Large Hadron Collider, Geneva

Since that first, primordial act of disobedience, Man’s insatiable lust for knowledge has been a sickle that has reaped a harvest bountiful in tears as well as forbidden ecstasies. Even now, as the ultimate secrets of coy Nature seem at last to lie within our grasp, are we tottering on the edge our own Icarus moment, when overweening ambition will cast us headlong into the abyss; or has Hope come in a humble shape and bearing Salvation in its beak?

From an unexpected quarter, it seems that the planet—if not the space-time continuum itself—may have narrowly avoided an uncertain doom at the hands of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a multi-billion-dollar machine designed to unlock the workings of matter, mass, energy, and time by throwing atoms together, very, very fast, and very, very hard.

In the early hours of November 3, the temperature in sections 7-8 and 8-1 of the LHC, a complex of subterranean tunnels that lies beneath the Franco-Swiss border, began to rise alarmingly. Inexplicably, the collider had lost power, and the cooling system was failing. Peaking at a 400 percent increase—from a standard operating temperature of a few degrees above absolute zero to a balmy 8 degrees Kelvin (a.k.a. negative 445 degrees Fahrenheit)—the two lengths of tunnel were perilously close to the thermal threshold at which the LHC’s super-cooled, superconducting magnets lose their super powers of particle acceleration and become merely mild-mannered, everyday “warm” magnets.

It was Christine Sutton, a spokesperson from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which runs the LHC, who had to announce the humiliating news that the mighty $6 billion supercollider had been crippled by a power outage caused by a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird.

“There was an interruption in the power supply,” Sutton stated, “just like you might have a power cut at home. The person who went to investigate discovered bread and a bird eating the bread.” This pano-avian intrusion had apparently shorted one of the complex’s above ground copper conductors, which cut power to the cooling system.

Dr. Mike Lamont, machine coordinator at CERN and self-described “general dogsbody” expressed the situation more alliteratively in this improvised line of ancient Anglo-Saxon verse: “A bit of baguette on the busbars.”

A press release on the CERN website later updated: “The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread.”

As absurdly compelling as this story is, CERN nevertheless buried the real lede: In none of its statements did the organization mention the esteemed Danish physicist who had predicted that the collider would be plagued by just such freakish “bad luck” or his provocative mathematical model that suggests events like the bread-bombarding bird might be directed from forces emanating from the future—guided, perhaps, by the manifest will of the universe or perhaps even by God Himself.

Secret, volcano-based SPECTRE super-villain complex, off the coast of Kobe, Japan

But before we investigate this remarkable claim, let me offer a brief excursion into the background of the HLC. A project 20 years in the making, the HLC has gone largely unnoticed in the U.S. outside the science and tech community. But in Europe it has been polarizing. Lurking beneath the environs of Lake Geneva, like a SPECTRE super-villain base in a James Bond film, the ultra-high-tech LHC is a project of breath-taking audacity. It aims to use powerful superconducting magnets to accelerate streams of particles a hair’s breadth shy of light speed and then smash the massively energized particles together.

If all goes well, the collisions produced by the LHC will recreate in miniature the conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and generate a plethora of fleeting subatomic particles—including the elusive Higgs boson, whose existence has been conjectured but never confirmed and which is thought to be responsible for the phenomenon of mass. Let me repeat that so it sinks in: The Higgs boson is the subatomic particle that’s responsible for giving mass to everything that exists. Isolating one of these would be a very big deal.

Ambition such as is evinced in the LHC never comes without a hubristic shadow side. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the scheme has engendered heated opposition—particularly once the news became widely circulated that the list of quixotic products that could emanate from all that subterranean super colliding includes such horrors as mini-black holes and explosions whose magnitudes could surpass any previously known on earth.

The misgivings of the doubtful have been by no means allayed by a series of freak incidents that have plagued the LHC since it opened in September of last year. Just nine days after powering up, the LHC was forced to close, after an accident with the magnets led to the spilling of thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen coolant. Repairs took more than a year to complete, and the LHC was just beginning to hit its stride again, when the saboteur bird tossed a baguette in the works. In the meanwhile, a physicist connected with the collider was arrested by French police on suspicion of conspiracy with Al Qaeda.

