The Big Idea

The word “angel” literally means “messenger,” both in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek text of the Christian Bible. Angels, messengers from God, are shown in Scripture as, well…delivering messages (big surprise, right?). As in the two angels that deliver the message to Lot that NOW might be a good time to leave the soon-to-be-destroyed city of Sodom, or the angel who announced the coming births of Jesus and John the Baptist (Gabriel in Luke 1). But angels in the Bible don’t just constitute the heavenly equivalent of email, at various times they protected people or provided food or did a variety of other things. Definitely they’re shown as having supernatural power—for example, the messengers in my examples above also struck men blind and performed what appears to be teleportation in the case of Lot’s angels or made Zachariah mute until the birth of his son John in the gospel of Luke chapter 1. Technology we associate with the power of nature and rightly so. By studying nat...

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time  contained a speculation about a time machine that could actually work without violating the known laws of physics, based on wormholes. For this post, I’m imagining a story featuring a time travel machine using something not unlike what he suggested. A wormhole, as science fiction fans well know, is a gateway between different locations in the universe, a tunnel that “skips” all the space in between, a shortcut a little like the hole a worm bores trough an apple instead of travelling around its surface. The thing about space that may be a bit hard to grasp (I don't quite get it myself) is Einstein's theory of General Relativity defines time as a fourth dimension—that our universe does not just exist in width, length, and height, but also in time. Sooo, a wormhole could exist that crosses not simply between different places in space, but also between different regions in time. One of these time wormholes could have a date of 2012...