Absurdity
Scientists Celebrate Historic Time Travel Breakthrough After Going Back One Second
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
ANN ARBOR, MI: Scientists at the University of Michigan announced Tuesday that they have achieved what physicists have theorized about for over a century, successfully travelling backwards through time, emerging intact, lucid, and exactly one second in the past.
The team, which has been working on the project for eleven years at a total cost of $2.3 billion, described the moment as "indescribable."
"We stood there," said lead physicist Dr. Carol Anand, "and we were in the past. The past was all around us. It was one second ago, and we were in it."
She paused for several seconds before adding that the air tasted the same.
The university held a press conference in the same room where the experiment took place, which meant that everyone in attendance was already, technically, in the future relative to the breakthrough, a point that Dr. Anand raised unprompted and then could not stop raising.
Reporters struggled to find the appropriate follow-up questions. One journalist from the Associated Press asked whether the team planned to use the technology to prevent any historical atrocities. Dr. Anand said that was "an interesting framing" and that the technology could, in theory, undo something that happened a second ago, provided you were ready and knew it was coming, which somewhat limited the use case.
A second reporter asked what, specifically, could be undone in one second. Dr. Anand said, after a long pause, a typo. Possibly a sneeze. She said they were still mapping the full range of applications.
The university's provost, Dr. Gerald Fitch, released a statement calling the achievement "a transformative moment in humanity's relationship with the dimension of time itself." The statement did not mention the one second. It had to be pointed out to Dr. Fitch at the press conference. He then said, and these are his exact words, that "the magnitude of a breakthrough cannot be measured in the units it employs."
No one followed up on that.
The federal government, which co-funded the project through a Department of Energy initiative originally intended to improve battery storage, confirmed it was "monitoring the development closely." A spokesperson said the agency remained committed to "forward-looking energy solutions," and when asked if time travel counted as forward-looking, she said she would need to circle back.
On social media, reactions were divided between people who called it the greatest achievement in human history and people who pointed out that blinking takes longer than one second, meaning the team had travelled to a point in time that most humans casually and continuously skip over without noticing.
Dr. Anand, shown the blink comparison on a laptop at the press conference, said she found it "reductive." She then acknowledged that she had blinked twice during the answer, which meant she had personally, biologically, already exceeded the total distance her team had spent eleven years and $2.3 billion to achieve.
She did not take further questions after that.
The paper has been submitted to Nature. Peer review is expected to take eight to fourteen months, meaning the findings will be evaluated roughly 25 million seconds after the experiment occurred.
The team's next experiment is scheduled for spring.
The story we are making fun of: https://babylonbee.com/news/breakthrough-as-scientists-at-university-of-michigan-develop-ability-to-time-travel-by-one-second/