Time Travel Without Frequent Flyer Miles

On Tuesday night, there was an installment of a special series called “Through the Wormhole” on the Science Channel, hosted by Morgan Freeman, which is the only reason Life in the Boomer Lane watched it. She doesn’t like Science. Worse, science doesn’t like her, and is constantly foiling her attempts to do things like live in this century. But she does like Morgan Freeman. In fact, she adores him. She will watch him in anything, which is how she got stuck watching “Invictus,” which I thought was a pretty lame movie. But she digresses.

The topic of the show was Time Travel. LBL counted on Morgan to explain time travel in a way that she could understand. She was introduced to Morgan Freeman when he was one of the hosts of a children’s show called “The Electric Company,” which followed “Sesame Street” and was for the next older age group. She watched with her kids. If Morgan could explain things to children, he would be perfect for LBL.

Time travel is something that LBL has always considered very deeply. This depth has been limited to one outstanding question, which is “How can we go back in time if it has already happened?” That’s where she stops thinking about time travel. She couldn’t even read the popular book “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” because she got too confused. When the older main character met his younger self at one point, LBL had to take three Advil and lie down in a dark room. Although, if her current self met her younger self right now, she might be tempted to tell her to just hold on and wait another 30 years for the Brazilian Keratin hair straightening process to be invented.

Even though Morgan spoke very slowly and used very small words, LBL was doomed. And the astronuclearmicrobiotic physicist experts were a nightmare. They used a lot of words like “superluminal” and “subatomic” and “black hole”. One astrophysicist even cut a slice out of a pizza and created a cone, of sorts, with it to demonstrate the “inverse relationship between parallel universes,” in order to show how time travel would work (“Sorry I’m late, babe, I ran into a slice of pepperoni”). Would extra cheese have any impact on time travel? How about deep dish vs regular? Delivery or in store purchase? The discussion topics are endless.

LBL admits she didn’t last past the pizza. She went into the kitchen to see if there was anything good in the refrigerator. There wasn’t. It was then that she had her “aha” moment regarding time travel. If time travel really were possible, there would still be that half gallon of cappuccino chip ice cream that was now only a memory.

Now, there’s something to think about.