Cod Almighty | Diary
If only we had a flux capacitor
1 August 2018
Eighty-odd years ago, Austrian scientist Erwin Schrödinger attempted to explain some aspects of quantum mechanics with a thought experiment about a cat in a box. In this experiment, said cat may or may not be dead, and therefore can be considered both alive and dead, simply because nobody has actually bothered to look in the box to check for sure how the cat is faring.
if Erwin had being working on this more recently, your Devon Diary wonders if he would have illustrated this with the paradox of a non-chairman who is also effectively the chairman because nobody is allowed a proper look in the building.
No, I'm not taking massive amounts of drugs (there's no need – the season doesn't start until Saturday). I was watching the BBC's excellent Horizon documentary How to Build a Time Machine, in which some scientists and philosophers tried to explain how time travel might actually be possible.
Don't get too excited now; this doesn't mean you will be able to pop back in time and place bets on Town results and make a packet. As well as this being really fucking complicated, it will need tons of energy (more than 1.21 gigawatts) and maybe a wormhole. It's also likely that being able to travel faster than the speed of light will be quite useful, and this is considerably quicker than the 88mph which is achievable in a clapped-out Delorean. Cheer up though. We all know that if you try to mess with time like that, then Jean-Claude Van Damme will turn up and throw you out of a window or something.
In the programme one of the neat things the scientists talked about was the idea of space-time; that, like our basic three dimensions, time is also a linear thing and can't be changed but we might be able to go and look at it. So, just like Grimsby and, say, Lincoln are two places which exist at the same time and we can travel between them, the scientists reckon that all events exist at once and therefore dinosaurs are still dinosauring, we're still winning the Auto Windscreens, and Nathan Arnold is scoring a winner at Wembley.
Don't get carried away with this though – it means we're still getting dicked 5-0 by Braintree.
It probably also means that we're already playing in the Fentydome somewhere (somewhen?) but we just don't have the technology available to get there. Speaking of which, the much fabled new stadium actually turned up last week, but in, er, Devon. A rip in the space-time continuum or simply a gaffe by the owner of a football club? Sadly, the latter, but at least it wasn't the owner of our football club this time.
No, this was Clarke Osborne of Gaming International (who ended up owning Torquay United by mistake a couple of years back) clearly not appreciating the availability of reverse image searches on that internet and slapping a Gulls crest on the infamous firework picture which the BMX lads knocked up for GTFC last year.
This idea that everything is kind of happening concurrently means we can look back (or sideways) fondly and read this rather ace interview with our former manager Hursty (or current manager, depending on your level of physics qualification). Today is also Yorkshire Day, which is rather neat timing. Whatever time actually is.
Next week we'll be asking Schrodinger's chairman to explain how special relativity shows us that relegation wasn't about us getting worse, per se: it was simply other teams becoming much better than us. Until then, UTM and enjoy the footy on Saturday.