Scientists respond that any project as massively complex as the LHC—the world’s largest machine, whose interior must be kept colder and emptier than deep space and whose energy consumption equals that of the entire canton of Geneva—will inevitably undergo teething pains. They point out that the accidents thus far have been completely harmless, and, moreover, they maintain that critics’ doomsday fears are based on a profound misunderstanding of physics.

In Europe, where social conventions do not accord the ignorant and outspoken the same solicitude we allow them in this country, scientific pushback has been vigorous. University of Manchester professor and CERN researcher Dr. Brian Cox has stated authoritatively, “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”

That from a man whose C.V. includes a stint in the ‘90s synthpop band D:Ream, whose U.K. top-20 hit “Things Can Only Get Better” sucks even harder than Howard Jones’s ‘80s synthpop song of the same name.

LHC is A-OK for Queen axeman Dr. Brian May.

(As befits a rock ‘n’ roll legend, astrophysicist and lead guitarist for Queen, Dr. Brian May, also an enthusiastic LHC booster, has chosen to accent the positive, rather than vilify the opposition. He has been known to refer to the LHC as the “Large Hardon Collider.”)

Not everyone in the scientific community defends the LHC, however. Dr. Holger B. Nielsen, a fellow at Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute and a man who is considered one of the fathers of string theory, dismisses black-hole panic but sees a potentially “miraculous” pattern at work and speculates that what he calls the LHC’s run of “bad luck” may actually be the universe’s way of telling us that the collider and the quixotic fundamental particles it may produce are fundamentally “abhorrent to nature.” In a series of papers posted on the physics website arXive.org, Dr. Nielsen, in collaboration with Dr. Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, argues that, for reasons yet unknown, the universe cannot abide the Higgs boson. He conjectures that creating large numbers of these particles might actually send ripples through time that will cause (has caused…? will have caused…?) the future to intervene and alter the past in order to prevent the creation of these Higgs particles in the first place.

I’m not much of a mathematician and Dr. Nielsen is not much of writer, but I have read every word of his paper “Test of Effect from Future in Large Hadron Collider; a Proposal,” and the gist is plain enough: “If an accelerator potentially existed that could generate a large number of Higgs particles…then such a machine should practically never be realized!” (Yes, Dr. Nielsen is a scientist who uses exclamation marks.) The mathematical models Dr. Nielsen employs allow for the present to be shaped by causal chains that extend not just from the past but from the future as well. This may challenge ordinary logic, but it’s not forbidden by the rules of classical physics, which for the most part work as well backwards as they do forwards. Dr. Nielsen concedes that influence from the future is typically slight; however, his equations show that the sway of “reverse chronological causation” is “unusually large in the case of the Higgs [particle]. … This possibility makes it likely that…cases of the future influencing  even the initial conditions, and thus the past may occur when the Higgs [particle] is involved.” I trust Dr. Nielsen’s math is sharper than his syntax, but if that statement is somewhat muddy, his conclusion is tolerably limpid: “Thus, we predict possibly that the initial state [i.e. the past—or is it the future...?] would have been organized somehow so that a large Higgs-particle-producing machine such as the LHC should somehow be prearranged so as not to come into existence.” Or, as he told the New York Times, “God…rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Thus, “it must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck.”

As examples of this prearranged “bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen points not only to the, quote-unquote, accidents that have affected the LHC, but also to the scrapping in the U.S. of the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been America’s answer to the LHC. In 1993, Congress voted to cancel the project, which had run woefully over-budget. Dr. Nielsen finds this act of financial prudence so unlikely that he labels it an “anti-miracle” and ascribes it to divine intervention.

The scientific community at large has not raced to embrace Dr. Nielsen’s hypothesis about the LHC. But many admire his daft bravado. Dr. Nielsen is a scientist who is not afraid to punctuate his technical writing the way a 14-year-old girl would; neither does he shrink from using words heavily laden with non-scientific significance, such as luck, miracle, or God. Although his way of paring down these resonant terms to mathematical variables can be brutally Procrustean, it is nonetheless bracing to see a theoretician confront these facts of lived experience head on and attempt to find an accommodation for them within physics.

That doesn’t mean that he succeeds. It is with deliberate provocation that Dr. Nielsen writes “one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” But when the smoke clears, he leaves us with the underwhelming and probably tautological assertion that God  “may here be roughly identified with fundamental physical influences from the future.”  —Then again, is this distant and abstract God so terribly different from the heavily intellectualized First Cause or Unmoved Mover posited by Thomas Aquinas?

Yes, I suppose it is.

