Bill Ralston on neutrinos, Einstein and vodka

Turning back time could be the ultimate hangover cure.

It was fascinating to read recently how scientists in Europe performed an experiment that may prove it is possible for neutrinos to move faster than the speed of light. Fascinating because it was a story I was completely unable to understand. Physics is not my strong point. Einstein I am not, although he’s not looking too hot either if this neutrino thing proves to be true (whatever a neutrino may be). So much for e=mc² if things can go beyond light-speed after all.

However, tell me if I’m wrong, but if something travels faster than the speed of light, surely it is actually going back in time, which means it could theoretically arrive before it departed. It’s that kind of twisted logic that makes physics hurt my head and, accordingly, many things remain a mystery to me.

I have often pondered the unanswerable. For example, why is it that when I buy a full bottle of vodka, I open the fridge the next day to find it half empty? It’s possible my fridge is, in fact, a particle accelerator and half the voddy has disappeared back to the day before yesterday. Of course, alcoholic memory loss also may be the answer to that one, but I can’t remember.

Then there’s that irritating phenomenon with taxis. If you’re in a hurry and call one it will take 20 minutes to arrive. If you’re happy to wait and pour a drink or light a fag, the cab will arrive in a nanosecond. There are many mysteries in life. I manage to join the shortest checkout queue at the supermarket but people in the longer queues still finish before me. Why is that? Actually, I think there may be a tear in the fabric of time and space in most supermarkets that means men can do an entire household shop in 10 minutes but women will take at least an hour to do the same.

Of course, that may be simply due to gender difference. Women shop differently to men. If I need a shirt I will walk into the store, pick one, buy it and leave within five minutes. If my wife wants an article of clothing she will look at it in the shop window over a period of days, eventually she will try it on, then put it back. Later in the week she will return and put it on lay-by.

For heaven’s sake! Lay-by? Why would you buy something but not take it home? The whole point of being a consumer is you must have it now, no mucking about: see it, buy it, have it. Anything else is a waste of precious time. Although this philosophy may also explain the black hole that is my bank account.

Time is a tricky thing. If I’m having a drink or two and a good yarn with friends, the evening flies by and the next thing I know I’m waking up in the morning with a sore head and a mouth that tastes like an All Black’s armpit. If I’m bored time goes into excruciating slow motion and the night takes forever to end. But I guess the upside is at least I wake feeling fresher.

The saddest aspect of time is the ageing process. I may be well over half a century old, the hair grey and body creaking, but weirdly, inside I still feel about 18 years old. I’ve asked other aged curmudgeons if it’s the same for them and, somewhat guiltily, they’ve admitted it is. It seems, somehow, the body ages but the spirit doesn’t.

The single scientific fact I have grasped is the story about a pair of twins. One remains on Earth, the other goes into space and travels for many years at near-light-speed. The astronaut returns home to find his twin has aged much more than he has because at near-light-speed time moves much more slowly than on Earth.

This is where those neutrino thingies could come in handy. If that experiment is correct, all we have to do is somehow propel ourselves faster than the speed of light for a period of time and our bodies should regenerate to youth and match our younger spirits.

Sadly, the bloody neutrinos have a bit of an advantage over you and me. They are very tiny with almost no mass, they don’t emit an electrical charge and they somehow pass through virtually any sort of matter as if it wasn’t there. Admittedly, I can pass through all kinds of material as if it wasn’t there, usually due to that mysterious missing half-bottle of voddy, but I definitely have a very large mass, mainly on the waistline.

All I need to figure out now is how to rocket myself into space at greater than light-speed. Of course, an All Blacks victory in the RWC might just do it.