Holy shit! Was that Stephen Hawking on my phone? I played the message several times and it sure sounded like him. But why would he be calling me? What was going on? At that point, I really wanted to get moving and the traffic jam I was stuck in became even more annoying.
It took another hour to finally get home. When I entered my apartment ‘Einstein’ was sitting in front of my laptop with a silly smile on his face.
“Did you get mein mezage?” he asked.
“I got a message from somebody who sounded just like Stephen Hawking,” I said.
‘Einstein’ then typed something on my computer and the same voice I had heard on my phone repeated the message: “Raymond Young, you’re invited to look at my time travel experiment of 2009.”
“You know, zeze computers are amasing. I found zis vebzite zat reproduces vadeffer you vant to zay in ein Stephen Hawking imitazion. I zought zat vould get your attention,” he said smiling.
“You’re an asshole. You know that? And since when did you know how to use a computer? Never mind, I don’t want to know. Anyway, what’s that about a 2009 time travel experiment.”
“Zat year Hawking conducted ein experiment in vich he concluded zat time traffel vas impozible.”
While ‘Einstein’ talked I went over to my room and found the blue light wall gone.
“I zuggest you look it up,” Einstein said raising his voice so I could hear him in the bedroom.
“Hey, did you take down the information wall?” I asked while ambling back to the living room.
I got no answer; ‘Einstein’ was gone. I was really getting tired of his pop-in/pop-out routine.
Well, at least he didn’t take my computer. I made myself a cup of coffee, hurt my tongue blister again, cussed about it, and then started searching for information on Hawking’s experiment. I was expecting something fancy but instead found something so low tech, simple and downright silly that for a moment thought it was a joke.
In effect, in 2009 Dr. Stephen Hawking conducted an experiment in an attempt to prove whether time travel would exist in the future. He organized a party for time travelers and announced the time and location of the party after the event was over. The idea was that the only way to attend was to find out in the future and travel back in time to attend. Dr. Hawking concluded that time travel to the past was not possible because nobody showed up the day of the event.
After reading that I thought, “really? That was it?” But, hey, this was Dr. Hawking not some schmuck, so I checked my cynicism at the door and pondered his approach.
“If traveling outside of time is only possible in energy form,” I thought, “then the time travelers that made it to Dr. Hawking’s party could have only shown up as energy. Did anybody measured the energy level at the event? Was there any difference in the energy levels before and during the event? Would a time traveler disturb the energy level at its destination? What energy frequency should we be looking at?”
I started Googling different things until I found what I as looking for.
In his book Cosmic Evolution, Astrophysicist Eric J. Chaisson presented some interesting findings regarding our brain’s energy. According to his calculations our brain uses 75,000 times as much energy as the Sun.
The number was astonishing. That’s the amount of energy our brain uses, the organ that houses the energy universe that is our mind!
“With such an energy consumption associated to our mind,” I thought, “we should expect some type of energy signature to show up in a place where a time traveler has arrived. I mean, a ferret like Matthew seemingly perceived brain energy(1). Could that be what cats and dogs react to when there seems to be nothing there? Time travelers in energy form!”
Suddenly the absurdity of my previous doubts regarding traveling to the exclusively material past in energy form dawned on me. You may only travel in energy form but that form can exist in a material world just like all other types of energies. What can’t be done is travel to the past in material form, once you become energy you can go anywhere. I got up to get a glass of water and thought that maybe Dr. Hawking did get some guests to his party after all.
One conundrum solved, now, what about the past’s connection to dark matter?
(1) As seen back in Chapter 9: Hitting the Wall