Saturday 23 July 2022

The Cheese Sandwich Dilemma by Henry Lewi, glass of New Zealand Chardonnay

 

The trouble with time travel is that it is full of dilemma’s, you go back in time, is it your past or an alternate reality past and the same thing when you travel forwards in time, whose future is it or when is it. 

Those scientists working in   the Transient Particle Unit where they’d originally identified the Tachyons, together with ‘High Energy’ and ‘Sterile Neutrinos’ spent a lot of time pondering this dilemma.These researchers had first noted that those particles both appeared and disappeared instantaneously, and their mathematical calculations and modelling inferred that the particles were able to travel both backward and forward in time. So, the theory was that if you bombarded an object with these transient particles depending on their velocity you could propel an object either backwards or forwards in time. The Cheese Sandwich test was the basis for time travel, in their first series of tests the scientists were able to send a Cheese Sandwich (mature Cheddar if you ask) backward in time, initially for 10 seconds, then for longer periods of time and finally for 24 hours, how did  they know that, well they sent it back to their own lab where the scientists logged the arrival time of the Sandwich which they already knew, as it had already happened anyway. Are you following this so far? Now the important thing dear readers is that each Sandwich was freshly made before being sent back in time, so it was whole when it left and whole when it arrived – Got it so far? So, the Cheese Sandwich as it bounced back in time followed a coherent timeline – it was made, sent back in time, and returned to its original timeline intact and as fresh as it was when sent.  Confidently the scientists turned their attention to the exciting prospect of the transportation of the Cheese Sandwich into the future. So, they repeated their tests sending the Cheese Sandwich 10 seconds, 10 minutes, 10 hours into the future – smooth as silk; it was when they got more adventurous and started sending the Cheese Sandwich further and further into the future, then they hit the dilemma. A Cheese Sandwich was sent 2 weeks into the future, it departed smoothly and immediately returned to the point of origin with a large bite taken out of it.

So, the team shut down their experiments and waited for the two weeks to elapse until the whole Cheese Sandwich they’d sent into the future appeared which it did – a perfect Cheese Sandwich with a bite taken out of it – the partially eaten Sandwich appeared, shimmered, and disappeared back into the past.

Ok folks so answer me this, how can a Cheese Sandwich made fresh today and sent into the future as a whole Sandwich return to its past with a bite taken out from the future – was it/is it the original sandwich? Or where did it go and who or what bit into the Cheese Sandwich?

They could only conclude that somewhere floating around in the universe of time there is a whole Cheese Sandwich waiting to be eaten. 

About the author 

Henry is a retired Surgeon and member of the Canvey Writers Group. He has published a number of stories on the CafeLit site 

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