I finally have a good excuse for speeding
I enjoy watching the Discovery Channel from time to time.
Some of the programming is entertaining, and it is always informative.
The show I watched Sunday night is no different.
It was a new show featuring astrophysicist Stephen Hawking — who I like because he has a knack for making the most complex physics problems in the world seem as simple as first-grade science.
In the episode I watched he talked about time travel.
He quickly explained how the forces of nature prevented time travel to the past for several reasons, but said time travel to the future was theoretically possible.
I was somewhat disappointed because I would love to go back in time and witness some of history’s biggest moments and possibly see a living dinosaur.
With those hopes dashed, I turned my sights toward the future. The danger of traveling to the future – Hawking neglected to mention this — is that if you go forward, you can never return.
Wouldn’t that stink to travel 1,000 years into the future only to find all life is extinct? That would be quite lonely in my humble opinion.
But it sounds relatively easy to time travel to the future.
Well, easy might not be the right word, but it turns out you don’t need crazy machines to do it.
According to Hawking, all you have to do is travel very fast.
He explained that the faster a body travels, the slow time moves around it.
For example, if a high-speed train could travel near the speed of light, by the time a week passed on the train, an entire century would have passed on Earth.
I thought it was pretty cool, so I decided to put it to the test.
I got in my car and drove down a stretch of highway without any stops. I was going faster than the cars around me — but not over the speed limit — and I arrived in the future. Sort of.
I got to my destination before the other cars did and they had aged more than I had by the time I got there — one of the other drivers was very slow.
Okay, I know that experiment does not test Hawking’s theory, but can you imagine if you could get in your car and arrive one or two years in the future?
Yeah, that would work until you got pulled over by the cops. I would love to hear that conversation.
“Sir, what’s the hurry,” the cop says.
“I’m sorry, officer,” the person in the car replies. “I’m trying to get to the year 2314.”
“Step out of the car, sir.”
As everyone knows, time slows down when the cops pull you over. It slows way down, almost like it stops.
Maybe a lengthy traffic stop is the key to time travel to the past. Hopefully, I will never have to find out.
— No traffic laws were broken during research for this column.
