Jane's World by Paige Braddock for July 19, 2013

I guess this is back when Jane first started dating Dorothy… before their break-up and eventual reconnection….which was before their next break-up and reconciliation…….

which will lead in one way or another through various permutations to their break-up a few months ago, in the present arc…

And their subsequent time travel to San Francisco, where they will meet the hippy chick everybody keeps asking about….

But on the day of this party, all that is still years off in the future…

Now here’s the confusing thing about time travel…..

If this party took place in, say, 2006…. even 2009… Jane and Dorothy have not yet gone back and accidentally abducted the hippy chick from Golden Gate Park in ,,,um….1969, was it?

I was GOING to say " so she’s still in San Francisco….."but she’s not…. cos in HER past, she left there in 1969….. and went straight to 2013.

So, you sci fi buffs… where was she, 3, 5…. 7 years ago?

You are funny Susan Sunshine :-)

“Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so”-Douglas Adams, Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy

We can see who’ll wear the pants in that family.

The real question here is “What is Paige thinking?”Are we being treated to rehashes because Paige is busy on something else? Could this all be some misguided effort to help all new readers become acquainted with characters and relationships? (Couldn’t that be better handled by a nice, neat FAQ page, Paige?) Are these clips from original strips or “reimaginings?”

“The equations say time can move forward or backwards.”

Physicists and Cosmologists become so enamored of their math that they forget that a set of rigorously consistent equations are only as valid as the assumptions upon which they are built.

The logical structure of the Phlogiston Theory was quite consistent. The problem was that atoms and elements hadn’t been discovered yet. What was remarkable is how long adherents of the theory held on and tried to defend it after oxygen and other elements had been discovered. However, the following paragraph shows that it wasn’t so simple to make the shift in awareness. “Oxygen had been produced by several chemists prior to its discovery in 1774, but they failed to recognize it as a distinct element. Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele both independently discovered oxygen, but Priestly is usually given credit for the discovery. They were both able to produce oxygen by heating mercuric oxide (HgO). Priestley called the gas produced in his experiments ‘dephlogisticated air’ and Scheele called his ‘fire air’. The name oxygen was created by Antoine Lavoisier who incorrectly believed that oxygen was necessary to form all acids.”

Check recent articles in New Scientist and Scientific American for a taste of the actual controversy. Trying the simple logic I outlined will take you further than the equations that are built on an unnoticed structure of unquestioned assumptions.

Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” is a short story about time travel with a bit of a twist. You might find it in collections. Pretty old.

I like when she blows off Monday, I really do. She can blow off Tuesday and Wodensday too, if we get Janes World through Sunday.