Have toilet, will travel?

What kind of situation could have the unannounced guests much more surprised than the residents? Well, it may be something that I think an event at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) last May 7 would have given rise to as they held the first time-traveler’s convention where they expected guests from the future to pop in. They even provided exact GPS coordinates (degrees in latitude and longitude) so that the guests from the future would not turn up in "rival" campuses in Cambridge and find that they were not welcome. But unfortunately, among the 100 or so who turned up, there were no visitors from the future. But I think they all went home with shirts to commemorate that moment. Amal Dorai , 22, the student-organizer, did not seem to be heartbroken at the no-show of guests from the future. Well, he is after all, a student at a premier science and tech institution and he knew the odds for a "future guest" to attend his convention would be a million-to-one to a trillion-to-one. (I really get a kick out of it when scientists persist to tell us the mathematical range of the odds for something to occur in nature even if they are calculably this painful.) This is the same kid who proposed that the cartoonist of Calvin and Hobbes be imprisoned if the cartoonist does not continue the famous cartoon strip. He also once posted his resume on the Web, with the comment: "I publish it in a reckless display of youthful optimism." I like this kid. If there had been any visitors from the future at his convention held at an assigned rectangular yard at MIT’s East Campus, he would have certainly earned an interview for a job in the future for his imagination, humor and his chutzpah. I do not know if I was not paying enough attention back in college but I cannot remember witnessing or being part of such a wild collective display of imagination with science ideas. I would have wanted to be part of such things.

In a long-running Einstein Exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History in New York I visited over two years ago, renowned physicists like Michio Kaku and Alan Lightman of MIT appeared on mounted video screens explaining to museum-goers that given what we know so far in physics, time travel, whether to the past or the future, is theoretically impossible. There is such a thing as the Grandfather’s Paradox that poses the problem of, for instance, a Ms. X, a traveler going back in time and shooting her grandfather, which would certainly make her own existence impossible. If you ask me, it makes for messy physics and even messier philosophically. I can also imagine that if time travel were possible, it would make all of us sure candidates for the loony bin. Imagine, a caveman ancestor (let’s name him "Adam") of ours who finds himself needing to do a "nature’s number 1 or 2" and finds himself transported to the present Moon River Art Park that opened late last year in Songjiang District in China. It houses the most luxurious toilet, worth a little over $600,000. It is a toilet that was built to simulate the most natural settings – dripping stalactite-shaped faucets and inlaid sculpted boulders hidden behind huge trees and hanging flowers. And what does that sound like? A cave!!! Traveling in time 100,000 or so years, our Adam finds that he now has to pay the admission fee to the park to use the cave-toilet which is what he would have had for free (and not just the cave but anywhere, I guess) if he just stayed in his own cave in his own time. Again, if you ask me, this $600,000 toilet could be an extraordinarily stressful thing for a toilet-ready traveling caveman to contemplate.

But slowing your own time is possible. You can do this if you move at speeds approaching the speed of light. But for what remains of our summer, I do not think you should make time travel itineraries yet to a desired date in the future. Nothing yet is known to exceed the speed of light. I do not mean to put a damper on your time travel plans but given what we know now in our given lifetimes, I also have to tell you that the same Einstein exhibit also posted the fact that only one human so far, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev, has slowed his own aging, sans having to avail himself of the services of cosmetic surgeons. This was when he was aboard the spaceship Mir. His position and motion while aboard the Mir, relative to the Earth’s, made him .02 second younger when he came back, relative to all of us here who remained on Earth. It is anyone’s guess what you can do with this .02-second advantage.

So that leaves us with the here and now which is quite a rich dimension to be living in, I should say. I think it is more than pregnant enough with possibilities to engage in. And while you figure out what to do with this inescapable thing called the "present," make sure you relax and think before you lose your temper and be angry. Matthew Stopper of the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut has just nudged the term "broken heart" beyond its metaphor status. In an article from Nature, Roxanne Khamsi (May 5, 2005) reported the study that revealed findings that the heart really goes into "premature contractions," a condition that is known to put people at "greater risk of sudden arrest," after "angry" episodes. The subjects consist of individuals who had implanted defibrillators (devices that detect heartbeat irregularity) and who were also made to record their emotions in a diary to see if there were corresponding links. So it would seem that if you relax and pay attention to the things at hand, science also thinks, as do wise old sayings, that you have a better chance of seeing your own future.

So if anyone out there is thinking of organizing his or her own time travel conventions, I have to say that if the MIT’s East Campus was not good enough to ensure the arrival of the time travelers, then that makes the rest of us rethink our own backyard plans for time travel meetings. But why let what science knows so far, spoil your party? Science or no science, I think it is paramount that you make your guests (regardless of whether they are from the past or future) welcome. So keep this in mind: Be sure to have souvenir T-shirts and please, if you do not want an angry caveman, do not charge for the use of toilets.

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