Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Physicists, the top carnivores of the trophic pyramid of scientists, have
at their service the most expensive machines and instruments ever devised.
To smash atoms, to find and identify the smallest particles in the universe, to
see and measure the last whispers emanating from the Big Bang—such quests
require brute instrumental strength. Nevertheless, physicists still routinely
encounter phenomena and questions that are beyond the scope of even the
most advanced technology. When this happens they must take an entitely
different tack—an approach that may not solve a problem but that at least
brings it to an intellectual point where it can be re-examined and perhaps
can eventually be solved theoretically rather than experimentally or obser-
vationally. These exercises are "thought experiments." Einstein loved
thought experiments—and needed them. Yet these devices are not the sole
property of physicists. Scientists in other disciplines (such as paleontology)
can use them too. Every time a paleontologist attempts to reconstruct con-
ditions in some long-ago time, he or she is conducting a thought experiment.
Our concluding chapter is science fiction, of course, and so is sure to in-
cite the wrath of those who cringe at any bending of the unspoken rules gov-
erning content in "trade science books" (books written, in other than a text-
book format, for people who love science). But, as the preceding chapters
will bear witness, the
science
in the following science fiction comes from
many years of dogged detective work by many different scientists. What fol-
lows
is
a thought experiment of sorts, for it is the best guess I can make, on
the basis of the evidence, about what a true time-travel expedition back to
the locality of Sucia Island in the Late Mesozoic world would encounter.
June 15, 2222
The device sat gleaming under sterile fluorescent lights. It looked rather like
a boat, instead of whatever a time machine is supposed to look like. And that
was a good thing, actually, given that its prime purpose
after
time-traveling
to the Late Cretaceous Pacific Ocean, just off the western coast of North
America, was to float reliably for three hours in a long-ago sea.
