Should I go to bed? Yes

A perfect example of why I should not be watching so much TV.

"The Universe" is a show on the History Channel, and also happens to be really cool. Right now, they're discussing how time is relative. Apparently gravity affects time. So that the clocks on the GPS satellites orbiting earth run actually slightly faster than clocks on earth. They even did experiments using super accurate atomic clocks in space and on earth.

Now they're discussing paradoxes regarding time travel, i.e. The Grandfather Paradox--what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather? Then he would have never had your father who would have never had you, so how could you exist to go back in time and kill him. The 'scientists' on the show then give another paradox. What if you go back in time and meet your teenage mother. And then she falls in love with you. How could you exist to go back in time if she spurned your father and therefore never had you.

Wait just a second. They just exactly recited the plot of Back to the Future. So now there's a solution! Force your teenage dad to grow a pair, get him to start a fight with Biff, the town bully, and woo your teenage mom back! Its almost like Hollywood wrote it.

How bizarre. I mean who decides, one day, to see if time goes faster or slower in space. I mean science fiction aside, time is one of those things I think of as pretty concrete. But now there's a "fabric of time". Does it rip? Can we sew it back up if it does rip? Are Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock actually going to travel back to the 20's or 30's to rescue a drugged, crazed Dr. McCoy? (Yes that is an actual Star Trek episode, and yes I've seen it.) These are questions I must have the answers to!

Final Thought: I love watching these science and history shows. They take these very advanced topics, strip them down to easily digestible theories and then add lots of graphics. If only school was that easy. Let's be honest, I could never do the legwork to see what happens in a black hole, but I can understand a narrator explaining what would happen with an animated visual of an astronaut getting pulverized. God, I love TV.