I realized that we do time travel all the time (and no, I'm not talking about the standard passage of time). Ever sat in a meeting that seemed to drag on forever? That is a form of time travel. To everyone outside of that meeting, it was just an hour, but to you, it was an eternity. You were traveling through time more slowly than those other people. On Monday, I stayed home to play around with writing some code. I started coding around 11:00 am and the next thing I knew, it was 6:00pm. Where did the time go? Clearly, I was in some sort of a time warp. Most other people had 7 hours of meetings and commuting. That time flew by in what seemed like about 2 hours to me. From this, I can determine two things.
1) Conference rooms are time machines that slow down time.
2) Computers can be a time machine that speeds up time around me when I am doing things like writing code or playing World of Warcraft.
But what about more interesting uses of time machines? We had a discussion at lunch today about teleportation. I said that teleportation would be easy if you could just control time. You could stop time, travel somewhere and when you got there you could start time again and it would look to everyone else just like you had teleported to that place. In fact, that is probably how teleportation works. Here's the downside. Like sitting in a conference room for a boring meeting, it feels just as slow as regular travel to the person who is teleporting and since time has stopped, you probably can't use your MP3 player very well since the tempo in music would be totally screwed up so it is a really boring trip. I then extrapolated that people had probably already invented time machines for the purpose of teleportation, but then realized that they were really rather dumb and just decided to not tell anyone about it.
So. There ya go.
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