It is known that time is the fourth dimension. It is elusive and mysterious and never stands still. Yes, and there is no way to stop it… Each person feels time in their own way: for someone, it drags on very slowly, for someone, it runs too fast. But in any case, the clock is always its main measure.
Why a person, even in ancient times, needed to know the exact time, is not easy to understand, but already in ancient China, people measured time with a rope with knots, which was set on fire. And determine the time by the number of burned-out nodes. According to history, the emperor Fu Hi was the creator of the fire clock. It happened about three and a half thousand years ago. It must be said that, at about the same time, the first lamp, wick, and gas-light lamps appeared, which were used until the last century.
Another famous time meter was the sundial. Roman patricians used the services of special ministers who reported on the past time every hour. Then the flat dial was divided into 12 parts, which corresponded to the signs of the zodiac.
In addition, in India, Egypt, China, and Greece, water clocks were also used, which were glass containers with graduations applied to the walls. In the days of ancient Greece, such a clock was used during the speech of speakers to limit the performance. In India, at sunrise, containers were filled with water, which gradually flowed out, thus indicating a certain time.
The hourglass was also convenient to use, to which a dial was even attached during the Middle Ages. When the sand flowed from one vessel to another, the attendant turned the clock over and moved the hands on the dial.
With time, mechanical watches appeared. Initially, they were very large, and it took a long time until they became such that they could be hung on walls, carried in a pocket, or on a hand.
The first pocket watch appeared around 1511. The inventor of the pocket watch was the watchmaker Peter Henlein from Germany, who amazed those around him with his extraordinary abilities from early childhood.
The clock has passed many periods in its development. And what kind of watches have not been invented during this time – quartz and electronic, waterproof and shockproof, super thin, made of cheap plastic and decorated with precious stones, with a lot of functions.
Time traps
However, it is now quite obvious that the clock cannot always show the time correctly. Sometimes, in certain places, this item is completely useless. These are the so-called time traps.
So, periodically there is information about strange people who appear completely out of nowhere. They are dressed out of fashion, and do not understand where they are and what is happening to them. For example, in 1987, in one of the Chinese newspapers, on the basis of official documents that accidentally fell into the hands of journalists, a note about a unique case appeared. For a whole year, historians, scientists, and psychologists in Hong Kong have been studying a ten-year-old boy who was being held at the Change Bay orphanage.
The police found the child on one of the city streets – he almost fell under the wheels of a passing car. The policeman drew attention to the boy, as he was very strangely dressed. When he was sent to an orphanage, it turned out that it was extremely difficult to talk to him, since the boy spoke ancient Chinese.
And only when the professor who knew this language arrived, the boy was able to talk. We managed to find out that the boy’s name was Jung Li, and he was the son of a dignitary of the emperor of China in the 9th century. He could not explain how the boy got to modern Hong Kong, but at the same time, he easily read ancient church books, told details from the life of the imperial court and the customs of the Tang dynasty.
The child’s clothes were sent for analysis, but the specialists were unable to determine the exact age of the cloth from which they were made. And after a while, the child simply disappeared. A year later, an ancient chronicle was discovered in the library of one of the monasteries, which said that the son of an official had disappeared and went to a mountain cave. A year later, the boy returned and horrified everyone, telling that he saw huge birds, magic lights, houses to the clouds and rode in a long snake. The father was sure that an evil spirit had infiltrated his son, so he ordered to strangle the child with a silk thread…
There are many such stories around the world. In the last century alone, there are more than twenty of them. According to one of the researchers of the problem of time traps, Victor Limmerst from New Zealand, it is almost impossible to determine whether a person really visited a parallel dimension, or if it is just a figment of his fantasy. He also notes that many of the time travel accounts feature mountain caves.
So, in particular, in German medieval chronicles, cases are described when a person or a group of people, entering a mountain stalactite cave, disappeared without a trace. And three hundred years later, new cases were discovered in the archives – about the appearance of people in old clothes who descended from the mountains to the villages and asked the local residents what year.
Such strange people were considered insane. Scientists say that it cannot be ruled out that in such stalactite caves, whose age is estimated at millions of years, there are certain points at which time refraction occurs, forming a time loop.
Another similar case was investigated by the journalists of the Boston Globe newspaper. In 2000, during excavations in Canada (archaeologists were excavating a fortress wall in Montreal), skeletons of soldiers, presumably musketeers, were discovered, who were overwhelmed during the Seven Years War by cannon fire. But the scientists were in for a real shock when they found parts of a mobile phone among the remains… After conducting a detailed analysis, it was possible to establish that the phone was produced in 1998. However, scientists failed to establish how a completely modern apparatus ended up at a depth of several meters underground and looked as if it had lain there for more than two hundred years (the plastic was almost completely decomposed).
Scientists put forward various versions trying to explain such cases. So, back in 1960 in London during the historic congress, the so-called “black holes” theory appeared. Simply put, a person living in the modern world can walk down the street, go down the subway and, stepping on one of the steps of the stairs, find himself among the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period.
Hans Reichenbach described similar cases in his book “The Philosophy of Space and Time”. He gave examples of cases when a person unexpectedly met himself for just a few seconds, only a few decades older. In addition, he talked about cases when people could get into the time of Emperor Nero or Ivan the Terrible, just going out to shop in a store. And if you delve into history, you can find that almost every century strange people appeared, who were mistaken for crazy, since they claimed to have come from the future or the past.
In the Spanish city of Seville in 1947, Enrico Borjias-Mendeles was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for the fifth time, who claimed to be making time travel in his sleep. This man repeatedly turned to the police and newspapers, saying that he was transported directly from his own bed during the Roman Empire during the reign of Caligula, rode elephants with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, and also talked for a long time with the cruel inquisitor Torquemada.
But, according to him, every time he woke up in his house, although in his hands, he certainly held some object from the past. Mendeles showed an old cross, a sword of a Roman legionnaire, medieval clothes as proof of the veracity of his words, but he was constantly accused that he simply stole all these things.
At the same time, During all this time, none of the collectors contacted the police about the loss of exhibits, so the time traveler was simply isolated from society for a while, placing him under compulsory treatment in a psychiatric clinic. Ultimately, the man disappeared from the hospital, and no one else heard of him.
And in 2003, Spanish television journalists conducted a study of the place where Mendeles’ house was located and found very strong radiation and energy radiation there.
The famous science fiction writer Herbert Wells supported the theory that time travel occurs in dreams. It should be noted that at that time, many researchers were sure that in a dream, a person could see the events that actually happened to him, but at the same time think that he is sleeping.
Once, the writer Mark Twain admitted that he saw the plot of one of his books (“Yankees in the King Arthur’s court”) in a dream, having moved in a dream to the Old English period. When the writer woke up, he saw that one of his hands was covered in blood, because in the battle that he dreamed of, he grabbed the sword. At first, Twain was even sure that he had simply touched the broken glass, since he fell asleep at the table.
Recently there was information about another similar case. The Chinese publication, referring to its sources, said that in Mongolia, during the excavation of the Gobi Desert, a place where a huge number of dinosaur skeletons of various historical periods are located, researchers were able to find horse bones, parts of a fossilized human skeleton and arrowheads. Scientists believe that these are the remains of one of the warriors of the era of Genghis Khan. However, scientists cannot yet explain how this person ended up among the dead dinosaurs, and the leadership of the excavation generally refrains from any comments on this matter.
Thus, it is quite obvious that very little has been studied about time, and despite numerous efforts, scientists cannot say anything definite about it. Therefore, it is safe to say that there will be many more cases in history when people talk about their time travel. And it will still be impossible to verify the veracity of their words.
