It's mathematically proven that alternative universes exist and perhaps in a different dimension that's just out of our eye sight. They say that for every right turn you take, there's an alternative universe where you took a left turn and things turned out differently. So there must be an alternative universe where the following happened to Watford. Jim Bonser refuses to go and Elton John loses interest. GT never comes and we spend the 80s, 90s and noughties and 10s like all the previous decades, hacking around the 3rd and 4th divisions, with 19th in the 2nd division under Ken Furphy remaining our highest ever finish. The Pozzos have no interest in us and we carry on as a sort of North London Orient. Perhaps even dipping out of the league for a season or two like Oxford did. We draw 5 or 6 thousand for our home matches. The question I want to put is, in that alternative universe of under-performance and disappointment, are YOU still a Hornet do you reckon? Are you one of the 5 or 6 thousand or are you following a more successful team? I'm not trying to be 'loyaller than thou' when I say that I'm certain I would be. Watford were rubbish when I started supporting them and pretty much stayed rubbish for the first 10 years or so I followed them.
My guess is I would be as well. My early years were the Furphy years, 71-72 was difficult, but I went to the the first game of 72-73(against a newly promoted Muff; I recall their supporters wearing face paint, like Cherokees my dad said), enthused and really excited about the future. The next few years were disappointing, but I stuck with it. Playing in division 3 and 4 was what would be expected.
There's a dimension out there where Watford are getting ready to play St Albans in the big Herts conference-south derby. I'm too busy giving Gillian Anderson a rodding to care much, but I will probably take a sneaky peak at the scores on my phone when her sights are lowered.
Interesting theory... in this alternative back to front universe does Clive work in the City and drive a Porsche and spit on poor people?
This is a good point. We'd probably have avoided a lot of bad owners trying to make a quick buck and ended up with a steady stream of perfectly honest but small time owners. League One and Two can be quite good fun really. So can the conference. If you take out the heady days of the 80s and the Pozzo era, the intervening 20 years were thoroughly miserable and, probably, not much worse than this alternate future. We'd have a small dedicated group of fans and they'd be totally content because they'd never known anything else. I'm not sure I'd be a fan to the extent I am now. My dad has supported Watford since the 60s, but I grew up away from Watford, so it would have taken some effort to tempt the young Jellyman to a fourth division club miles away.
Can you show us that? Using maths i mean. Tip: You'll probably need to include some algebra. PS If you read these boards often enough you will see that some Watford followers are already living in an alternative universe!
There is also the other parallel universe whereby Watford just beat Bayern 5-1 in the final of the Champions League.
When I first went to Watford games as a kid it wasn't even debatable about which team I supported. Watford was my team from the day I was born, I wasn't interested in our rather bland history or how many trophies other teams have won. I actually quite liked how bad we used to be at the time because it really felt like it was us against the world so when we did rarely win a game it was fantastic. This is part of the reason why I can hand on heart say that throwing the league away at the last minute doesn't pain me anymore because even if Watford never win anything until the day I die it wouldn't change anything. Watching a team in Yellow kit with "Watford FC" stitched onto it representing my town is what I enjoy and if we win then bloody fantastic.
Really? With two promotions to the top flight, two play-off losses from the second tier and a couple of near misses, three cup semis, and only two seasons below the top two tiers (and with a third division title for good measure)? Doubtless there were some pretty dull periods but for the most part we were a highly competitive second tier side, never going more than four seasons finishing in the bottom half (and that included the season we were relegated) and unlike some teams historically bigger than us, more than merely treading water (Barnsley and Huddersfield) or yo-yoing between the middle two divisions (Bristol City, Preston, Millwall). I'm sure that's a major part of the reason why we attracted the Pozzos; not just the heady days of the 1980s but they saw the potential of a good, reasonably well supported Championship side in an ideal location who could go one better and not only get to the top flight again but establish ourselves there. And needless to say, for that we should be very grateful.
