Humor by John Christmann
Unresolved Resolutions
With the passing into the New Year I have been thinking a lot about time: where it comes from, where it goes, where I get more. It’s a lot like beer.
Like many people, I imagine how it would be to go back in time. But I worry that if such a thing were possible, I would disappear in the very spot I was standing and find myself embedded in a two thousand-year-old tree. I don’t know if my insurance would cover that.
And of course, if I went back in time, could I really convince someone like Archimedes that his rudimentary analog computers would be replaced by powerful electronic devices capable of displaying highly cryptic messages coded in Greek? And more importantly, would I even be able to look up Archimedes on Facebook?
I was thinking this after watching a YouTube video over the holidays with my younger son in which a man with way too much time on his hands constructed a working model of the Antikythera Mechanism entirely out of Legos.
The Antikythera Mechanism was the name given to an intricate analog computer constructed by the ancient Greeks using dozens of precisely cut bronze gears. Remnants of the device were discovered in the waters off the Greek island of Antikythera by sponge divers in 1901.
Since neither the digital computer nor Legos had been invented by the early 1900s, it wasn’t until many years later that experts understood that the device was used to predict celestial events. The giveaway was in the cryptic instructions coded in Greek that were painstakingly reconstructed from the deteriorated case. I guess no one ever thought of looking for a user manual there.
Thanks to this device and its modern descendents, my son and I knew to arise on the Winter’s Solstice to witness the lunar eclipse. Since we got up at 2:00 AM to watch the dramatic event, he had trouble understanding how the longest day of the year could also be the shortest day of the year.
Then, several days later, on New Years Eve, we watched a live broadcast of fireworks exploding in the dark over Sydney Harbor as the Australians brought in the New Year.
“How can it be 2011 already?” my son wanted to know looking at his watch in broad daylight. He had difficulty understanding my cryptic Greek explanation about celestial movements and time keeping. Frankly, so did I.
“Time is a paradox.” I finally told him. Then he wanted to know what a paradox was. I told him it was a contradiction in terms which defies logic. “You mean like when you tell me to clean my room?” he wanted to know.
I tried to give him an example. “My New Year’s resolution for 2011 is to NOT make any resolutions,” I told him. “Making a resolution to NOT make a resolution is a contradiction.”
He thought about this for a minute and then lit up. “So no matter what you resolve, you always fail!”
He has a point. My success rate with resolutions has been pretty dismal. Last year I vowed to lose weight and be more frugal. After a week I cancelled my subscription to the gym then spent the money I saved on beer and Cheese Doodles watching playoff games on a new, large screen TV.
And then there was the year I vowed to learn something new. In retrospect, learning quantum physics was probably not the wisest course of study, but at least I learned what I am not capable of learning.
I tell my son that if I could travel in time I would project to the day when he was explaining a paradox to his own son. Of course, by then he would probably have constructed a Lego time machine, so he could easily go back in time and ask me for an explanation. But I wouldn’t be here because I would be in his time, in the future. And he couldn’t get back to the future because his time machine wouldn’t have been built yet.
As I am telling him this story, I realize that someday in the future, I will ultimately have to explain the concept of a paradox to my grandson too.
“So this year, I resolve to stay put so that I will be available to help you explain the concept of a paradox to your son when you come back in time.”
My son looks at me as if I am an ancient collection of corroded gears that has been hauled up on New Years Day from the bottom of the sea by a bunch of barrel-chested sponge divers.
“Dad, that makes no sense at all.”
“You are right. It’s a paradox!”
Finally, maybe this year I will be able to fulfill my resolutions.
© 2011 Dadinthebox.com