A playground for your sense of time
Time is weird.
Let's play with it.
You don’t need to know physics. Just make a guess, move a slider, and watch what happens. These ten real experiments will do the explaining.
1 Make a guess→2 Try it yourself→3 Get the “ohhh.”
Warning: may cause
excellent questions.
01
Start with a tiny clockREAL EXPERIMENT · CERN, 1977
READY TO TRY
ILLUSTRATION · NOT TO SCALE
The real experiment & the deeper explanation
Follow your curiosity
Ten ways to break your intuition.
Start anywhere.
No homework required.
Okay, but the big question…
So, did anyone actually
build a time machine?
It depends what you mean by “time machine.”
Here’s the part to take home with you.
↗ Into the future? In a small, real sense.
A traveling clock can experience less time than one left behind. Reunite them, and they really disagree. It isn’t just how they look.
↶ Send a message to yesterday? No.
None of these experiments lets you change a recorded event or send useful information into the past.
✳ Weird enough without the hype.
Light peaks, measurement choices, and the order of quantum operations can surprise us. They don’t all mean the same thing as time travel.