Does that mean you can go home again?
This month's date tie-in gives me an opportunity to examine a favorite question of mine, one that I've touched on before in these pages. It was on this day, in 1931 that the Nobel laureate in physics of 1980, James Watson Cronin, was born. I make no claim to understanding much physics, and I'll even admit to being a rampant populist who, on matters such as this, can probably be deemed the proverbial fool who rushes, happily, into any metaphor that sounds convincing no matter how unbased in actual science. But admitting to this doesn't stop me.
Cronin received his Nobel prize for an experiment that showed (and here I quote the simplest online source I could find) "that reversing the direction of time would not precisely reverse the course of certain reactions of subatomic particles."
So? Well, let's put it this way. If time is symmetrical, then it would seem that getting from then to now is interchangeable with getting from now to then, in the same way that getting from here to there is interchangeable with getting from there to here. Translating that to the web essentially tells us that clicking Back actually lets us start over again. I've never really been able to decide whether being able to go home again is actually desirable, but it seems that Cronin told us, over twenty years ago, that when we do get back it just ain't the same.
Perhaps the emphasis here should be on the words not precisely. If, let's say, I had succeeded in uploading this column one day earlier, I should have found a date tie-in for the previous day, September 28. (As I've admitted long ago my choice of dates, and their actual connection to when these columns are uploaded, allows more than just a bit of poetic license.) It happens that that day is the birthday of Seymour Cray, the premiere designer of super-computers, and then, instead of dealing almost incoherently with the fascinating topic of time's arrow, I would have tried to deal with another topic somehow related to these columns but about which I (also) know basically nothing.
Go to: My inbox runneth over.