FT263

Time travellers don’t get a very good press in our world; it’s fair to say that any authentic visitors from the future who declared themselves would, in all probability, be sectioned as deluded and dangerous. It’s easy to understand the reason for this. Towards the end of July 2009, New Zealander Mark Paul Warren, 26, was found not guilty, by reason of insanity, of killing two people in 2007 by driving dangerously near Auckland airport at Mangere. Warren, who had no licence, had been travell­ing at 166km/h when he smashed into another car; passengers in both cars died, while Warren and the other driver spent months in hosp­ital. After he told police that he had been in a time machine and needed to exceed 100km/h to become invisible, he was committed to a facility in Hamilton specialising in treating acute mental illness. [NZPA] 31 July 2009.

Michael McDermott, 43, said that when he entered the office of the software company in Boston where he worked in December 2000, he believed he had, in his words, “entered a time portal that transported me to Hitler’s bunker in 1940. The Archangel Michael promised me a soul as a reward if I killed members of the Nazi High Command and prevent[ed] the Holocaust. The last Nazi was there. I shot and killed him. Hitler was there. I shot and killed him. My mission was complete. I had a soul.” He had, in fact, killed seven colleagues with an AK-47 rifle and a pump-action shotgun, while his co-workers cowered under their desks and begged for their lives (FT161:16). In April 2002, a Massachusetts court convicted McDermott of first-degree murder on all counts, after the jury agreed with the prosecution’s case – that McDermott was attempting to appear insane while angry at the company for withholding wages to pay outstanding taxes. It is surprising that computer-games were not blamed! D.Telegraph, 25 April 2002.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which failed to end our existence by creating mini black holes, figured in one of this year’s best April Fool spoofs: a report of an attempt to sabotage the Swiss collider by a “strangely dressed young man wearing a bow-tie and rather too much tweed for his age”. The intruder, who gave his name as Eloi was allegedly spotted by CERN security “rooting around in bins” claiming to be looking for fuel for his “time machine power unit” which “resembled a kitchen blender”. At this point, most folk got the Doctor Who references. The joke appeared in the ‘Crave’ section of CNET, an online electronics review magazine, headlined: “Man arrested at LHC claims he’s from the future”. “Countries do not exist where I come from,” he told Crave. “The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power [..] It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it happening.” Crave, 1 April 2010

This may well have been inspired by a noted opinion-piece by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times (October 2009), commenting on papers by two physicists who sought to explain the run of bad-luck at the LHC, where a series of malfunctions scuppered important experiments to detect the long-sought Higgs boson. In papers with such titles as ‘Search for Future Influence From LHC’ – posted on Cornell Univers­ity’s physics website arXiv.org – the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen suggested, half in jest, that the Higgs boson was so “abhorrent to nature” that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery [FT257:9].

Most recently, an amusing piece of Internet detritus – revealed on the forgetomori, FARK and Above Top Secret blogs – caused a modest flurry of interest, with the suggest­ion that a time-travelling “hipster” was caught on several period photographs of the re-opening of the South Fork Bridge at Goldberg, British Colombia, after it had collapsed the previous year. The original photos appear on the Bralorne Pioneer Museum website; however, subsequent research has shown that the young man’s natty sunglasses, printed T-shirt and camera (which had so convinced many credul­ous Internet viewers) were all available in the early 1940s. There is still the possibility that there are circle-maker-like pranksters out there, photoshopping old archive images and inserting them into online archives to be discovered in due time… or that genuine time-travellers are researching their travel-wear with due dilig­ence.