A silly fable I “discovered”:
Maurice Rexham was a professor of mathematics at Wichita State University, and one of most skilled mathematicians in the country. He was also a very devout Baptist, as one might be wont to find in Kansas. Thus, one particular evening as he was putting away some towels and linens, standing near the open door to the bedroom where his daughter and her friend from school were studying (or whatevar), he overheard a song playing. In a strange man’s strained voice,
Heaven,
Heaven is a place,
A place where nothing,
Nothing ever happens
Naturally, to a deeply religious man, making such statements about God’s glorious domain was outrageous. Heresy. Blasphemy, even. Maurice was upset and troubled at hearing this, and it ate at him for several days, until at last he decided to bolster his own faith by proving that it could not possibly be true. With his thorough understanding of the principles of physics, solid grounding in philosophy, and inestimable mathematical skills, surely he could construct an irrefutable proof that there could be no place in time, space or beyond devoid of events.
For fifteen long years, the professor labored in his spare time to craft his thesis, striving to be comprehensive and inerrant. It had to be flawless and unassailable. When they found him, pencil in hand, head lying on his desk, expired from an unexpected massive stroke, the page his cheek was pressed to described part of an ancillary lemma to his masterwork.
Rexham’s Theory, even not quite finalized, was indeed impressive. More importantly, the key principles that underlay it led to some significant discoveries. His detailed analysis of temporal dynamics came to be used to contrive and develop a ridiculously simple, efficient and powerful world line reshaping device that allows our space-faring vehicles to cross immense distances very quickly at mundane rates of speed.
In a way, one might say that God himself has given us the stars. We can tool on over to WR136 (or what might be left of it) and back in about a month’s time, traveling and returning in a coherent frame of reference. And the Theory’s body of work has allowed us to establish a useful and consistent means of measuring these great distances that are rife with relativistic distortions: a benchmark known as the “moresex” (about 12 lightyears), in homage to the professor himself.
Science is, of course, full of impishness. The WSU Engineering College twisted Maurice Rexham’s work to build a device that was able to bend world lines completely back around. They constructed the long sought after Time Machine that would allow a person to travel backward in time. And it worked beautifully, apart from two tiny limitations.
The first limitation lay in the fact that the machine would only transport the traveller backward in time. No matter how hard they tried, they could not build a conduit to the future; we are stuck moving forward at the normal pace. The second limitation can be much more serious: the time traveller must not, ever, be in danger of a coincidence paradox. One may only go back to a time prior to one’s own existence, and if by residing in the past, one runs up into their own timeline, all of that traveller’s existence will vanish from all of ever.
The hypothetical for you is: how old would you have to be to use one of these devices to venture into the past, never to be in this now again? And how far back do you think you would want to go?