When Sir Isaac Newton wasn’t quantifying gravity or inventing calculus, he diverted himself by calculating dates for biblical prophecies, so Dr. Nielsen’s incorporating acts of God into his equations isn’t exactly without precedent in respectable science. But his definition is anemic and unnecessarily minimalist—particularly in light of the vivid examples we have of the divine Will at work in the supernatural intercessions at the LHC.

Let us try our own thought exercise. “What sort of Supreme Being,” we might ask ourselves “would choose to smite His foes with a baguette-bearing bird?” It doesn’t take any complex math to reach the conclusion that the Divinity must be the sort of entity that wears a hoodie and enjoys Devendra Banhart. If I could recall my trigonometry, I am certain that I could reckon whether it is within the walls of a Silverlake bungalow or a Williamsburg loft that His beatific Tweeness has elected to dwell, and exactly how much rent His parents are paying for it.

But allow me to put aside these metaphysical speculations and return to the mater at hand. Today the LHC is once again up and running. While we here in the States were sleeping off our Thanksgiving dinners, operators at CERN were celebrating the completion of a successful low-speed collision. No Higgs bosons yet, but experiments will step up in the new year, and then the hunt will be on in earnest.

I await to see what God will have to say about that.

Well, I won’t even try to explain. If you don’t know it, go watch it now. It’s two of the most thrilling and stylish minutes you’re ever likely to see on television, and an extraordinarily lucid piece of storytelling to boot.

Part spy adventure, part science fiction dystopia, and part counter-culture influenced social critique, The Prisoner was groundbreaking television when it debuted in the fall of 1967. With surreal plots that push the limits of narrative groundlessness, the 17-episode miniseries baffled, seduced, and ultimately enraged its original audience. (Such was the fall out from the maddeningly inconclusive concluding episode that the show’s creator was temporarily forced into hiding.) In look and theme, The Prisoner became an inspiration for a generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, comic book artists, new wave bands, and nerds of every other stripe. From the Super-8 aesthetic of the Dharma Initiative to the watchdog-like white smoke to borderline brain-in-a-vat narratives, the influence of The Prisoner can be seen all over ABC’s time-travel-obsessed Lost.

And now, after decades of speculation and anticipation, of deals struck and scrapped, the British cult classic is about to become the latest pop-cultural institution to submit itself to reinterpretation. On November 15, AMC will debut its own version of The Prisoner staring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen. The six-hour miniseries will run for three consecutive nights, starting in the coveted 8 o’clock slot leading up to AMC’s current mega hit, Mad Men — which makes a certain vertiginous sense, because both shows complement each other, the way one end of a telescope complements the other: Mad Men is a meticulous historical reconstruction that uses the veiled tensions and uncertainties of the early 60’s as a touchstone for our current moods; the new Prisoner, on the other hand, aims to pull the 60’s spy genre into the 21st century by replacing the original series’ core of Cold-War paranoia with the brand-new set of anxieties brought on by the War on Terror.

For those of you who’ve never seen The Prisoner, it’s a simple enough story. The series follows the increasingly baroque attempts to deprogram a retired secret agent; it’s James Bond meets Roadrunner, with a light psychedelic twist. Kidnapped by unknown forces, the ex-operative is held captive in a mysterious/kitschy seaside resort, whose strangely tractable residents are referred to not by name but only by number. Using a combination of cajolery, mind games, drugs, and a succession of punch-card, color-wheel, and disco-ball activated computers the functionaries of whatever power controls the Village — the West, the Soviets, or Other — are determined to extract from the prisoner (known only as Number 6) the true reason for his abrupt resignation — a reason, which for motives known only to the enigmatic and nameless hero, he adamantly refuses to reveal. You can watch all the original episodes on AMC’s website.

Exuding an air of cramped paranoia despite its trappings of Swinging London frippery, The Prisoner is a sort of dyspeptic yang to the frothy yin of The Avengers, that other masterwork of pop psychedelia. But while The Avengers is content to luxuriate in its surrealist absurdities, The Prisoner uses them as a satirical weapon. As in Catch-22 (1961) or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) or the movie The King of Hearts (1966), The Prisoner plays out the familiar trope of a mad world where Establishment lunatics are running the asylum and only the mad are free or truly sane.

