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brought the concept of time travel to every TV screens across America with the show "The Time Tunnel." The show lasted only two seasons but in the minds of many of the baby boomers who absorbed it, the idea of time travel became common place.

So, by the mid 1960's the concept of time was well established as a fictional reality, but could it also be a true physical reality? Did Einstein's theories of special and general relativity open the door to a practical conceptualization of temporal transparency? Anyone with even an elementary understanding of special and general relativity might conclude that the curvature of space time would permit passage through a sort of temporal membrane from one instant to another, either forward or backward. But one proverbial fly in the ointment of this perception would come to light in 1943, and is referred to as the "grandfather paradox." We have novelist Ren Barjavel to thank for this bit of logical extrapolation in his book "The Imprudent Traveler." The paradox simply put states: if you were to go back in time and kill your own grandfather, then how could you ever have existed in the first place. If this paradox did not eliminate the possibility of mobilization into the past, it certainly complicated the issue.

But there may be some other physical ramifications which call into question altogether the feasibility of time travel. This quandary comes to us not from science fiction nor logical speculations, but through a perception of quantum mechanics called the uncertainty principle. In 1905, Einstein had obliterated Isaac Newton's notion that time was absolute, and in so doing redefined the fundamental precepts of physics. In 1927, Einstein's good friend and colleague, Werner Heisenberg, would do no less. Heisenberg's notion of quantum uncertainty represented that it would be impossible to know the precise position of a particle like a photon or electron, and its momentum (given that momentum is a factor of velocity times mass) at the same instant in time. This principle in a way of looking at it suggested a flaw in Einstein's handiwork with respect to relativity which from Einstein's perspective was not acceptable. Einstein believed that there were no random possibilities, as he put it "God does not play dice with the universe."

But suppose for a moment that Einstein was wrong, and in fact there was and is a component of randomness which governs order in the universe. Consider that at any instant of time each particle of matter

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