Page 120 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

No Country for Old Men

“I’ve thought of a new wrinkle on the time machine idea,” said
Fred Feghootsky. “It’s different because the machinery does not
take its operator off to another era in the past or future of this
planet, but leaves him right here. Let us call him Treadwell. He is a
bright fellow in the graduate program for particle physics at a
famous university. While working on problems in General
Relativity, he comes across the Twin Paradox. That’s the strange
apparent slowing of time caused by the acceleration or deceleration
experienced by a twin returning to his identical earthbound brother
after a voyage in space occurring at speeds approaching that of
light. In a trip during which the traveling twin ages one year, his
stay-at-home brother will have aged ten or twenty. This is not
fiction, but it says here on my writer’s license that I can take a few
liberties with it.”
“So, young Treadwell has made a discovery in his research that
will, as they say, change his life forever. He was working alone
inside a new device to resonate molecules by means of terahertz
oscillations when he realized that its silent quantum accelerator-
decelerator had been left running the whole time, about ten
minutes. Fortunately, it hadn’t harmed him, so he turned it off and
went about his business. Later, that evening, at home, he happened
to look at an hourly website news broadcast on his mobile
telephone, as its clock was showing 6:59 p.m. To his surprise, the
program was already in progress. At first he thought the phone’s
clock was at fault, although it hadn’t failed before. Then he looked
at other devices in his apartment that synchronized electronically
with his phone. They showed the time as six minutes later than his
phone. This puzzled him until he recalled the Twin Paradox he had
read about not long before. Could it that his body, via trillions of
tiny accelerations and decelerations, had experienced time dilation
while inside the experimental machinery at the university?”
“To test that hypothesis, he again spent time inside the QAD
afterhours when no one else was in the physics lab. He made sure

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