Travelocity

Well, I went to our old friend Wikipedia to read about time travel. Yikes. Technical, technical, technical. I went up to Advanced Physics in my high school Science Honors Program, but still... From wormholes and time dilation to cosmic string and the Roman ring... it all sounds dirty, uh, Greek to me. (By the way, that's a Roman ring with two wormholes over there to the right...)


Don't get me started on the chronology protection conjecture. Don't even get me started. (No, really. I can barely say it.) And can we tawk about Stephen Hawking? This lengthy Wikipedia time travel entry tends to portray the naysayer in him. He seems to downplay the whole idea—the Wikipedians constantly quoting his negative views on time travel—like: if we could, why haven't we met any time travelers? I mean, the man is a brilliant physical theorist, as we all know. I just think it is interesting (and worth paying attention to) that he doesn't have huge amounts of encouraging words about time travel. (And do remember I've done incredibly superficial research about this.)

Somewhere in the entries, a contributor wrote about methods of time travel in literature:

"The most commonly used method of time travel in science fiction is the instantaneous movement from one point in time to another, like using the controls on a CD player to skip to a previous or next song, though in most cases, there is a machine of some sort, and some energy expended in order to make this happen (Like the DeLorean in Back to the Future or the phonebooth and the circuits of time in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure)."

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure? Who knew? Clearly, I'm missing out on some prime popular culture. Shoot THAT to the top of your Netlflix queue, why dontcha? Push aside both the 1960 and 2002 filmed versions of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) and chew through some classic Keanu. Excellent!

It is sad that I get stymied by the scientific and buoyed by the popular. I like to think of myself as intellectually curious, looking at the world from out in space, trying to decipher it all. And yet I can't resist including a picture of Papa Smurf in my blog.

The last I'll write about the Wikipedia nonsense is to point out the five links at the bottom of the entry, entitled Claims of Time Travel. The most comprehensive was about one John Titor from the year 2036. Here's the actual website.

And you should all know that the time travel entry begins with all sorts of Warnipedias:

1. This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims
2. This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject.
3. This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.

Really fills with you with confidence in its content, eh?

Oh, and just in case you were wondering what the hell that artwork is at the top of this post:

Artist's impression of a wormhole as seen by an observer crossing the event horizon of a Schwarzschild wormhole, which is similar to a Schwarzschild black hole but with the singularity replaced by an unstable path to a white hole in another universe. The observer originates from the right, and another universe becomes visible in the center of the wormhole shadow once the horizon is crossed. This new region is however unreachable in the case of a Schwarzschild wormhole, as the bridge between the black hole and white hole will always collapse before the observer has time to cross it. See White Holes and Wormholes for a more technical discussion and animation of what an observer sees when falling into a Schwarzschild wormhole.

Clear?