Being in Time

I was stopped at First and Broad the other day. I worked in a building on the southwest corner of that intersection more than twenty years ago. That building has been torn down and replaced.

Waiting for the light to change, I thought, what if I could go back in time to my little office? I could almost see myself right there, just inside the new building, only in 1998.

A couple of days or so later, I came across the meme posted here. “You can easily return to the past but no one is there anymore,” it says.

It’s a joke, of course (or is it?) but that got me thinking again. If I could go back in time to exact spot of my old office at First and Broad, I’d be at the new building, not the old one, unless I could fit the whole intersection into my time machine with me. And all of you, assuming you would not fit in there either, would still be up here in 2022. There’d be no one to talk to in 1998.

So to get to the old building, and see my old (younger) friends, I’d have go to back not just in time, but in space also. And I’d have to take everyone with me. Because you all are here, now, in 2022.

It’s like when you click on the red dot at the bottom of a YouTube video and drag it to the left; everything goes back all at once. Then, when you let go, it all moves forward and the same things happen all over again.

The alternative would be thinking of time like ripples in a pond emanating from a central pebble splash. Going back in time would mean hopping like a water skeeter off of the crest of the 2022 ripple and flitting backwards to the 1998 ripple to ride that one.

In this scenario, 1998 is always back there, but never catches up with all of us here in 2022. We keep rippling outward into the future, always 24 steps ahead. So no matter what I do back there, none of you will ever know about it.

A lot of particle physicists, advanced mathematicians and so forth have put more thought into this than I have here. But what I am saying is the plot The Terminator makes no sense.