Disassociated Press. Three-minute read, unless you are a geologist then you’re looking at about 2 hours with help, and 3 hours without it.
Calgary, AB — In what physicists world-wide are calling “the most significant scientific breakthrough of the century,” a mid-level landman from Alberta’s oil patch has single-handedly solved one of the longest-standing and most difficult problems in physics – to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. Perhaps the most amazing part of this feat is that he did this while thoroughly intoxicated at Hy’s Steakhouse along Stephen Avenue Mall in downtown Calgary during some important and necessary negotiation talks.
Randy “The Lease Whisperer” McDougall, a longtime negotiator of mineral rights for Frontier Energy Corp., was 13 Old Fashioneds deep and attempting to explain the concept of “freehold vs. crown land” to a table of half-listening clients when he scribbled something on the back of a steak-stained napkin that would send shockwaves through the physics community.
“It started when I was trying to prove to Dave from Conoco that a quantum lease could theoretically exist on both freehold and crown land at the same time,” slurred McDougall in a post-revelation interview. “That’s when I had my Eureka moment. I realized space-time isn’t continuous—it’s just a series of extremely hostile negotiations.”
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According to theoretical physicists who later examined the napkin (recovered from the restaurant’s lost-and-found after a waiter mistakenly tried to wipe up a Manhattan spill with it), McDougall had unknowingly derived a set of equations that seamlessly reconciled the curved spacetime of general relativity with the probabilistic chaos of quantum mechanics.
“I spent my entire career working on this problem,” said Dr. Rebecca Langley, a renowned quantum physicist at the Central University of Natural Technology. “And this man—who, I might add, once tried to expense a $1,400 bar tab to ‘consulting services’—solved it between bites of a bone-in ribeye. We should give this guy an honourary PhD in condensed matter physics from C.U.N.T.”
Theories of quantum gravity have long eluded the brightest minds of our time. String theory, loop quantum gravity, and other exotic mathematical models have attempted to bridge the gap, but none have provided a complete and testable solution. McDougall’s approach, later dubbed Leasehold Spacetime Theory (or LST), suggests that the universe is composed of discrete “parcels” of spacetime that behave similarly to mineral rights leases, with overlapping jurisdictions creating the apparent contradictions between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
“We always thought the Planck scale was the fundamental limit of spacetime in anti-Desitter space coupled with conformal field theory,” said Dr. Langley. “But McDougall’s work suggests it’s actually more like a land title registry—chaotic, disputed, and filled with loopholes.”
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As word of the discovery spread, McDougall was invited to present his findings at an emergency physics summit in Geneva. However, he has reportedly declined in favour of a last minute trip to Vegas with “the boys from Husky.”
“I don’t know what the big deal is,” said McDougall. “I was just trying to get my per diem’s worth.”
Meanwhile, Calgary’s Hy’s Steakhouse has since added a new signature cocktail to its menu: “The Quantum Lease,” which, much like quantum gravity itself, exists in an uncertain state until observed—at which point it’s either a whiskey neat or a Negroni, depending on the bartender’s mood.
