Back To 1976?

Time travel was the topic of the last couple of Luky's posts. It's a topic of relatively intense personal interest to both Luky and me for our respective and distinct reasons - and contrary to his normal omniscient tone, I am quite certain that Luky has no more personal experience with it than I do.

For me, it's always been my overall enjoyment of the science fiction genre. Time travel offers a plot device for the generation of so many interesting stories. For Luky, it's more about the scientific and philosophical implications. He continues to pursue the implications, yesterday invoking the "Novikov self-consistency principle" (Luky has increasingly become a fan of Wikipedia entries - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle). He loves conjuring up the endless problems and paradoxes - and then he walks over to his favorite blanket and turns around about three times and plops with an audibly relaxed harrumph into a pile of furry contemplation.

I still like my reasons better. It's like politics and religion - the idea already strains credibility, the last thing we need to do is worry about whether it's true!

Lots of Luky's thoughts and conversations are about deep concepts - too deep, usually, for me. But I happened to ask him yesterday why this time travel thing has occupied him so much this past week. His response kind of surprised me . . . not because it was so deep, but rather because it was so pragmatic (if impractical). He wanted to go back to 1976 to visit Piitok (pronounced "Pee-Tawk") in California.

I was shocked. But it motivated me to go look up a circa-76 picture of Piitok, lying on the red linoleum kitchen floor of our San Leandro Avenue home in Berkeley.

Piitok was a great conversationalist. He was not the philosopher that Luky is, and probably not as good a cosmologist either, but I think he was a better marketer. Man, (or as Luky prefers to rephrase that chauvinistic, not to mention anthropomorphic, exclamation, "Wolf,") I really think Piitok would have loved these media-driven times.

Luky wants to reminisce now, so he's stopped dictating. Needless to say, we'll both check in later.