Chapter Text
A Series of Terrible Analogies Considered By One Angus Macgyver
The Geometry of It All
"I love you like... a differential manifold with a globally defined connection... God, that sounds even worse out loud."
"You’re going to have to walk me through that one."
"Imagine a space, something complicated and curved and not flat, like the world we live in. You can’t always compare things directly across it, directions get messy, distances warp. But if you have a connection, like a rule that tells you how to carry something across that space without it losing meaning, you can trace everything. You can make sense of motion, of change, of how something moves without breaking. That’s what you are to me, you’re my connection. As long as I'm with you, the world still makes sense. You remind me how to move forward."
Topological Charges But Make It Romantic
"I love you like a conserved topological charge."
"You love me like a what."
"A conserved topological charge. Okay, so, in field theory and gauge theory there are these quantities called topological charges that don’t come from local symmetries. They come from the global structure of the field. You can’t smooth them away or cancel them out. They just are. No matter how chaotic the system gets, no matter how many things shift or collapse or get rewritten, they stay. You’re that. You’re the thing that doesn’t vanish when the system breaks down. You’re the constant in a world I thought I couldn’t survive. And my love for you, it’s not noise or chaos or just a feeling that might fade. It’s a charge, it’s embedded. It persists, no matter what."
I'm Dating A General Relativist And You Have To Pay The Price
"I love you like a geodesic deviation."
"That’s a new one."
"It’s this thing in general relativity. Two particles start off next to each other, right? Same path, same direction. But because of spacetime curvature, because of the gravity well or black hole or whatever, they start accelerating apart or pulling closer together without either one doing anything. It’s not about thrust or force or propulsion. It’s the fabric around them telling them how to move. The shape of the universe deciding their story. I was always going to end up here. I love you like the shape of the world made it inevitable."
Charm Quarks
"I love you like... like asymptotic freedom."
"You love me like what?"
"Asymptotic freedom. It’s a quantum chromodynamics thing. Quarks, they're bound together by the strong force, right? But the closer they get, the less the force holds them. It’s counterintuitive, most forces get stronger with proximity, but this one frees them. They’re wild and chaotic apart, but stable together. That’s what loving you feels like. The closer I am, the more myself I am. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. You don’t cage me, you free me. I only feel like I’m not falling apart when I’m in your orbit."
I'm Incomplete Without You
"Okay, fine, but you asked for this. You remember Gödel’s incompleteness theorem?"
"That is not where I thought this was going, but I’m intrigued."
"So, Gödel’s theorem basically proves that in any consistent logical system complex enough to handle arithmetic, there are statements that are true but can’t be proven within that system. Like, the system knows the thing is true, but it can’t ever show it. Loving you doesn’t always look like it makes sense. It’s not clean or logical or something I can always justify within the rest of my life. It doesn’t follow my usual rules. But it’s true. It’s always been true. Even when I couldn’t prove it to anyone else, especially not myself."
My Favorite, Broken and Symmetrical
"Alright. You know how in gauge theory you can start with a perfect symmetry, like, a whole system that obeys beautiful rules, and everything’s balanced, right?"
"Sure."
"So, the symmetry breaks. Not because it fails, but because something chooses a specific direction to exist in. It stops being perfect because the system settles on something real. Something grounded. A vacuum state. And yeah, the equations get messier and there’s fallout and mass and fields and Higgs bosons and whatever, but.. I guess what I’m trying to say is that my heart used to be like that symmetry. A lot of rules. A lot of ideals. Balance. Order. But I broke that for you. I let it pick a direction. You’re the broken symmetry. You’re the reason the theory became real."