Patrick McGoohan, the creator and star of The Prisoner, pitched the series when he was stepping down from his role as secret agent John Drake in the hit show Danger Man (shown in the U.S. under the title Secret Agent). Seven seasons of Danger Man had soured McGoohan on the spy genre, and he looked to his new series as a way of not only expanding his range but leveraging his celebrity to vent his irritation with what he saw as the depersonalization of modern life. For McGoohan, cloak-and-dagger intrigue was just the cover for a parable about the foredoomed struggle every committed individual wages against the collective. Stopping short of agitprop, The Prisoner exploits its tensions between spy parody, social satire, and libertarian screed to produce a surreal and captivating spectacle that mirrors the fault lines that fractured the late 60’s.

What gives The Prisoner its remarkable staying power is that it manages to powerfully evoke its time while also transcending it. You don’t have to be a 60’s fetishist to enjoy it. Nonetheless, I was certain as I began to re-watch the series for the first time since PBS reran it during high school days — now sadly many, many years ago — that I would be jettisoned into a Swinging London or a tempestuous Summer of Love. Capturing its historical moment with a wistful but lacerating gaze — like a Kinks’ song that can’t forgive old hidebound England her manifest flaws but cannot quite stop loving her anyway — I thought that I, too, might see with The Prisoner’s gimlet eye. In McGoohan’s portrayal of Number 6, I thought I might catch visions of button-down conservatives who turned on, dropped out, and went rogue — like Timothy Leary or Edd, the father of my college girlfriend, who forsook his job engineering weapons for the military-industrial complex and went to play the banjo and live on a commune instead; perhaps, encapsulated in the psychic assaults of the Village interrogators and the countering mental jujitsu of the indomitable Number 6, I would see shadows of the Yippie freak-outs and Situationist confrontations that counter-cultural warriors staged in the streets, seeking to jolt people out of entrenched habits of thought and into groovy enlightenment.

But time travel is a very slippery customer. It plays havoc with causality, scrambles memory, beggars reason. And it’s damnably hard to control. For all my easy talk in these columns of transportive portals and talismans, there is a mystery at the heart of mental time travel that makes it ultimately unpredictable.

Re-viewing The Prisoner, I didn’t feel as though I were looking back into the 60’s so much as I was looking at today reflected in a funhouse mirror. The Prisoner’s schizoid vision of a world split between mad institutions, which destroy freedom and corrode the spirit, and a few raging and alienated holdouts still speaks to the zeitgeist — but the political poles have flipped since 1967. The pot-smoking, radical hippie has been replaced by the gun-toting, reactionary tea bagger; in place of the Stalinist aphorisms of Mao’s Red Book, we have Manifest Destiny redux in The 5,000 Year Leap, a.k.a. Glenn Beck’s Red Book. Unlike the older generation, today’s rebel dropouts are not inspired by the spiritual restlessness of Hesse’s Siddhartha or Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Their motives are economic and punitively moralistic, and their model is John Galt, the libertarian hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Seething with resentment that the fruits of their honest labor are used — via the tyranny of taxation — to subsidize their less deserving fellow citizens, they fantasize about dropping out of the system, or in their patois “going Galt.”

The Prisoner reads very differently today than it did even in the Reagan era, when I first watched it, and that fact points out how much and how rapidly things have changed in this country. Over the last eight years we have passed though a very dark time, when the profound unreason of fear and self-righteous anger propelled the ship of state into treacherous straits. The darkness of that period was so palpable — and I speak here as an expert on the Einsteinian physics of time travel — that I have to wonder whether its gravity was so intense that it might have warped the fabric of space-time to the breaking point — opening up a wormhole that led out of our universe and into some uncanny alternative reality. It’s the same physics as time travel, but this time, instead of shunting us to some distant point in our past or future, the wormhole has catapulted us straight out of the time-space continuum.

We seem to have entered a parallel universe where FDR staged a socialist coup in 1932, which caused the Great Depression, and Hitler, the harbinger of political correctness, instigated the Second World War chiefly so he could impose vegetarianism and socialized medicine on a global empire of demoralized welfare slaves. In this topsy-turvy universe, a left-of-center coalition headed by the half-black son of a single mother can sincerely be characterized as a national socialist insurgency; the fractious Democratic party is the party of institutionalized repression; and howling Republicans are the beleaguered champions of free spirits and dissenters.

