How To Build Your Own Time Machine Chapter One The School

If you were given a time machine with only a one time use, what would you like to do?

If I had a time machine that I could only use once, I’d go back to August 10, 1959, when I was being a pouty 13 year old to my 38 year old mother. This was a woman who never in my 13 years had raised her voice to me, nor treated me with anything but love - but I was clearly annoyed. The fog of time has erased the reason… and I don’t think it would make much difference now if I knew why my actions were so petty. My sister (15 years old) and I decided to take the bus downtown to a movie, and I stomped out of the house. I always kissed my mother goodbye when I left the house, but I didn’t this time. That’d show her!We were sitting in the theater, watching the movie, when friends of the family found us in the balcony and asked us to come with them. I knew something was wrong, but the sudden dread turned my throat to stone, and I was too frightened to ask. We left the theater and got in the back seat of the friend’s car. The woman turned to us and said, “There’s been an accident.” I immediately asked if it was my father, as he had a fairly dangerous profession and I assumed it must have been him. The answer was a matter of fact: “No… it’s your mother.” I still don’t know where the words came from - how I ever let those words leave my mouth - but I asked, “Is she dead?”A simple “Yes”, and all I remember is throwing my head back and hearing someone screaming “NO NO NO” over and over again. I felt myself falling backwards into a void with nothing to stop me. It seemed no time passed, and we were at a family friend’s home - surrounded by relatives who said things I cannot remember. Their faces blended in and out of the darkness I felt - the hopeless wish this was just a nightmare - the beginning of a long road to acceptance.So yes - if I had a time machine that I could only use once, I’d return to August 10, 1959 and take the time to kiss my mother goodbye. Maybe she would have been late to that intersection where the drunk plowed into her car. Maybe she would have lived.

If you had a time machine, would you go to the past or the future, and if so why?

Time travel is a interesting subject. To be quite honest, I would want to know what happens in the event of a paradox before I even went forward or backwards in time. Is the grandfather paradox real? Are events even changeable? Could I get lotto numbers, go back in time a few hours and buy a ticket with those numbers? How badly does this break time if at all?What would happen if I went back in time and killed Hitler in WW1? Would I still exist? My mum’s parents came to Australia after WW2 and probably would have stayed in their native country if the war didn’t happen. If I no longer existed after killing Hitler, would that undo my actions? Better yet, if I killed Hitler, would WW2 still happen? Killing Hitler would prevent a Nazi party with Hitler at the helm but it wouldn’t change the situation that led to Hitler’s rise in the first place. Would the lack of WW2 make things better or worse for the world? Would stopping Hitler’s war stop Japan’s war? Would China as we know it today exist? Would the USA be a world power without the technical knowledge and lendlease payments from the UK?And that is just from going into the past. Going into the future opens up a whole new can of worms. How malleable is time? Was Jules Verne right when he wrote his novel “The Timemachine” in that going into the future doom humanity to live through that future? Could I change the future by changing events that occurred before the point that I wanted to fix?Heck, are there actually infinite realities and time travel is simply jumping timelines instead of actually changing anything from my point of origin’s view?

If I get a degree in mechanical engineering will I be able to build cool stuff in my free time?

What keeps you from doing that now? Welding, fabricating, machining, gear ratios, CAD/Drafting, taking cars apart and putting them back together are fairly accessible on a craft/trade basis without all the calculus. It’s a long way to go to make cool stuff. In some ways, engineering school might train ‘the knack’ out of you, because it’s difficult, time consuming abstract stuff you might never use. Check out instructables, how many of the people on the site are engineers? Which projects interest you there, and what’s the applicable background & learning? I think I learned more about problem solving by working in tech support.The people that I knew in school that were handy and tinkers or shadetree mechanics seemed to have been that way prior to school. Whether you go to a ‘hands off’ or ‘hands on’ school will make a difference- whether learning to draft and machine will be required or hard to find instruction in. If SAE (society of automotive engineers) has a chapter on campus, they tend to attract the handy/making stuff sorts.I had done some shadetree stuff prior to school but really, getting a Benz 240D that needed work was the start for me, and I was well out of school when I did that. In some ways, you’ll stick out in class with grease under your nails as much I do in an office.RIT is a stereotypical hands on school, University at Buffalo was pretty hands off for me. A night lecturer at UB (dynamics) who also taught at Buffalo State was pretty blunt. ‘I derive this for you guys. I tell the guys a Buffalo State to plug it into the calculator’.There are plusses and minuses according to your own skills, aptitudes and biases.