Scatter Brained

TIME MACHINES THAT 
DON’T WORK:
slingshotting around the sun 
(William Shatner)
freezing  your  head  (Baseball 
Hall of Famer Ted Williams)
the combination of internal 
combustion, a fl ux capacitor, and 1.21 jigowatts (Michael 
J. Fox)
✖  ✖  ✖
Speaking of which, the issue of Marty McFly’s disappearing 
photo is a matter of considerable debate among physicists. 
What if you were to travel back in time and kill your virgin 
grandfather. Would you instantaneously disappear? And if 
you had never existed, how could you have killed your grand-
father? Ow—contemplating these questions is giving us a 
stabbing pain in the head. Stabbing pains . . . stabbing 
pains . . .
Time Travel in 
Times Past
It didn’t start with 
Back to the 
Future.
 We’ve been pretend-
ing to travel in time for as long 
as we realized there was time. 
Preagricultural peoples be-
lieved that time was not linear, 
but that everything happening 
has happened and will hap-
pen again. This cyclical nature 
of time allowed for communi-
cation to the past by sending 
messages into the future. And 
well before H. G. Wells kick-
started the time-travel genre 
with 
The Time Machine,
 Rip 
Van Winkle had already slept 
for decades.