Just before 10 o'clock on a drizzly spring night in Cambridge, about 500 enthusiastic students, bemused professors, and time-travel buffs crowded into an MIT courtyard. Standing around an empty metal platform, they shouted out the seconds as the hour approached. They had come to help engineering student Amal Dorai discover whether time travel was possible.
Research into time travel, Dorai had realized, did not necessarily involve building almost-light-speed-capable nuclear rocket ships (problematic after 9/11), infinitely long cosmic strings (certain to violate city zoning ordinances), or wormholes in space-time (requires negative energy –> potential risk of blowing up world –> headaches with OSHA). Instead, the experimental protocol could be much simpler and cheaper: host a time-travel convention, publicly invite travelers to appear at a designated time and place (10épm EDT, MIT courtyard), and see whether they show up.
When the countdown finished, the results were thunderously clear: No messengers from the future or the past arrived. No bang, no flash, no gunpowder smell. No one pecked at the milk and cookies that Dorai and his cohort had thoughtfully provided for the anticipated visitors.
Then came the hermeneutical trap. What did this nonappearance mean? As the crowd shuffled beneath umbrellas back to the East Campus auditorium that was the center of the convention, many began to realize that the obvious answer - time travel is impossible - was unthinkably boring. Alternative theories quickly emerged:
"Maybe they're dumber than us." (Student who gave his name, suspiciously, as galactic hitchhiker Arthur Dent)
"It could be a sign that there's a cataclysm in the near future." (Julian Wheatley, MIT East Campus housemaster)
"Maybe it's the other way around - they know all they want to about us. They invent time travel, but nobody wants to use it." ("Arthur Dent," reflecting further)
"I wouldn't know about that. Anyway, my friends just came." (Very attractive young woman who seemed to mistake a reporter's inquiry for an inept pickup line)
"You can travel to the future pretty easily. Just get in a rocket, go 99 percent of the speed of light, then come back. You age a little bit, the world ages for centuries or millennia. So what this is indicating, I would argue, is that nobody invented time travel in the past. There's no Renaissance-era time machine. That seems clear." (Edward Farhi, MIT particle physicist)
"Maybe they're like paparazzi. They're voyeurs. They're just watching, not advertising their presence." (Brian Desmond, engineer who drove up from Hartford, Connecticut, with his 9-year-old son)
"Maybe they're French." (Acquaintance of author's, actually said before convention, included here for interest of hypothesis)
"It shows that if you go back and forth in time, you end up building these, you know, vast structures of time that would interéconnect and implode with, you know, their own density. It's like a failure*."* ("Just Alex," hiding a contraband can of Bud)
"God, Alex, it's way simpler - you - I - I mean, what kind of person's going to come all the way from the future to a party with nothing to drink?" (Alex's companion)
"There are some interesting arguments that you can make a time machine, but that it can't go to any time before it was constructed. So this might show that time travel is not possible now. But it wouldn't necessarily show that it wasn't possible in the future." (Alan Guth, MIT cosmologist)
"It's possible that time travel is inherently really expensive, or that people have better places to go than here." (Amal Dorai, convention organizer)
- Charles C. Mann
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The Future Is a No-Show
