Saturday, November 6, 2010

Time traveler caught on film. Hey, why not?


http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/1028/Time-traveler-caught-on-film.-Hey-why-not

Time traveler caught on film. Hey, why not?
Time traveler caught on film: An Irish filmmaker has uncovered evidence of a woman speaking into a cellphone in a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film. And clearly there's no other possible explanation.
Eoin O'Carroll, CSMonitor.com / October 28, 2010

An Irish filmmaker has uncovered irrefutable evidence of the viability of time travel: a shot of a woman jabbering into a cellphone in a Charlie Chaplin silent film.

George Clarke, the Belfast director of the independent zombie film, "Battle of the Bone," spotted the time traveler in the DVD extra footage of the 1928 Academy Award winning film, "The Circus." He uploaded the clip to YouTube on Oct. 19, and it has since been viewed 1.5 million times.

Actually, who knows? Now that we know that time travel exists, it could be that some of those 1.5 million views could have happened before the clip was uploaded.

In any case, the time traveler has enormous feet, probably a side-effect of warping through the fourth dimension. See for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6a4T2tJaSU

We can't say exactly what era this time traveler comes from. The first cell phone was demonstrated by Motorola in 1973, although it wasn't until the late 1990s that cellphones became small enough to conceal in the hand. We're not sure what kind of phone she's holding, although we can rule out the iPhone because her call doesn't appear to have been dropped during the six seconds in which she is being filmed.

So let's say that she hails from between 1995 and 2025 (after which point we can assume that all mobile devices will be implanted directly into our heads).

Some skeptics have pointed out that, even if she traveled back in time with her phone, she couldn't have been talking into it because there were no cellular towers back then. Others have pointed out that it could be a vacuum-tube hearing aid, which was first sold in 1921.

But we prefer to subscribe to a principle that we call Occam's Quattro Titanium Razor, which states that the best explanation of a phenomenon should invoke extraneous elements that sound really cool.

And in any case, she's not the first time traveler to be captured on film. Here's some hipster in sunglasses caught in a photo from 1940:


http://boingboing.net/2010/04/16/time-traveler-caught.html

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