Guys,
I happened to be surfing a local auction site here in NZ, when this came up:



In the sellers notes was this:

And would you believe that there are people here that wanted to buy it!!!.

Besides, I thought you actually had to be inside the thing to facilitate time travel.

{Message edited to fix up typo's}



[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 10-05-2005).]

Hey! I built that thing in 1995 but accidentally sent it forward in time.

Trumpy, you're not as far off-topic as you might think.

Nearly a dacade ago, a amn called an all night radio show (known for entertaining 'unusual' topics), claiming to have built a time machine.
He had stolen step-down transformers from the power company, and hooked them up in such a manner that a high-voltage arc passed across his front porch. This was his "time machine."

The host- who is quite knowlegeable in things electric- timidly asked him if he had tried the machine. The man replied that, while he personally had not, he had 'tested' it by tossing some loose coins into the arc- where they disappeared in a blinding flash of light. He went on to explain that he was still waiting for the coins to re-appear, so that he could "calibrate" the device!

[This message has been edited by renosteinke (edited 10-06-2005).]

Haha I remeber that show.. has it been 10 years already?!? Great entertainment, ol Mr Bell is..

anyone remeber the "antichrist line" show, or the night he was "ba-ba-boo-ied" on air?

Sure...

It's easy to mock genius...

A credit card swiping machine, digital disc drive, telephones...

When integrated properly, anything is possible.

Say credit fraud?

You smirk... but trust me that'll get you time.

A time machine? In theory it's possible to fast-forward into the future. All you need is a spaceship capable of sustained acceleration. Accelerate at 1 'G' for six months, ( nice and comfy on board, no weighlessness! ) and you'll be approaching the speed of light. Time on board will be slower than time on earth. Now de-accelerate at 1 'G' back to earth, and hey presto! -depending on the conditions of flight you would be sometime in the future. 2000 years? 20,000 years? JHC! - 200 million years? Social problem: All your folks and friends are long dead, you have no assets and you can't come back. Also, Einstein postulated dimensional changes so there's a good chance you would be slightly flat and thus slightly dead.
OK, try another tack. We climb into a freezer and with the help of 'medical science' manage to 'hibernate' for a couple of generations.
Wow, that'd be great, wouldn't it? You come back to a brave new world, with no assets, no family, no usable knowledge and frostbite. Nah, I think I'll stay now and take it one (sidereal) day at a time!

Alan

PS Just had a thought of a systems failure on the return leg. Bloody FPE panels!!! Ship hits Earth at 300,000,000 miles an hour and drills a hole from Hudson Bay to New Zealand!

[This message has been edited by Alan Belson (edited 10-07-2005).]

LOL!


Yeah, but looking at the way the world seems to be headed at the moment, I'd much rather go backward in time.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be Paul! But...I might bump into 'Big Lou' down our alley, and I still owe him ten bob* from a 3-card brag game in 1955!
* '10 bob' was 50 'new' pence, or about US 1 dollar. You could go out with that, go to the cinema, get completely squiffy later on a few jars down the rub-a-dub-dub, smoke twenty snout, buy a fish and chips supper, wend an unsteady-route home via the duckpond and wake the entire household when you dropped the change all over your bedroom floor at 2am! What's happened to our money? Time was if you had 5 shillings in coppers in your trousers pocket you had a job staying upright!
Mrs B. says; "I've told you a million times to stop exaggerating!"

Alan





[This message has been edited by Alan Belson (edited 10-07-2005).]

Alan:

You sir are a comic genius!!Thanks for the laugh, after the past few days I've needed a good one!!

Cheers,

Tony

Of course the fictional time-traveller had to contend with all sorts of problems. Suppose he accidentally killed his great-grandfather when he was a boy - would he cease to exist and fade-out? But, if he didn't exist, how could he kill anyone? Would he pop in-and-out of reality at 60hz?
In 'The door into Summer' by Robert Heinlein, (1955), as an aside to the main plot of a regular guy getting stitched-up by a wily dame, an American lab-tech. called Leonard Vincent gets lobbed back into the 1400s by a mad-scientist, never to return. Somehow he makes his way to Renaissance Italy, ( who with- the ruddy Vikings? L. da Vinci b.1452-d.1519, so the bulk of his life is before Columbus ), and dreams up lots of doolally machines and dabbles in painting and stuff.....!
Actually, the best parts of this book, from a 21C viewpoint, are the electrics / electronics, which Heinlein visualises quite accurately with robots, CAD design centres and computers. Heinlein had a 'thing' about time travel; in his book 'Job', the main character, ( named after the Old Testament character tested by God), is doomed by some higher being to flick through parallel, but almost identical, universes every 2 weeks or so, with all his cash turned to worthless funny-money, loss of his friends, his possessions etc. The plot is that insignificant chance actions multipy chaos and create multiple futures- so which one is his particular America, and can he get back there?


Alan

Love it---"...don't have the time to complete it"...LOL.

Have always loved time travel stories, Jack Finney's "Time and Again" from 1970 is a good one, which I first read in a Reader's Digest condensed version (cheating, I know).

Anyone recommend a good short story or whatever on the subject?

Does the fact that Ihave to swipe a credit card mean that I don't go anywhere if I don't have any credit?

TW

Sad to relate, as recent events showed, without money or credit you are pretty much stuck where you are. However, with a proper time machine you could be stinkin' rich! Go forward a week, come back with a wad of newspapers and hammer the bookmakers with a bunch of long-odds accumulators at the track! Then go back a year and buy/sell 3 months pork-bellies or orange juice or copper. Win the lottery. Here, wait a cotton-pickin' minute, someone already has a machine!

