Venture August 1964 [antikvár]

LIVING ON SCRAMBLED TIMEBY GORDON G. GREER jjThe clocks inside you are fine-tuned to your environment and your daily habits, but a flight across five time zones can upset this harmonyIn a radio play of the nineteen forties a pilot took off in an experimental plane to see how fast it would go. As he shot across the sky he was clocked at Mach 1, Mach 2, then Mach 5, with the speed still mounting. Presently he radioed back to the control tower in a strange voice, high-pitched as a child's. Then he screamed. After that came some incoherent babbling and gurgling. and suddenly an absolute silence. Later, in the wreckage of the plane, a dead baby was found at the controls. What had happened was obvious to any science fiction buff: The plane had exceeded thespeed of time and flown into the past.The idea of growing younger by time-machine travel may still be science fiction, but speeds that beat the earth's day-night cycle are a reality for the astronaut of today, for the passenger of tomorrow. Already the jet set has a publicized routine of breakfast in London, lunch in New York, dinner in San Francisco. It won't be long before a traveler may order his lunch in each of these three cities all at the same hour of the same day. And when passenger planes fly at a speed greater than that of the earth's rotation belowwhich won't be too far in the futurea traveler going west will be able to reverse the jet set's routine: He'll order dinner in London, lunch in New York, breakfast in San Franciscoand have the additional thrill of watching the sun set in the east.What will this scrambling of time do tothe traveler's stomach? His sleeping pattern? His metabolism? Can he reset his metabolic rhythm like a pocket watch to suit one time zone, then another, then a third? Can he settle for lunch when his stomach shouts that it's time for dinner? Or does he carry with him from the primordial ooze some subtle obligation to a day-and-night pattern of twenty-four hours' duration that cannot be so casually ignored? (The cosmonaut Titov, who went through a complete cycle of sunshine, earth-shine and earth-shadow every eighty minutes of his seventeen orbits around the earth, slept when it was night over his Russian motherland.)After a good century and a half of speculation on these questions, scientists are beginning to pin down some of the answers. Their research involves both jet travel and space flights. It is also tied in continued