AMC says that their remake of The Prisoner will deal with contemporary controversies, like state surveillance and extraordinary rendition. But from where I sit, that sounds like a lonely echo from an abandoned arc of history. Those issues, artifacts of the Bush era, are orphaned anachronisms, here in our strange new home. Furthermore — if I may speak of such weighty matters in aesthetic terms — exploring the excesses of the misbegotten War on Terror is a poor fit with the original Prisoner’s tone of wry satire. Carl Rove was called the Mayberry Machiavelli, but the policy he and Dick Cheney built was devoid of even a veneer of Southern charm. We have seen their preferred means of intelligence extraction, and that tool kit does not include sending “high value suspects” to idyllic seaside resorts to ride penny-farthing bicycles and sip lapsang souchong in Italianate gardens. But that’s the oppressively decent way “enhanced interrogation” is practiced in the Village.

Astute surveyors of the political landscape realize that we’re not in Mayberry anymore. The nation is beyond carping about tactical details, like the relevance of habeas corpus or the permissibility of wiretapping or even torture; we’ve moved on to bigger quarry. The question we see playing out on cable news, in blogs, in town-hall meetings, and public demonstrations is “Who do we imagine ourselves to be? What is the soul of America?” As is the case with definitional questions, the answer is typically expressed as a negative: We are defined against the thing that we reject. And, as is the case with family squabbles, the tone is uniformly nasty and ad hominem. Our political lexicon is distended with a list of new terms of invective, Rabelaisian in its length and grotesquerie: We are a nation of wingnuts, moonbats, birthers, FReepers, libtards, Paultards, snow-billies, nObamans, Christianists, liberal fascists….

If Patrick McGoohan, the crusty, misanthropic creator of the original Prisoner, had lived to remake his series, I’m certain he would have recognized this knotted up state of affairs, so ripe for satire — and would have relished jabbing a finger into our aching collective pressure points, sparing the fragile sensibilities of neither right nor left. I imagine him hiring Kiefer Sutherland to reprise the role as Jack Bauer — just as it was an open secret that McGoohan’s Number 6 was a continuation of Danger Man’s John Drake. Bauer — a man who understands more than most that the delicate soufflé of democracy requires the occasional breaking of an egg — would be spirited away to a mysterious resort-spa on a nameless shore, where he would be confronted by a succession of callow but enthusiastic policy wonks, political appointees to some vaguely-alluded-to Truth and Reconciliation Committee. They would offer the rogue spy white tea and cucumber water, and then urge him to make a public confession of his crimes against humanity — tea and sympathy being, as you know, the signature style of Democratic regimes. They just want everyone to play nice and get along with one another. In fact, they insist on it. Und zey haff vays of making you toe zee liberal agenda….

The self-conscious artifice of the original Prisoner and its dream-like logic allowed it to rub up closer to the maladies of the late 60’s than a more subtle and realistic treatment would have. There is opportunity in the remake to examine in cringe-inducing detail the corrosive stereotypes that both the right and left today seem incapable of setting aside. The deadlock between earnest hope mongers of the new left demanding “sunlight” and “transparency” and the dour Cheneyesque figure that accepts torture sites and covert ops as the unsavory but necessary price of freedom would be a perfect microcosm of the unsettled and uncivil moment we’re inhabiting.

But, sometimes reality is more surreal than acid visions or science-fiction allegories. If we are living in universe where political “thinkers” can seriously suggest that viewing pornography turns straight men gay, or that environmentalism is a death cult, or that discrimination is actually a higher form of tolerance (and, sad to say, we are), then perhaps the wormhole has carried us beyond the reach of satire’s salubrious laughter.

Video courtesy of Dr. Michio Kaku, Science Channel personality, author of Physics of the Impossible, and all around pragmatist.

On a hot summer day in late August 1911, a desperate and bedraggled man left his hideout in the mountains of Northern California and passed through a time warp that would cast him 10,000 years into the future. Starving and mourning the death of his solitary compatriot, Ishi — the last living representative of the Yahi tribe, Stone-Age hunter-gatherers who for uncounted generations had roamed the woods of Mount Lassen — had  decided to chuck it all in and throw himself on the tender mercy of the people who had worked so hard and so long to achieve his eradication.

The Ironic Muse was clearly minding the shop that day. The first building the exhausted aborigine happened by was a slaughterhouse, and it was here that his legs gave way and he toppled in a dead faint. Fortunately for Ishi, Injuns did not fall within the scope of professional butchery, and the startled workmen — who, like everyone else in the town of Oroville, had considered “wild Indians” an extinct species in these whereabouts — hauled the unconscious stranger off to the jailhouse. There was no particular reason to do that, except that the very surreality of the situation somehow smacked of danger.

