S nap pyP ant s.Ne t

The big question regarding time travel is, of course, "if it's possible to travel through time, then why aren't there spandex-clad time tourists hanging around today?" After all, time travel by definition involves the present and past as well as the future, so either all time travelers from all the untold ages of available time travel have shown superhuman levels of discretion and caution, or they haven't made it back here.

It will not come as a surprise to our regular readers that we've come up with an answer to this conundrum.

If we know one thing about time travel from watching cable, it's that given the opportunity, someone will always travel back in time change things, whether to prevent World War II, or start World War III, or save Lois Lane from an unpleasant death. Whenever this takes place, we end up with a different timeline, presumably one in which someone different decides to kill someone's parents before they're born or whatnot, which creates yet another timeline, which is wiped out by someone else's temporal shenanigans, and so on like a four-dimensional Escher painting.

How many times does this take place? It's impossible to say. As each timeline is created it's instantly replaced, and you can't get a thing done without finding out that your brother is suddenly your aunt, and rather than being a VCR repairman you're Squander, Lord of the Under-realm. It is for measurements such as these that the word "bazillion" was created.

The only way reality can exist for more than an instant is when someone, by accident or design, changes things to create a universe where time travel is never discovered. And that, my friends, is where we are now. Time travel may be possible, but anyone who tries to discover it will fail, probably due to a misadventure of ludicrous improbability.

So the next time you read about an eminent physicist buried alive in a tragic pudding-transport accident, or you're distracted once again from your experiment to see what would happen if you hooked all the Swatches left over from the eighties up to one of those new cars with the computerized mapping software, remember: it's all for the best.

[Addendum: Soon after I first published this piece, several readers wrote in to point out that this theory was first put forth by Larry Niven over thirty years ago, only without the part about the Swatches. I can only plead ignorance, given that I've never read the essay in question and came up with the idea all by my lonesome while playing "Ape Escape." It could be worse; I could be inadvertently recycling old Piers Anthony essays...]

Recently, Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau managed to slow the speed of light by sending it through very cold globs of optical goo. Instead of the usual 186,000 miles a second at which light tends to race around the cosmos, she forced it, to travel at the more sedate speed of 38 miles per hour, about the speed of your average Grandmother-driven Cadillac. This mocking of one of Einstein's absolutes is only the beginning of a revolutionary new program. Currently, many scientific institutions are having monetary issues, as less and less money is handed out to fund pure scientific gain. The powers that be have decided that this is due to the fact that many people feel intimidated by the sheer size of science, and that if science was less intimidating, the money would once again flow freely.

Here then, is a sneak peak at some upcoming scientific revelations slated for 1999.

March 6th: U.C. Davis Professor Henry Heinhold will announce that the Earth is not 26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy, but merely 37 miles. Furthermore, he will announce that he recently took a trip over there in his Honda, and it wasn't all that exciting.

April 23rd: Swedish Nobel-Nominated Physicist Helga Brumenfeldenfield will discover that e=mc2 can also be calculated as "e equaling m which also equals c and they can all be squared."

June 6th: Boston College Professor Matt Plumb will solve one of the most incredible mysteries of the scientific world. The number Pi will no longer be 3.14159... ad nauseam, but as it turns out, will simply be 2.

August 12th: In a day which will be forever celebrated by all, the exact date of the death of the Dinosaurs will be correctly established as January 10th, 1952. For proof, paleontologist Marcia Balhoon will show scenes from The Land of the Lost, which clearly shows Dinosaurs interacting with human beings captured on film.

September 3rd: A German team will announce that they have successfully mapped the human gene, and that it consists, not of millions and millions of DNA strands, but of 16. Furthermore, they have used this information to create life in a test tube, his name is Clyde, and he likes popcorn.

November 28th: A Japanese Chemist will reveal that the Kelvin temperature scale has been abandoned in favor of a new scale called "The Temperature Scale." Absolute zero on this scale can best be described as "Really cold. Like Alaska Cold."

December 31st: Saving the Granddaddy of them all for last, Michigan State Fine Arts Professor Jake Hammersoft will announce to a stunned world that, due to some clerical errors in the mid-1400's, it is not Dec. 31, 1999, but rather Dec. 31, 1973, which means everyone has another 27 years to deal with their Y2K bugs.