ABSTRACT
Do you remember attempting these kinds of math problems in school? If a train travelling south from London to Birmingham at 99 miles per hour leaves London at 9am, when will it arrive at its destination, assuming a distance of 125 miles and a delay of nine minutes? For me, growing up in England in the 1970s, I experienced considerably longer delays than nine minutes. But all those hours spent waiting on windy, underground train platforms gave me lots of time to think deep, angst-ridden, young-person thoughts, often about space and time and the nature of being. A big influence on those thoughts was the sci-fi TV series, Star Trek. Many years later, in the fifth iteration of the franchise, Star Trek: Enterprise, we would hear sub-commander T’Pol say, “The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.” Time travel was also considered by the Directorate to be “illogical,” but of course, that did not stop our intrepid, intergalactic heroes from falling into wormholes, stumbling across all manner of temporal anomalies, and generally having a grand old time, flitting across galaxies at warp speed.
