Time Travel: A Cautionary Tale 

Dear Friends,
 
Malcolm is smitten with theoretical astrophysics and takes it upon himself to educate anyone who will listen about black holes. I find it deeply charming, at least until he drops the word "space-time." Because that's just taking unrelated concepts (space and time) and pretending that the intervening hyphen turns them into a single concept. I guess that's what makes it theoretical physics. Standard high-school physics teachers would never try to attribute observed phenomena to vacuum-topography-chaos-velocity or friction-adjacent-parallax-bureaucracy.

The Hard Taco song for December, "Inverse Chinese Finger Trap," showcases just how little I actually learned from those conversations.

What I was really hoping to learn is whether black holes prove that (A) time travel is possible, and (B) I could use one to go back and prevent my dog from mangling my most precious stuffed animal, Opus. Read more