h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Today in NewScientist Newsletter a story about a professor who has a theory about timetravel and is working to make a time machine.Something to do with slow light and eddies in the whatsit.

Typical to be a week late ,isn;t it?


Cheapolata

If you have a time machine then the concept of 'late' becomes, like lunchtime, an illusion. So no worries.

Q

It'll never work. Time machines can't be made, otherwise there would already be one.

I think the current theory goes that if time travel is possible, you won't be able to travel back in time to any point prior to the first time machine being built.

Precisely because of this, time travel is impossible...

Proof is as follows:

1) Boffin conducting experiments builds small machine demonstrating temporal displacement...

2) Lawyers from infinite futures instantaneously materialise in a race to lodge patent applications...

3) Time machine technology is tied up in so many patent lawsuits from the very start that no practical working time machine can ever be built without the inventor being sued into the next century...

4) Since no machine can be built, no patent lawyers can travel back from any possible future...

This results in a paradox; therefore, time travel is impossible.

QED

Of course, I am neither a quantum physics boffin nor a patent lawyer...
...so I could be wrong!

The true proof that there are (or never will be) time machines is the fact that there ARE lawyers. If anyone is ever clever enough to build a time machine, they are certianlly clever enough to figure out how to go back in time and prevent lawyers from coming into existence in the first place. I would think this would be the driving force in the development of time travel. So, since we do in fact have lawyers, there can be no time machines.

I think thus far there are no time machine because :
a lot of people were out for lunch
and the others were too demotivated by the few telling them how impossible it is to make one.
We have now entered the lucky phase that lunch out of office is forbidden and people have to bring breadboxes again.

Anyone ever saw that great piece from DNA about the millenium?

Chipo