Sunday, May 08, 2005

Time Travel Party

Comment if you must on the irony of the situation, as I had complained not so long ago about time - but I spent this saturday night at the time travel convention organised by some undergradsgrads.

The talks were interesting, not stuff that we hadn't already heard about though. Some of the profs were really funny, and i was surprised that they were such good actors. One of them talked of the wormhole theory by Kip Thorne. Eric demaine, the super-smart very young prof at CSAIL was the last to speak. He insisted that the universe was a computer. I think what I found most amusing, was that it seemed like people were pretty serious about it. They engraved stuff about the time and exact location of the convention onto things that might be preserved for future generations to see, with the hope that they'll come to this convention.
After the talks, everyone gathered in the courtyard around a launching pad that they created, with cookies and milk to attract the time-travelers. Obviously, no time traveler came to the launching pad, but after waiting roughly about 5 minutes, many students did pounce on the cookies and milk.

Oh and if you're dying to know what they said about time-travel, many of them don't believe traveling back in time possible or feasible. But they also said they could be wrong, and entertained the possibility that the theory of relativity could be wrong as well. bah. wasted time in relativity classes.