by Mary W. Matthews

Created on: December 02, 2010

Who hasn't wanted to be able to time-travel? I'd love to go back to when I was a teenager and tell that poor kid not to worry so much, that ALL teenagers are miserable.

I'd love to go back and see for myself whether God really did raise Jesus from the dead, whether God did really dictate the Qur'an to Muhammad, or even whether the perfect dream world that the Tea Party wants to "take our country back" to ever existed in reality.

(In one sense, we are ALL traveling in time — one second at a time, 1,440 seconds a day, 365.24 days a year.)

The problem with time travel is that "traveling" in time involves more than setting out from point A and arriving at point B. There used to be a wonderful show called "Connections," which pointed out that when you get right down to it, everything is connected to everything else. For example, if a first-century scientist called "Mary the Jewish prophet" hadn't invented the double boiler, Julia Child might never have become the most popular chef of the 20th century. Instead of making "Julie and Julia," Meryl Streep might have starred in a completely different movie, and Amy Adams might be selling cosmetics at a department store in Ohio.

Some time-travel stories feature protagonists who go back in time and talk to their younger selves. But if in, say, 2025, I am going to go back in time and talk to my 10-year-old self in the 20th century, why do I not remember it ALREADY? Why don’t I ALREADY remember encountering a woman who was ravishingly beautiful (because she looked so much like ME!) and who talked to me mysteriously about my own future?

If time travel were possible, why did no one stop 9/11 from happening? Why did no one save Kennedy from being assassinated? Why did no one save Jesus from Pontius Pilate?

Most time-travel scenarios involve paradox. For example, suppose you’re in the market for a certain kind of car. You miss reading the classifieds one morning, and by the time you get around to them, the used car of your dreams has been sold to someone else. You kick yourself, and then you invent a time machine. You go back in time (managing to avoid the whole “matter suddenly appearing inside other matter and exploding” phenomenon) and succeed in buying your dream car. At the moment you ought to be inventing your time machine, you are driving down the road in your dream car. So the time machine never gets invented. So the going-back-in-time thing never happened. So you missed reading the classifieds

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