In those days we were all British

(Well - this applies to all the people in the British Isles of course)

Seeing this silly tee-shirt and smiling at it, I can't help but think of it as a sign of the times.

Titanic deception

The Titanic was sunk, in a vain attempt to win the Blue Riband for an Northern Irish company, Harland and Wolff, on her maiden voyage.  She was proceeding without caution as was standard practise at the time, under the command of an Englishman who had had his share of maritime accidents.  Captain Smith himself had declared that he could not "imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that."

Now I wonder who told him that?  Was that a case of an Englishman being deceived by an Irishman?  How unusual.

And if you are Irish you have no more right to be offended by this than I as an Englishman have to be offended by the tee shirt slogan.

Anyway, it all happened a long time ago when they were both British and we were nothing at all.

John Titor - time traveler

John Titor first appeared on the Time Travel Institute forums on November 2, 2000, under the name TimeTravel_0.

He described his time machine saying it contained the following:

• Two magnetic housing units for the dual micro singularities
• An electron injection manifold to alter mass and gravity micro singularities
• A cooling and X-ray venting system
• Gravity sensors, or a variable gravity lock
• Four main caesium clocks
• Three main computer units

Was he a real-life Dr Who or not?  Who knows.

Titor claimed that he had been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer which he said was needed to "debug" various legacy computer programs in 2036, when the UNIX operating system will reach its own equivalent of the 'millenium bug' problem.

He also claimed to be on a 'stopover' in the year 2000 for "personal reasons". 

I tend to believe that 2000 was not exactly on the way from 1975 to his time in the future in any real sense.  Its a fun story though, and well worth a glance at the Wikipedia article.

I wonder how he overcame the difficulty that I described in  How does Dr Who do this?


Small note (in larger text than usual):
Why not listen to the excellent Episode 113 of The Pod Delusion to hear more about the story.  And while you are there, if you live in London UK, why not glance at the CV for Liz, one of the stars and the Deputy-Editor of that podcast, who is seeking a job at the moment.  Perhaps you can help her?

How does Dr Who do this?

Have you ever wanted to travel in time?  The idea seems quite attractive in spite of  the obvious potential paradoxes.

On top of the 'usual' risk of accidentally (or purposefully) killing one of your own ancestors and thus forcing yourself not to have existed, or the freak accident of reappearing inside a wall that somebody built while you were not looking, there is another subtlety that most people don't think about.

Not only do you have to find a way to travel in time, you also have to plan to travel in the three spatial dimensions and three complex rotations in order to land in the same place on the same planet.  Think about it.  The earth is speeding through space on its orbit around the sun, rotating as it goes.  The sun is circling the centre of the galaxy, and the galaxy itself is moving.

So imagine yourself getting into a time machine in your house and just going back or forwards 10 seconds to try the new 'toy' out.  Surely no paradoxes can be caused by that.  Other family members probably wouldn't even notice.

However, think how far your house has traveled through space in that 10 seconds.  When you re-materialise you will be in the vacuum of space with no way to return.

It might be OK if you are cocooned in the tardis with a friendly Time Lord, but for us lesser mortals it will be much less comfortable.

Time travel seems too risky.  Making the machine itself almost seems easy compared with the problem of trying to get to the right place, the right way up.


Added 10th September:
See Monty Python's Universe Song and a further link to a nice Facebook page about how fast the earth is moving through space. 


Small note: I seem to remember Asimov using this idea in one of his novels.  Its not new - but just an unusual thought.