Article About Time Travel

“Suppose that i give you a time machine and you travel some seventy years back and kill your grandfather. Since your grandfather would not have been married by then your father’s birth is not possible and you cannot be here today to travel back in time to kill your grandpa. Hence your grandpa is alive then and you are here today, now there is again the possibility for you to travel back and kill your grandpa. So…”

I stopped my lecture and looked at the children .Some of them were baffled but many had bright faces. Though they didn’t understand they were all enthusiastic so I continued my lecture. “This has no solution it is like an infinite loop, we call it grandfather’s paradox and it is one of the problems in time travel. There are others for example…”,I stopped to pick up my ringing phone , I was shocked to learn that my grandfather passed away.

As I was on my two hour flight to Hyderabad I spent my time reminiscing about my grandfather .He often said that there were no coincidences but only choices, either ours or others. But it was not my choice to hear about his demise while talking of grandfather’s paradox, may be it was god’s. My grandpa worked as an engineer in The Archeological Department of India, and headed the project for discovering the lost Indus valley civilization. He used to tell me strange stories about the Indus valley civilization when I was a child, but one of them was so fanciful that I just took it to be a mere fable but as I grew older my scientific knowledge and reasoning taught me that it was also possible. So I have asked him whether it was true or not and he always replied with a smile “I have made an arrangement for you to know about it after I am dead” .

After the funeral my bereaved mom handed me a file which my grandpa wanted to give me. It was a collection of reports about the archeological discoveries around the world, UFO sightings etc., cut off from the newspapers. They looked decades old and I couldn’t find their age coz there were no dates on them. As I scanned those articles one of them titled- “Mysterious artifact found in the excavations at Harappa”, caught my attention .My heart started pounding with anxiety to know whether this was the proof I was waiting for ,and I started reading it.

“A mysterious artifact resembling those found in 1903 at the excavations near the pyramids in Egypt was found at Harappa last month .Neither the material from which it is made nor its age were found by carbon dating & spectrum analysis, but due to its dumble shape scientists believe it to be a toy. They also claim that this establishes that there was trade between the ancient Egyptians and the Indians”.

I was dazzled by his creative genius, coz he created a great story based on this article and it went like this…

********

He conceived the world around him in a different way, he used to say ” don’t just look manavada (grand son), observe and question “,and at that age I couldn’t really understand the difference. When I was in sixth grade I asked him the same question, he stared at me for a while and asked me “do you know how many stone blocks were laid to construct the Giza pyramid ?”,I said “no”. “about 25 lakh stones each weighing about 25 tons, have u ever wondered how they constructed such a great structure in those days when they had no iron to cut the stones. Have u ever wondered how they transported or lifted such heavy blocks”. I said “no”. “It is simple, someone with the technology must have helped them. May be they were constructed by aliens.”

“come on thathayya ( grandpa) not a fairy tale again….”,

“why is it impossible manavada, as Sherlock holmes says when you have eliminated the impossible, the remaining however improbable it may seem is possible”.

“then which alien civilization do you think is responsible?”

“May be the one a billion light years away or a well advanced civilization from this planet itself”

“What, how is it possible for a civilization belonging to the same period to be so advanced than the Egyptians “

“Not of the same time, may be their own future generations, time travellers”.

“What nonsense”

“ok then explain me this, the mortar used in the construction of the pyramid is responsible for its strength ,even the mortar we use today isn’t that strong. Our scientists were able to decode its chemical composition but not the process by which it is made. Now imagine that in the future our scientists figured out this process and also some other science freak invented the time machine. To test the strength of this mortar our scientists go back 4500 years and help the Egyptians to construct the pyramids with it. Since our scientists discovered the process by reverse engineering the mortar and gave the technology to the Egyptians, it would not have been possible for the Egyptians to construct the pyramids without our scientists help, and if that is the case there would not have been the source for our scientists to reverse engineer and travel back in time to give it to the Egyptians. Now tell me who found the process first the ancients or our time travellers? “.

I was befuddled and told him that I don’t believe in time travel just to save myself from his wizardry. Then he said ” I am gonna tell you a secret and please keep it a secret, I travelled in time once.” I broke with laughter and said” do I look so foolish?, where did u get such a huge time machine from?”

“The time machine need not be a machine at all. There is a state called singularity, it is the state of matter at the core of a black hole. When a large star explodes it is called a supernova. The substance present at the core of a supernova is called Dark Matter, and the dark matter can be used to harvest a worm hole. And Albert Einstein stated that by constructing such worm holes we can travel back and forth in time. In 1952 I was sent to Egypt for fieldwork, there we found strange dumble shaped tools. I secretly brought one of them to India and gave it to my friend who is a physicist to find what material it is. He found a small portion of darkmatter that must have been left by some time traveller and we used it”.

Though it seemed silly I was awe struck by his creativity, so I asked him “where did you go then?”

“Do you know what caused the extinction of Indus valley civilization?”

“Well there are several theories like Aryan invasion, frequent floods of the Indus, continuous seismic activity etc..”

“These theories are only a twenty or thirty years old, in 1952 the only theory was Aryan invasion theory. And we traveled back 3500 years to the time when this civilization started declining to verify this theory. But to our wonder we found no sign of any invasion, floods or other calamities. We were enthralled by the brilliance of the harappans, and the splendor of the hakra and indus rivers, our rivers today are just canals when compared to them. They were constructing a behemoth sized dam over the hakra river that even the great pyramid is no match to its magnificence.”

“I never heard of any such large construction on the Indus before “

“let me complete, as we were on our way back something unexpected happened. My friend used a little more amount of the darkmatter to create the worm hole , as we entered the worm hole a huge explosion occurred and it shattered the dam causing a chain of floods and earthquakes leading to the decline of the Indus valley civilization. Now do you understand why the Indus valley civilization became extinct?”.

“Obviously because of you and your friend, if you would not have gone there it would not have become extinct, if it was not extinct you would not have gone there to find the reason, causality paradox I guess. So the Aryan invasion theory is false.”

“No, infact it is the only true theory and the Aryans were none other than me and my friend”.

“why didn’t you travel back in time again to prevent the destruction?”

“How could we, in that chaos we left the dumble there and now we can’t go back.”