Listeners of Ph.D. defenses across the world have heard the same joke a million times: “So then I jumped in my time machine to see if my hypothesis was right!”
Which made me wonder: If scientists had a time machine, where would they go? To the first nanoseconds after the big bang? To Mars, back when it hosted liquid water and an atmosphere? To the Cretaceous period to check out a possibly venomous dinosaur? Or perhaps to the future to really see how climate change has transformed our world?
In Eos’s new series “If Scientists Had a Time Machine,” I’m hoping to—with your assistance—visualize those wildest time-traveling dreams while also making you laugh. Come, travel through time with me!
If you could use a time machine for science, where would you go? Leave your ideas in the comments below, or tweet them at me. You might get featured in a comic!
—JoAnna Wendel (@JoAnnaScience), Staff Writer
Citation:
Wendel, J. (2017), If scientists had a time machine: No. 1, Eos, 98, https://doi.org/10.1029/2017EO088703. Published on 29 December 2017.
Text © 2017. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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