You too can enjoy time travel (if you're Australian)

I was watching HG Wells’ “The Time Machine” this week starring Guy Pearce, when it occurred to me that the other Time Traveller (they have no name) was Rod Taylor, in the same story a few decades back. Both are from Australia, the land of strange beasts such as the kangaroo and the duck-billed platypus. Were they brought back from the future by these two leading men? They do travel over 802,000 years into the future and might even have brought back Nicole Kidman, a creature who looks like she is from another Eden. (For Mel Gibson you have to go back 800,000 years).
Of course the films don’t portray anything from Wells’ novella other than the melodramatic action. The book in my library (showing a kangaroo reading a pocket book) is primarily a social critique combining Wells’ two main influences: Karl Marx and Darwin. But hey, those aren’t popcorn authors are they? All the action takes place in the Thames Valley in London, just as the end of “War of the Worlds” ends on Primrose Hill, one of my favorite places in London. The Pearce film seems to be placed in New York City. Science is a funny thing. As Mark Twain once said, “an idea doesn’t care who has it”. The theory of relativity came from a man working in Bern, the sleepiest city in a sleepy country. For all we know there is some spectacular breakthrough that will come from an American university where bowling is a Major.
I have a friend who is a mega-intellectual in physics located, in of all places, Sacramento, California. He can produce pages of profound and baffling equations and in the tradition of Euclid and Pythagoras he has dispensed with his family name and is known throughout the world of science as Dennis of Sacramento. Yes, this is the same town that the Werner Heisenberg of politics, Herr Schwarzenegger, works. He is, of course, the man who formulated “The Theory of Uncertain Fiscal Reality” (aber er ist ein netter kerl). I wouldn’t want the FBI to know this, but Dennis and I have traveled into the future ourselves. It happened when we walked across Hoover Dam from the Nevada side to the Arizona side. Arizona was one hour ahead of Nevada! Sure enough it was one o’clock in Arizona and it was still noon in Nevada. How such a place as backwards as Arizona could live even so slightly into the future was truly baffling. As Einstein said,, “the universe is not only strange, but stranger than you can imagine”.