As various, unprofessional, and completely unfounded accusations have been leveled against me regarding the incidents of my keynote address to the Society for Advanced Scientists, I have uploaded the complete transcript of the speech that I would have given had I not been forcibly removed from the conference by security before I was finished.

Society for Advanced Scientists 150th Meeting Keynote Address

San Dimas, California, 2016

Ladies and Gentleman, esteemed colleagues, various heads of state in attendance,

It is with great honor that I accept both the Society’s Challenger Award for Excellence in Field Exploration and your generous invitation to deliver the Keynote Address for this, our 150^th Annual Meeting. …It is also with incredible excitement as the discoveries I have just made during the last two months working in the lab are so amazing that I must forgo the discussion on cranial suture patterns in glyptodonts that is listed in your programs in favor of an entirely new topic, one with life or death consequences.

Time travel! Thought physically impossible and long relegated the shelves of science fiction. But no more! For I am here today to tell you that time travel into the distant past is not only theoretically possible but in fact, has already happened.

The late Professor Richard Hale, eminent historian

Now I assure you, this is no joke. My grandfather, Professor Richard Hale of Barnett College, was known to many of you, not least for his pioneering and highly respected research on the history of the American West. A more sober man could not be found. But on his deathbed, he revealed to me a secret that he had sworn an oath to uphold: he was once a member of the secret society of time travellers and explorers known as the Chrononaut Club. These “chrononauts” travelled back in time to study prehistoric beasts like dinosaurs and wooly mammoths while they were still alive!

I of course, was as alarmed and skeptical as you are now. If this Chrononaut Club was a real society and time travel technology has already existed for over a hundred years, why haven’t we heard of it? Well, my grandfather explained that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, fearing the misuse of time travel during the lead up to the War, signed Executive Order 7721.5 in 1937, banning all time travel related activities and airbrushing the Chrononaut Club out of history: all their documents were burned, their machines smashed, the location of their club headquarters stricken from public record. Each member was forced to take an oath under penalty of death that he  would never profess to his knowledge of intertemporal travel. My grandfather, as the last surviving member, decided after extreme deliberation to break that oath just hours before he died.

Recently discovered photograph of Richard Hale, circa 1936

And although my grandfather was only a 20 year old field assistant for the club when the Executive Order was announced, he was still able to convey enough to me in the short time before he passed that I fully believe time travel is possible and in fact, I have already begun designing a prototype time machine in my lab.

The mechanics of time travel are actually quite simple and can be best described as something akin to a temporal slingshot. A time ship is placed in a launch platform called a “cradle”. We all remember from Newtonian physics that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by some external force. Inertia keeps the time ship at rest in our normal three dimensions (up/down, left/right, back/forward) but in the fourth dimension, time, temporal inertia keeps the time ship, as well as everything else in the room including people, moving forward at a seemingly constant velocity. This is what we perceive as the normal passage of time.

Now if we charge this cradle with energy, we can actually reverse the forward temporal velocity of the time ship, sending it speeding backward into the past. The time ship is given just over twice the energy needed to reach its designated prehistoric date. The time ship is like a rock in a giant temporal slingshot.

Once the cradle is charged, the pilot of the time ship releases the temporal holding clamps that are anchoring the ship to our present moment in space-time. The time ship then hurtles back through the past but as it approaches the designated time period, its temporal velocity slows to zero, just as the band of slingshot does. But before the band can whip back to the present, the pilot sets down a temporal anchor, holding the time ship in the past.

When the chrononauts are ready to return to the present, they release the temporal anchor, sending the ship hurtling back forward through time. As they approach the present, temporal velocity again slows down allowing them to guide the time ship back into the cradle and engage the temporal holding clamps which keep the ship in the present while any residual fourth dimensional energy is dissipated.

It is clear that without some kind of temporal phase shielding, any vessel sent back in time would be smashed to bits as it collided with other objects moving forward normally through time. I was unable to make any headway in discovering the necessary modulation frequencies for this phase shielding and I’m convinced that not even our fastest supercomputers could arrive at a solution. The math seems too arcane. But my grandfather did confirm the existence of these modulation frequencies, discovered by the Chrononaut Club’s enigmatic founder. However, they were kept under strict lock and key and were known only to a few privileged members. But even with this shielding, time travel in this fashion was of course extremely dangerous and my grandfather attested to haggard skeleton crews returning to the present after years of being lost in time.

With any club archives surely destroyed by federal agents in 1937, these frequencies would seem to be permanently lost preventing us from ever time travelling again. But I believe my grandfather was not the last surviving member of the Chrononaut Club. Using the same temporal slingshot principles, is it possible to bounce electromagnetic waves backward through time. I know this because I’ve already developed a working temporal transponder and received some kind of communication from the distant past. Interference was very strong but I was able to make out this faint signal in Morse code: S.O.S. I believe this message is coming from a chrononaut stranded somewhere in the past. Distressingly, even with the advanced equipment in my lab, I’m unable to generate enough power to send a return message. However, with multiple temporal transponders working in concert, I think we could produce the necessary temporal energy. That is why I need your help. I’ve developed a program that uses the cellular antennas found in everyday smartphones and tablets as a temporal transponder. If all of you upload this program and activate it at the same time in areas of low temporal interference, I’m confident we’ll have enough temporal energy to communicate with this poor stranded chrononaut. If he can transmit the modulation frequencies for temporal shielding to us, we’ll be able to build a time machine and travel back to the past to save him.

Please, this is our only chance. Time is running out.

-Dr. Hale