A professor from Ozark Christian College named Mark Moore came with us on the trip and was an invaluable source of information about just about every place we stopped ("he has a huge brain", my friend Rich says). I felt like the cost of the trip was a bargain with Mark along! (Here is a link to Mark's summary of the trip: Mark Moore on Israel.) We captured video of a lot of his teaching. Hopefully someone posts it and I can link you all to that as well.
Mark calls it the Lake of Galilee, since it's freshwater and landlocked, but I engage in my own private time travel by continuing to call it the Sea of Galilee. Standing on its shores was my favorite thing about the trip. I was two thousand years ago, and I could see Jesus Himself walking across the water, walking up to me from the shore and embracing me. I also caught a glimpse of the present (but in a place far away): my grandmother, young and running in heaven's verdant fields.
Time travel may be the wrong term, because it was real. I was then and I was now. I was a short drive from the point of the earth farthest below sea level, but very close to heaven.
In slightly less life-changing news, Matt Gatewood and I had a fun conversation about time travel a few days ago. It may or may not be worth sharing, but here it is for your enjoyment. The same conversation has probably transpired a million times between better qualified geeks from all corners of the internet, but we tried our hand at it too. I can almost hear the comments: "Amateurish! He ignores the classic McDouglas Dilemma inherent in any respectable discussion of time travel."
me: i have a sci-fi grammatical question for you
2:49 PM if i am going to use a time machine and go back in time to do something (e.g. kill a dinosaur), should i say, "i will kill a dinosaur in the past" or "i killed a dinosaur in the past" (even though i haven't gone back in time to do it yet)
2:50 PM i think i should say "i killed a dinosaur in the past" because if at any point i use a time machine to rewrite history, then that becomes the real history
| 14 minutes |
3:10 PM Matt: i think that it is "i will" b/c, even though it is an event in the past, one has not done it in the present
the time travel itself has not occured
| 15 minutes |
3:28 PM me: but if the time travel ever occurred, then it has occurred, because there is a singular history
3:29 PM Matt: but, have you done the time travel yet
have you gone back in time to kill the beast yet?
me: but the past is the past
Matt: but in your present reality, you haven't done it yet
3:30 PM me: there is one reality
of course, by the same reasoning, if the past changed as a result of time traveling in the future, it nullifies the need to do the time traveling in the future
Matt: but, when did you come aware of the time travel?
me: it doesn't matter whether i'm aware of it or not
it happened
3:31 PM Matt: but, do you not have to go back in time to make the event occur
meaning, the event hadn't happened
you go back and do it
me: but the occurrence of the event is in the past
3:32 PM even if i haven't traveled yet. it is accomplished in the past
Matt: once you do the event and come back, i'm cool with "i did it"
but, you have to accomplish it first
what if you don't...
me: the past always comes first, so it did come first
Matt: did you stay in the past time?
3:33 PM what if your event caused you to never be born?
(this is fun)
me: then i would never be able to travel back to do it, then i would not have prevented my birth, hence i would still be born
yes, this is fun
3:34 PM Matt: i am assuming that this is the first "time" you have come up with the idea
i see your point...you came up with the idea
did the deed
me: actually i think we had a very similar conversation before
Matt: back in reality
so...is there a loop in time?
where you travel?
3:35 PM me: i view it as a line, and the traveling itself as instantaneous events
3:36 PM Matt: i view the alternative reality
like the star trek movie
me: yes, that's what i thought of, the star trek movie
which cheats
I, of course, was thinking of Back to the Future the whole time. I like how Doc describes it in the first movie- when Marty goes back in time, then goes back to the present time, he is in an alternate, skewed reality. I like that idea. Of course those are my favorite movies, so maybe I'm biased.
ReplyDeleteLoved what you said about Nana. Brought tears to my eyes.
My friend Jennifer and I had a similar discussion recently... she just read The Time Traveler's Wife. You might want to read that, because it sounds like you would understand it way better than I would. :)
ReplyDeleteGreat post, by the way.