Friday, April 22, 2011

Time Travelling

Today I will be time travelling back to EST.  This gives me the opportunity to ask the question, is crossing time zones technically time travel?  If you are on the border of the Eastern and Central time zones and you jump from EST to CST, in less than 5 seconds you've gone back in time one hour.  Or if you happen to have a fighter jet, you can skip over many time zones and go back or forward several hours.  Is this really time travel?  You can watch a TV show at 8 PM and then the same episode again at 8PM if you rush from the Eastern time zone to the Pacific zone.  Obviously, you never actually travel through time looking at GMT or UTC.  I think this is kinda like "random" numbers.  Most random number generators just follow a massive pattern to appear random, these are actually only pseudo-random (random.org has a good explanation of this).  Time zone travel is not true time travel, but it is pseudo-time travel.  Well, I'm off to pseudo-time travel back to Ontario.

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