If it wasn’t for an accidental alignment of interests, who knows what would have become of Ishi? He might have been strung up at the jailhouse; he might have assimilated after a fashion into town life, marrying a pox-marked dowager and eking out a quiet living selling carved wooden animals for children’s toys. But if the pioneering anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber hadn’t heard of the discovery and brought Ishi to the University of California, Berkeley, the last Yani would not have died of tuberculosis in 1915, wearing a city suit and stiff collar, looking off at San Francisco Bay and remembering tram rides down Market Street and visits to music halls. And I wouldn’t be writing about him today.

What’s most surprising to me about Ishi’s story is not that a “wild man” could have lived undetected for so long, but that there aren’t many, many more Ishis in our history. America is a big place, with an infinitude of isolated pockets that can conceal most any kind of person or activity. We have, to site just a few known examples, enclaves of religious zealots; of nudists; of painters; of polygamists; of separatist gun-nuts nursing strange and inchoate grievances; we have the state of Idaho.

All around us, countless tribes of elective affinities are marching slowly to the end of their line. My father, for instance, may have been the very last man in North America to have grown sideburns and a droopy mustache unironically. It was so late in the ‘70s that even Lindsey Buckingham was about to reach for his razor. But we never thought to title my father “The Last Man to Board the Love Train.” My mother and I just laughed. We weren’t anthropologists.

* * *

To reverse Ishi’s footsteps and ascend into certain regions of the Sierra Nevada and lower Cascade Mountains is still to step backward into time. You leave behind the big box stores that clutter the Reno-Tahoe International Airport and follow Route 395 into a featureless expanse of desert, substantially unchanged from the days of Conestoga wagons and the Donner Party. Across the California border you exit onto the 70, and dull yellow desert turns to orange scrub, which starts to give way to pines as the highway rises, thin at first, but growing until you are engulfed in a pleasant woodland. The few settlements of cowboy Victoriana you pass through become smaller and smaller. Once you pass the white clapboard shack that advertises Chinese and American food, you know that you have crossed the pale of civilization.

My destination that hot late August day I entered Ishi’s mountains was an isolated enclave of more recent vintage. Whitehawk Ranch is what the Census Bureau calls a CDP, a census-designated place, which is the bureau’s most lax and generic designation. The people of Whitehawk have no municipal government, they pay no city tax, and provide no social services for themselves. By the standards of Plato and Aristotle, they can hardly be considered human. They have no cable TV and almost no cell phone service. They do, however, have golf.

It’s the golf that brings residents to this isolated mountain retreat. It’s what brought my aunt and uncle, and they are what brought me. I hate golf, but I love them.

In the arid wasteland of my suburban childhood and adolescence, my aunt and uncle were a monsoon of glamour. My uncle, a veteran of the Second World War who earned a fancy Stanford MBA thanks to the GI Bill, is the success story of the family. A regional manager for a department store chain, my uncle knew how to drink and to glad-hand, but somehow always retained an aura of bookish aloofness that I took for benevolence. My uncle’s wife –his younger, second wife — always looked like a Virginia Slims ad. She kept her hair in a Joanna Lumley bowl cut and wore, sassy mannish blazers. She entered retail fashion at a time when ladies always wore white gloves out-of-doors. By the time she had risen to head buyer, women had ditched the gloves and were moving on to burning their bras. If my uncle’s wit remained dry no matter how wet he became, my aunt would easily grow florid and the cantankerous farm girl, never far from the surface, would come out bounding and grabbing at throats. As recently as 2008, my mother referred to her as a “women’s libber.”

As alluringly exotic as they appeared to me as a child, it turns out that my aunt and uncle are fairly typical residents of their new community. At the last census, the median age at Whitehawk was 61. The demographics are 99 percent white and one percent Asian. Eighty-five percent of the community is over 45, and just four percent are under 18. I imagine that the adolescents here must feel like protagonists in a John Hughes film — growing up alienated and misunderstood, surrounded by retired golf enthusiasts, with nothing but that one Japanese guy for comic relief.

