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This abstract will document a theory that will, we hope, revolutionise Human understanding of the universe and our place in it. Current theories of the universe state that there are four fundamental forces: the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces and the gravitational force.

The Grand Unified Theory (GUT) attempts to combine these four forces into a single force that existed at the moment of creation and that can be theoretically recreated under the correct conditions. However, nobody has yet been able to prove this theory. After spending many hours locked up in deep research, my group believes that we have found the reason that the GUT has not been successful. The GUT relies on the assumption that there are four fundamental forces, while we have theorised that there is, in fact, another: jam.

After much research, we believe that not only is jam the fifth fundamental force, but that it is the meta-force, i.e. an umbrella force that encompasses all the others – all the forces currently known to man are but aspects of the jam. The jam is a vast energy field that pervades the universe and binds the galax... [this sentence has been snipped for legal reasons – the Lawyers]. It could be fair to say that the universe has jam 'built in' to it. We believe that at the instant of creation, there was only jam, but after one of those very small amounts of time that cosmologists like so much, the jam decomposed into the four familiar forces that we see around us today. Well, perhaps 'decomposed' is not the correct word, these four forces are, to varying degrees, all aspects of the jam. Examples range from the existence of the Earth itself (it's location from the sun and the existence of life is held be at least an 8 on the jamminess scale) to the jamminess that always surrounds the humble pool table, of which more later.

Extrapolating from the famous equation in Einstein's theory of relativity (you know which one that I mean) that states the equivalence of energy and matter, we can now take this further and state that energy is equivalent to matter is equivalent to jam. This may have profound implications, not only for the way that we view the universe, but also in everyday life. For example, we say that one person is extremely jammy, and then perhaps later the same day, they may be extremely unlucky, this could be due to varying levels of jam in the nearby vicinity, possibly caused by high amounts of electrical activity. One of my more caffeine-crazed colleagues has even theorised that personal matter gets turned into jam. This implies that normal human functions like weight-loss and sweating could increase the amount of jam in the immediate locality. Since we do not have the necessary mathematical tools to model the interactions of jam with the rest of the environment, we cannot either confirm or deny this hypothesis. However, it may go a long way towards explaining the extreme jamminess associated with any pool table or table-football table in a hot bar or games room. Perhaps the sweat is evaporating and through some unknown interaction generating large quantities of free jam which then interacts with it's environment.

The pool table mentioned above has formed the basis of a case study that has resulted in much of the evidence for the Jam theory. By careful experimentation, we have come to some interesting conclusions. We discovered a jam field surrounding the pockets of the table. Our initial instinct was to try and treat this field in a similar fashion to the more common and better understood electromagnetic field, and initial observation has been encouraging. If a pool ball is travelling at speed through this field, it will produce an effect not dissimilar to the effect of passing a wire through a magnetic field generating a component of force that directs the ball towards the pocket.

Empirical evidence suggests that the greater the number of interactions between the cue ball, the cushions and the other balls, the more complicated the jam field that is produced. However, we have not yet been able to model this with our limited mathematics. The jam field theory has been tentatively extended to include perpendicular jam fields but, again, we have been let down by our lack of mathematical tools.

It has been theorised that, like the other fundamental forces, the jam is carried by particles. The proposer of this theory chose to call these particles 'Morrisons', as a reference to his god. It is when these Morrisons bombard a person in great numbers that they exhibit the symptoms of what we call 'jam'.

It has been suggested that, in common with other forces, the jam has an anti-force. One theorist speculated that this force was accountancy: a force so ordered as to be the exact opposite of 'jamminess', but this is generally dismissed by other jamologists. However, the debate as the existence of some sort of 'anti-jam' goes on.

Recently, a more detailed case study of the pool table has shed more light on the debate over anti-jam. After careful observation, empirical evidence suggests that large jam fields are unstable. Prolonged study has shown that whenever a pool player is "on a roll", they inevitably show the attributes of a strong jam field; however, within a few shots, they will appear to suffer a complete reversal of fortunes. From this, and other evidence, we have deduced that when it reaches a certain field strength, the immediate jam field will collapse, resulting in a hail of anti-jam which surrounds the player for several turns.

To conclude, my colleagues and I have decided to publish this abstract in the hope that it will be read by mathematicians who can develop the necessary mathematical models needed to allow us to complete our thesis and to encourage others to think along the same lines to speed the rate at which Humanity's knowledge of the universe is expanded.

– March 2000