Some kind of clarification is in order: last October, this column deliberated on the desirability and difficulties of teleportation, in particular the riddle of how to define where we are without altering where we’ve been, or put differently, rewriting our history to define our present.
But don’t get confused. While quantum physics and revisionist history may make it possible to alter the past, this doesn’t mean one can actually go back in time. Time travel, like teleportation, remains impossible.
Yet more and more people are lately asking why, if this global recession is supposed to be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the world doesn’t look a lot more like it did in, say, 1933? If things are so bad, they ask, why aren’t there more people huddled around burning oil drums warming their fingers or camped out in tent cities? Why hasn’t Angela Merkel been deposed as German chancellor by an Austrian megalomaniac? Why are photos and films still in colour and not in black and white?
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