All Posts Tagged With: "physicists"

Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has been mentioned before in this column. In the segment of that opus entitled The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the remark is made that in order to cover the phenomenal cost of an evening at the restaurant, all one has to do is deposit a penny in a savings account before leaving one’s own era. Even at low interest, an unimaginably great amount of money will have been accumulated in the course of several billion years. (Never mind that many planets, including the earth, would have burned up in the interim, complete with their banks. This is comic science fiction, after all.)

This morning I asked a group of friends I was having coffee with what point in time they would choose to visit if they could travel to the past. Mostly they were bewildered by the question, but some thought in terms of going back to an earlier point in their lives to remedy some error that had negative effects. The possibility of going back with a little information about what was going to happen in certain real estate markets was brought up.

Being the student of the Bible that I am, I said one moment in time that I would dearly love to witness is the one related in Mark 7:24-30, in which a Gentile woman from Syrian Phoenicia approaches Jesus to ask him to come and heal her daughter. Jesus answers her in mock-prejudiced terms, telling her it just isn’t right to give the children’s bread to dogs.

This is a bright and spunky lady, though. She picks up on the fact that he doesn’t use the word for “dog” that the Jews usually use for Gentiles, meaning a filthy, mangy scavenger. Rather, he uses the word for a little lap dog, a pet. She says, I’m sure with an ornery glint in her eye, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Jesus obviously loves her answer, and tells her to go home because her daughter is well. I’m convinced that Jesus was doubled over laughing when he told her he was granting her request. That is why I’d like to see that scene as it took place.

Many people, though, would like to go back to certain turning points in history and watch, for example, a great general going through the agony of trying to out-think his adversary, perhaps bringing his knowledge of chess to bear. I would love to see Alexander the Great debating with his trusted second-in-command, Parmenio, before the Battle of Gaugamela, about what to do when King Darius’s chariots charged. One might even speculate that Alexander’s father, Philip, whose name means “lover of horses,” wasn’t named in vain, and that he had told Alexander that horses would not charge into an enclosure surrounded by lances. In any case, what a moment of inspiration it must have been when the idea was put forward of directing those chariots into U-shaped formations in order to stop the horses and chariots and slaughter their occupants. For that matter, I would like to see Alexander’s face as he made the hard decision to return and support Parmenio, who was in trouble, rather than pursue and kill Darius.

Following the Battle of Waterloo, Wellington called it “a damned close-run thing,” and some practical people might well choose to go back to tip the scales on other “damned close-run things,” so that some of the worst horrors of history might have been avoided.

Of course, some physicists have felt time travel into the past must be impossible for the simple reason that, what with the butterfly effect in operation (a butterfly in Beijing today may affect weather conditions in New York City a month from now), any slight change in the events back there would radically change our circumstances today. The example most often given is that of a deranged person’s going back to kill his/her father before he could generate a child. The thing ends in paradox. Those who hold to the many-worlds theory, though, have no such problem; in an event of that sort the world without the patricide simply splits off from the one from which the time traveler departs.

Where some serious hypocrisy might enter the picture, however, is if someone imbued with radically postmodern values might travel back to the point at which the United States Constitution is being generated and make an impassioned speech about how many points in it will be considered embarrassing in what he firmly believes is a more enlightened, relativistic age. It’s something to think about.