I still wonder sometimes about that alternate universe that might have existed if Marlon hadn't got injured in 2006/07 - might have had very different (and far more positive) consequences for not only our club (as I'll never be convinced that we still wouldn't have stood a chance with King fit all season), but Marlon and Aidy's respective careers.
I want to live in the AU where we didn't buy Nathan Ellington and he wasn't our record signing for an embarrassing number of years.
It's more of a theory than a proof when you're dealing with infinity. If you say every event you ever take from the moment you are born to now has some probability P(x) that you will do it, then if there are infinitely many parallel universes then even things with almost zero (but not zero) probabilities would have to happen because you'd have taken every possible route. E.g. This morning you have a P(x)=0.6 chance of having breakfast, or P'(x)=0.4 chance of not having breakfast. If you have breakfast you have a Q(x)=0.75 chance of reading a newspaper, or Q'(x) chance of not reading a newspaper If you don't have breakfast you have a H(x)=0.35 chance of reading a newspaper, or a H'(x)=0.65 chance of not reading a newspaper So then you can have the following combinations of things, and the following probabilities that this is how you spent your morning: P(Breakfast and newspaper)=0.6*0.75=0.45 P(Breakfast and no newspaper)=0.6*0.25=0.15 P(No breakfast and newspaper)=0.4*0.35=0.14 P(No breakfast and no newspaper)=0.4*0.65=0.26 Each of those are the probability your life "took that route". (Except in a real model it would be everything from your parents picking you up for one second or not, dropping you, reading a book etc etc many infinite possibilities) Using our example, if we said there are 100 "parallel" universes, then you'd expect there to be 45, 15, 14 and 26 universes out of the 100 which "took each route" (because the expected number of times an event happens based on the probability, expectation = number of trials * probability). As life as many branches you can go down each second, in a finite universe (or number of universes) it would be almost impossible for any of the universes to be the same because the combinations matching up is too small, but if there were infinitely many universes then there has to be other universes that match up to your own as there would be enough "times" life has happened for another you to take the same option. Another way to look at it is if I told you to roll 1 million heads in a row P(h)=(0.5)^(1 million). You'd die before you'd do it, the chance is too small. But if you were put into hell and had to spend eternity flipping coins you'd not only get a million heads in a row but you'd achieve it many times into eternity, and tonnes and tonnes (infinite possibly) of other head/tail combinations, as infinity is much larger than any "small" probability. If p is a small probability, and n is infinitely many trials, your expectation is E(x)= p * ∞ = ∞, you'd expect the event to happen infinitely many times over infinitely many trials. It will probably still be unclear.
The answer is meridensi would have instead dropped a plate of dinner when he was 5 that led him to becoming the greatest player the world has ever seen.
Indeed. What i really want to know is whether Stephen Hawking is really that smart. I mean when someone asks him a question, how do we know he isnt Googling the answer on that little screen he has?
Ahead of, behind and right on its time at the same time. [video=youtube;_o1pOGc-zS0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o1pOGc-zS0[/video]
I imagine so. During my early years in 91/92 the attendance was only about 8,000 and it was mostly a cold, bleak experience.
Not enough threads on this forum that allude to the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. At least not in this universe's version of the forum. I often wondered about an alternate universe where Gavrilo Princip never assassinated Archduke Frank Ferdinand and World War One never happened (at least not in the manner it did). How different the world would look today! Britain may still own a global empire, the Nazis would never have existed and so on. But more crucially, Watford could have continued their dominance of the Southern League with it never being postponed by war. That golden era where we won the final Southern League title before abandonment of competition could have grown into something much greater. As it turned out, West Ham who finished 4th that season were elected to the Football League when peace returned and went onto become one of the nation's foremost football clubs for the century to follow. Might that have been Watford?
No, he's the Entertainment correspondent for the Daily Star, commissioning close ups of Zoe Ball's knickers as she falls into a taxi at 4 a.m.
