I know, Gary. Some people debate this stuff passionately, to others it's an amusing distraction. It can be hard to gauge one's audience at times. But you do raise some good points! I think it was Einstein who said something like "Time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once". That seems like a joke on the surface, but it really is true in our Newtonian world. Time is another concept that humans use because we think linearly. We need to have a cause before an effect. A beginning, middle, and end. But recent research is showing that time can manifest itself very differently on the quantum scale. Cause need not preceed effect! It also may be structured such that it is not linear at all- in that case time travel would be possible. Time could be "short-circuited" much like a wormhole through physical space. The true nature of time is still not understood. My position is that this is wonderful to read about in the science journals and on-line, but unless one is a researcher in the field, it's pointless to take a stand and debate it. As I said before, it's too far-removed from my daily existence to demand much of my time (pun intended) at the moment. Catch me when I'm retired and we'll see. In the meantime there are lot of other folks on this list who live and breathe this stuff and study the details far more intensely than I. They'll give you a terrific conversation and keep the jokes to a minimum. On 8/22/07, Gary Vardon <gvardon@webtv.net> wrote:

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Sometimes it is hard tell what is a joke.

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one could also say that time went back infinitely far in the past even before the supposed big bang and extends infinitely far into the future impendent of the rest of the universe.