His visitor never really understood why his friend gave so much time to his chosen hobby.
On this occasion, he found him agonising over a muon. In his past chats, he’d been told that his ideas for stories came from news items, newspapers, internet articles, personal experiences, memories, dreams, conversations, people he’d known, and sometimes relying mostly on imagination. He was continually typing up such items in the form of brief drafts. These, he regularly goes back to and converts them to short stories, he then posts these on his weekly blog. He says they are brief snatches from life, with the occasional items of science fiction and fantasy thrown in. On this occasion however, he was struggling with a muon.
The visitor was saying, “OK. What’s a muon, anyway?”
“It’s like an electron, but it’s unstable.”
His visitor smiled. “OK. Go on.”
“It is something similar to an electron, but like I say, it’s unstable. It may be positively charged, but with a mass over two-hundred times greater.”
With a shrug, the other said, “Is that anything special?”
“It certainly is, because it gives rise to the Muon Paradox.”
The other smiled again. “You don’t say.”
“I do.”
“Go on then. What’s the paradox.”
“Alright. This may not be the textbook answer to your question, but the muon is a fundamental subatomic particle. It has an extremely short lifespan of just a couple of microseconds. They travel to our planet over long distances at speeds that come close to the speed of light.”
“So?”
The writer gazed around the room. “Well, when you consider how brief their existence is, you’d expect them in their allotted time to merely travel from one side of this room to the other! That’s the paradox, right there, d’you see?”
“To be honest, no, not exactly. I take it it’s your intention to get this into one of your short stories?’
“Well, in the case of the muon, as interesting as it is, I have my doubts. Not all ideas get written into stories. I must say, this one probably falls into that category. I did think I would have some young school boy come up with a solution to the paradox and amaze his science teacher, but I gave that away.”
His visitor actually felt sorry for him, and said, “Never mind, I’m sure you have many other ideas that are far simpler and easier to understand, that you can convert to blog items.
“Simple. Yes, you’re right there. I do try hard to keep them that way.” With a grin, he said, “I’m sure there are those who would say that so much of what I write is absurd and quite foolish, and they could be right. However, I have readers from all around the world that leave comments of appreciation. Needless to say, I put my stories on my blog for them.”
Anyway, I’m sure you’ve known me long enough to have figured out that basically, I write these silly little stories for my own amusement.”
The visitor said, “Yes, I suppose I do.”
The writer said, “Shall I put the kettle on?”