Time - what is it? Well, right now it's about seven o'clock - EastEnders will be starting in a minute. Of course, as you read this, the news is probably on. Or maybe its the lottery? They might even be showing a re-run of Cheers, who knows? This unique quality of time was predicted by Albert Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity as applied to Programme Scheduling. And he lived in Germany, where all they ever show are cookery programmes and documentaries about lederhosen, so perhaps he had a special reason to take an interest. If he'd dropped all the space-time crap and got stuck into inventing the video recorder, he might have had a better time of it.
Nevertheless, the mysteries of the fourth dimension have engaged the wits and imaginations of scientists and philosophers throughout recorded history. What is 'time'? Where does it come from? Where does it go to? And, perhaps most importantly, what is it for?
We don't know exactly when man first became aware of the passage of time. Indeed, this is the essential paradox: with no knowledge of time, such abstract concepts as 'when' have no meaning. However, anthropologists believe that an awareness of time must have been an essential factor in ancient man's survival. For instance, they must have had a basic understanding of the difference between 'breakfast time' and 'dinner time' otherwise their mammoth steaks would have got cold.
"Fossilised walnut shells"
Archaeologists poking around in a clay pit in either Mongolia or Chiswick - I forget which - have unearthed tantalising evidence of early man's understanding of chronology in the shape of fossilised walnut shells, which they believe were used by cavemen to tell the time. You might wonder just how it is possible to tell the time from a walnut shell? Well, it isn't, and this is largely why the practice was discontinued.
Over the millennia, mankind has come up with more reliable ways of measuring time. For instance, in the fifties in was common to ask a law enforcement official. If you want to know the time, so the expression went, ask a policeman. This was because all policeman were synchronised when they started their shift, and were proven to be accurate to within two seconds. These days, assuming you can actually find a policeman, you're likely to get a side-handled baton up the sphincter, which is why we no longer rely on this method. Beside, there's always the telly, which is usually a good indication of what time it is.
But what do we actually know about time? Many scientists see time as a river, forever flowing inexorably downstream. Some rivers flow faster than others, some have bits of old cars and shit in them. Some are full of fish that bite your arse, but they all flow one way. This is what we have come to accept as reality. But is it possible to reverse the flow? To navigate upstream? To... to... to... sorry, I've got tangled up in my own metaphor. Basically, what I'm asking is whether it's possible to travel back in time?
"An expert in this sort of stuff"
According to Einstein - remember him, we spoke about him earlier - well, according to him, the only way to go backwards in time is to travel faster than light. And this is physically impossible, even with no traffic and a following wind. Einstein, you see, was a bit of an expert in this sort of stuff. In fact, it was precisely because he kept missing his favourite programme, Cooking in Lederhosen, that he first took an interest in the concept. Every night he would rush home from his job at the patent office, mending patents, only to find that he was too late again. Try as he might, he could never get home on time, and so he set about understanding time in the hope that he might perhaps be able to bend it. He never managed it, but his problems were solved by Rutherford, who was working on the same problem from a different angle and ultimately invented flexitime.