Bugger!

Alan

Alan,
We're going to have to start a translation service for our Colonial friends if you keep that up!

I've always found time-travel stories fascinating as well. I read several Robert Heinlein books when I was in school. The one which sticks in my mind is Rendez-vous with Rama.

SORRY!
OK class, listen up!

Squiffy; intoxicated with alcohol.
cf. Skew-whiff; out of square, twisted.

Jar; A glass/ pint mug.

Rub-a-dub-dub; rhyming-slang = pub.
cf. Rub-a-dub-dub refers to actions of washer-women.

twenty snout; twenty cigarettes.
cf. Snout, ( NOTE NOT SNOUTS ) was (is) prison slang for cigarettes. Snout; as in nose*.

I'm told that the favorite post-pub food now is doner-kebabs, whatever they are!

Alan

PS I should add that 'nose' here is not your 'hooter' (= schnozzle ) , but 'to search, ferret-out' etc.. 'Snout' also can refer to any 'treasure' a prisoner might get, like chocolate, sweets, postage stamps etc., anything tradeable, and no, I "ain't never been in no nick" = ( gaol ), as dear old Ronnie Barker said once in Porridge = (time served in gaol)!


[This message has been edited by Alan Belson (edited 10-16-2005).]

Professor Stephen W. Hawking appeared on the 'Richard and Judy Show' ( sic ) recently. Asked about the possibility of time travel, the Prof said that Einstein thought travelling back in time might be possible, but that there was the possibility that a dislocation of the space-time continu-ho-hum might cause a massive burst of radiation similar to a supernova.
Richard: "God!"
Judy: "Ooooh-er!"
The producers had thought the halting delivery and the speech comprehension might be a problem, but Judy seemed to manage just fine!
Such fun when a real brain meets the typical media dullards!

Alan

EDIT http://www.hawking.org.uk

(I should add that Professor Hawking has Motor Neurone Disease, and speaks via a computer; and of course, no disrespect.)


[This message has been edited by Alan Belson (edited 10-18-2005).]

To quote the words of a 13-year-old girl down in Georgia when I was explaining some of our differences in terminology:

"Gee, I thought y'all spoke English over there!"

Oh, and gaol = jail.

I've not caught much news lately -- I only just found out yesterday that Ronnie Barker passed away a couple of weeks ago.

The consequences of traveling back in time and changing something has always fascinated me. I remember reading a short story years ago about a futuristic outfit which set itself up as "Time Travel Safaris Inc." Somehow they'd constructed elevated walkways on pre-historic earth, but at one point somebody accidentally steps off the walkway and crushes a butterfly.

Upon returning to their present-day, the loss of that one butterfly millions of years earlier had so affected the course of history that their present had been changed considerably.




[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 10-18-2005).]

Paul, the plural of "y'all" is "all y'all".

And the plural possessive?

Limeric time :-)

There once was a young man named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light
He left one day
(In a relative way)
And returned on the previous night!

Backwards travel would definitly be wonderful If I could land in Sunset Beach Hawaii in the late 1950's. Hang out in the empty waves with Dale Velzy, Greg Noll, Dewey Weber, all the greats. But since I can't I just have to be happy to watch "Riding Giants" on dvd. What a great movie.

There was a time traveller called Finn,
Who took his machine for a spin.
He was only away
For half of the day,
So he passed himself coming back in.

Back went Finn, long-ago and afar,
In his time-machine travelling-car.
"Oh! The marvels I've seen,
In my old time-machine!"
And his wife said "You Liar! You've been at that Bar!"

Stangely enough, an anti-grav machine (AGM) might be more feasible than popping back to visit the ancestors and tossing some tea into the harbor. Research has shown that Earth's gravity is reduced in the vicinity of a rapidly-spinning disc. The postulation is to create a 'flywheel' of novel form; thin at the perifery and thick at the hub, and of a geometrically progressive contour such that the stress due to centripetal force is equal throughout the disc section. Mounted in very low friction bearings, and immaculately balanced to eliminate shock loads, vibration and fatigue failure, the disc runs in a casing in vacuo to reduce friction to a minimum. The rpm required is phenomenal, and as yet the strongest known materials, ( composites at say 800,000 psi ) would fail at a tiny percentage of any useful reduction in G,
but thats just an engineering problem!
Equipped with a compact multi-disc, ( for steering and manoevering), back-pack version, running on NiCads, you could make a fortune changing church light bulbs!!
Downside? A disc failure takes out several city blocks...

Alan


[This message has been edited by Alan Belson (edited 10-24-2005).]

There was an interesting show on TV here last week about UFOs. It examined the various possible reasons for the rash of sightings years ago, including -- as you would expect -- classic cases such as Roswell in 1947 and the saucers over Washington, D.C. in 1952.

It looked at the work of German scientists who worked at the various Nevada and New Mexico test sites at the end of WWII, and the files of what were then secret government projects, quite a few of which could certainly have been taken for alien spacecraft by many people at the time.

Right at the end of the show, they visited a guy in Seattle who was conducting anti-gravity experiments in his garage. He had constructed a "saucer" which seemed to consist primarily of some sort of aluminized film (mylar perhaps, or something similar) above which and supported on 2- or 3-inch high insulators ran a wire around the periphery.
We didn't hear much about the power source operating below, but there was brief mention of induced high voltages and whether it was an ion wind of some kind which was providing the lift. It was certainly impressive.