The Speed of Time

We were reading, my comedian friend and I, an article about Hong Kong physicists who said they had proven a single photon cannot travel faster than the speed of light, thus making time travel an impossibility, when it occurred to me, a science ignoramus, that if said photons could be slowed down (they never said it was impossible), then time could proceed forward as before, while we along with our photons could stay behind travelling backwards in time, the only problem in view of the above finding would be returning back to the present, if we so desired.   Which  remark provoked my unknown comedian friend into asking, "what's the speed of time?".  I immediately wrote this phrase down, the way songwriters write down often banal phrases they hear for eventual future uses in song lyrics.   This particular one would fit perfectly into David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period.

And then it occurred to me that it is perhaps the comedians who more often than scientists stumble intentionally or by accident into deeper truths.   I was watching an appearance of a well known standup comic on a television talk show, and he asked (rhetorically) about people who sit in the audience of various events filming the stage with their smartphones.   They are watching the performance on a tiny screen, to watch the shaky results later on a bigger screen at home,  and this after paying high price for the tickets, to be there, when they're actually not completely there, he was saying. This reminded me of the time when I met an Israeli man while we were both traipsing through some European city playing tourists, and he explained that he, alone among the thousands of other sightseers  there, did not carry a camera, because he wanted to see the place through his own eyes and not through the camera viewfinder.

If all of the above is not terribly interesting, then know that there is a small proud town somewhere in the state of Oregon called Boring.