But, as I learned in the course of a long weekend, if Whitehawk were a movie, its director would not be John Hughes but Werner Hertzog, the anatomist of obsession. The people here can walk out of their backdoors and onto a 7,000 yard, par-71, championship golf course; but they have to drive twenty minutes to pick up their mail and go 60 miles to get their groceries.

The golf links are the heart of civic life in Whitehawk — the agora, the forum, the mall, the place where neighbors meet and contend for prestige. The rhythm of life follows a cycle hallowed by nature and custom — the April thaw, the November snows, and in between the Mountain Hardware Tournament, the Club Championship, and an alternating succession of low-stakes men’s and women’s competitions with such colorful and utterly opaque names as “Three Blind Mice, “Sucker in the Bucket,” and “Cha Cha Cha.”

Some residents, like the nomadic hunter-gatherers who once ranged the mountains, leave for the winter to seek warmer pastures near Sacramento or farther south in Palm Desert where the golf never ceases, but for the most part people stay. They’ve done their time in the outside world, laboring and deferring their dreams. Now they can retreat into the mountains to shut themselves in and devote the remainder of their years to doing exactly what they please. They chose to settle in this reverse Shangri-La. Here the cloistered inmates might remain eternally old, but golf provides the portal to each person’s past. The ingrained movements and ageless verities of the sport connect them to the selves they remember, and in playing round after round, they make time vanish and keep their own mortality at bay.

It took some time for me to find my bearings among this strange tribe. The palpable weight of stasis made me feel cramped and edgy, and I longed for the bustle and the forward thrust of time once more. And there were strange customs. The men, for example, were fastidious enough to shave for dinner, but no one objected to the short pants they wore at the table, which flaunted their hairy legs. When I helped clear away the dishes, it caused a frisson of delight among the women and faint grousing among the men.

And, of course, there was golf, that sanctum sanctorum from which I remained an unrepentant heretic.

And yet, I surprised myself at how quickly I submitted to the diurnal flow of Whitehawk. It’s true that I could only fitfully follow the action of the women’s Solheim Cup, that came on at dawn and played all day on the flat screen TV, but three daily papers (which my uncle picked up from his post office box at the nearest town) meant that there were three crossword puzzles that needed doing. Follow that up with a leisurely stroll through the grounds, and I had the makings of a full and rewarding day. So it was with the clearest of conscience that I could settle down near sunset on the back porch and enjoy a few martinis and a little confab with the locals.

Life on the golf course, where everyone shares the same schedule and the same handful of intense preoccupations, struck me as remarkably like dorm life. This was my doorway into the foreign way of living I was encountering. I felt like an early naturalist on a mysterious jungle expedition expecting to encounter primitive savagery, but finding instead the Romantic ideal of a pristine form of existence unspoiled by the abundant woes of modern life.

I savored long, warm evenings that smelled of cedar bark and pine sap; conversations in which parties exchanged stories leavened with gentle wit, not snarky one-liners; cocktails sipped but never seeming to lose their chill — all luxurious elements of a precocious retirement. I even began to speculate that golf might actually contain an idyllic potential that had heretofore eluded me.

That’s when I should have known something was terribly wrong. But I couldn’t see it at the time, because I had been seduced by these misappropriated pleasures. Like many an explorer before me, I had started out in good faith but ended up in conceited affectation, aping the mannerisms of my newly discovered race of people, whose virtues could only be fully appreciated by an enlightened observer, such as myself. But I could hold no claim to any of what I saw. This pantomime would never really be my future, because I had never had these people’s past.

Here’s the trailer, if you think I’m lying:

I have to say that I love the premise, but the execution strains credulity. After all, who takes a hot-tub-cum-time-machine back to 1986 to listen to Animotion? The rules of time travel strictly dictate that you must go to 1976 and make sure that Fleetwood Mac successfully complete Rumors, thus guaranteeing the continued existence of hot tubs for generations to come.

Read more here.

I am, of course, alluding to the “World’s Gone Mad” media blitz that is sweeping our communities both on- and off-line, and heralding the third season of Mad Men, AMC’s popular dramatic series that attempts to do for the post–World War II generation what Gone With the Wind did for the antebellum South.

Let us set aside the series itself for today — hard as that might be as the season approaches. I come neither to praise Don Draper, the show’s steely, stoic, and wounded rogue-hero, nor to bury him. Allow me instead to close the door to the offices of the fictional Sterling Cooper and look at the real-life sausage factory run by AMC’s actual Mad Men — the creative team (which, for what it’s worth, comprises mostly women, according to the New Yorker piece that broke the story) that dreamed up “The World’s Gone Mad.”

