Gouda Time Travel
I’ve always thought that a pungent enough slab of gouda cheese should be able to distort space-time enough to allow time travel, at least a few hours’ worth.
So this weekend I finally set up a little experiment to see if gouda time travel was possible. Imagine me as some kind of amateur Mythbusters character, or maybe just a slightly deranged physicist. Or am I a slightly brilliant cheesemonger? The line between physicist and cheesemonger is extremely thin these days. Maybe I should stop smudging that line with my line-smudging stick.
But let’s get back to my time travel experiment. I got a big hunk of gouda, a bunch of wires, and both a digital clock and an analog clock. I’ve never been completely clear on what type of clock technology works best in a time traveling situation, so I figured I might as well have both of them available and see what works the best for me.
Oh, and I grabbed a big bag full of resistors, diodes, transistors, and assorted integrated circuits from Radio Shack. I don’t know how they all are supposed to fit together, or really what they actually do, but they seem like the kind of thing that a fully functioning time machine would need to have. I was planning on doing a lot of trial and error: throw a handful of those parts into a circuit in some way that looks promising, and see if I travel through time. If not, try some other arrangement.
It turns out that it’s a lot easier than I thought. Two of the diodes and one of the unlabeled chips, enough wire to hook it all up to the gouda and to each other and the digital clock, and bingo! I’ve traveled forward in time by about three hours. Unfortunately, that means I’ve missed my Saturday night bingo game. But on the positive side, I’ve traveled into the future.
Unless the government has done that already without telling us — which I’m not completely ruling out — I have to assume that I am the first non-cartoon character to travel through time. I hope there’s a Nobel Peace Prize involved, or at least a Guinness Book of World Records entry for First Human to Travel Through Time.
If nothing else, I think there should at least be a cheesy little certificate that I can hang up on the wall and impress all my visitors with. Something that would lead to discussions like this:
“Really? First person through travel through time?”
“Yeah, that was me. Nobody had even thought about using gouda until my ground-breaking work on the subject.”
“Wow. You’re even cooler than I first estimated based on the number of moldy eggs sitting in your front lawn.”
“Hey, thanks!”