. It effectively means that a year passes three times more quickly at thirty than it did at ten. Obviously, at forty it goes four times faster, and so on. Each year zips by a bit smarter than the one before. Now then, for those of you who've stuck it out this far, here's the pay-off. By the application of a few simple logical principles, the implications for football soon become apparent. Take it away, Spock... Since each year passes more quickly than the previous one, and each year there's new football season, then each new football season must also pass more quickly then the one before. If the football season is passing ever more quickly each year, then it follows that it is actually getting shorter. If the football season is getting shorter, then the close season, with all its execrable golf, abominable tennis and wearisome cricket, must be getting longer. Frightening, isn't it? I mean, why bother legislating to cut the number of matches when the season is getting shorter every year anyway? Instead of haggling over the future structure of the game, the Football League and Football Association should be getting their act together to fight off these insidious attempts by the poncy class ridden golf, cricket and tennis authorities to encroach on the part of the calendar that belongs rightfully to us soccer fans. And if the logic of my argument is a bit, shall we say, convoluted, then let's just say it's on a par with the one the FA uses to claim their proposals for a Super League are for the 'good of the game.' Pah! Issue 008 - November 1991
	Next: James Clerk Maxwell explains the implications for the Second Law of Thermodynamics of the settling of FA Cup ties by a penalty shoot-out after a drawn first replay.