First off, there’s the aptly if inartfully named “Mad Men Yourself” Web page, where fans can give themselves a cartoon makeover into a Kennedy-era swinger and then post the results on their social network of choice. This high-tech take on Colorforms is, as they say, but the camel’s nose peeking under the tent. Cross-promotion will allow us at the very least to drink like a Mad Man at Hilton hotel bars, dress like a Mad Man at Banana Republic, and watch the August 16 premier, like a madman, in Times Square. (I understand the acoustics are awesome.) Lucky fans at Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, will even have a chance to win their own Mad Men fedora — because nothing says baseball like wintertime office headwear.

Forgive your Time Travel Correspondent if he greets this ballyhoo with a degree of (delayed and) jaundiced bemusement. There is a reason for it, and it goes deeper than garden-variety, bloggy snark. You see, I myself once succumbed to an earnest case of Cocktail Fever during my adventures in the early ‘90s. I wore my grandfather’s suits, pretended to enjoy Manhattans, and searched thrift store bins for old records with names like Exotica! or Bongos and Brass. The fever eventually broke, after one-too-many evenings spent standing in L.A.’s Dresden Room listening to veteran lounge act/crypto-performance artists Marty and Elayne plunk and warble through a ten-minute rendition of “The Girl From Ipanema.” Now my body produces antibodies that render me quite immune to Mad Men Mania or any of a range of other maladies associated with the Rat Pack, bourbon drinking, songs with scat lyrics that go “zu zu zu-u-u,” or the use of Royal Crown hairdressing.

Just as world travelers risk illnesses such as dysentery and malaria, time travelers face ailments of their own. That is the price we pay to get up close to our obsessions. We sometimes get invaded by foreign bodies that change our chemistry and make us no longer feel ourselves.

And that is where AMC’s “The World’s Gone Mad” campaign stumbles, from my perspective. As light and entertaining as the pre-season Mad Men hype is — or could be, if it turned down the volume a notch or two — it transgresses the rules of responsible time travel. It cheats us by offering an overly pasteurized version of the past, which removes all the pests that might upset the constitution but also robs history of its characteristic tang. As someone who cares deeply about the integrity of times past and future, this genuinely distresses me. It makes me feel like an ugly tourist.

The pre-season Mad Men hype exoticizes the early ‘60s, seducing the target market with the shadowy allure of long ago pleasures now denigrated as vices — drinking, smoking, wearing expensive clothes, being less-than vigilant toward our children. But it lets us off the hook by delivering only ersatz naughtiness — Don Draper signature cocktails, flash drives shaped like Zippo lighters, and wear-a-fedora-to-the-ballpark gimmicks — that deliver all the raw authenticity of a weekend at a Sandals Resort. In short, “The World’s Gone Mad” commits the cardinal sin of time travel: It condescends to the past in order to flatter the present.

To its credit, Mad Men itself manages for the most part to avoid this trap. Maintaining a delicate balance between fetishizing the past and preaching to it, the series alternately presents the post-war era as possessing both license we’ve lost — e.g. the freedom to drink all day long –  and strictures we’re lucky to have escaped, e.g. social codes that insist husbands and wives must remain strangers. But the marketing apparatus promoting Mad Men squeezes out all that dramatic tension and ambivalence, leaving behind only an attractive and empty surface of gray flannel, mink stoles, and cigarette holders. This free-floating chain of cocktail-lounge signifiers supposedly shares — and convey — an ineffable quality known as swank.

But the hard truth, as any seasoned time traveler knows, is that it is not quite so easy to wield such trans-historical talismans, portals to other times and places. Wearing a fedora with yoga pants in the outfield bleachers, for instance, will not make you swank. And pouring your Arbor Mist into an inverted cone of glass and calling it winecoolertini will not make you Jackie O. These temporal misappropriations are to time travelers the equivalent of claiming expertise on Polynesia on the basis of a few dinners at Trader Vic’s.

But talismans are tricky and powerful things. No matter how they are mistreated or perverted, they still retain the potential to open up vortexes that suck us in and transport us — willy-nilly — to enchanted places. Grating as it is to my delicate time traveler’s sensibilities, the new Mad Men blitz has nonetheless absorbed my attention.

Besides, who doesn’t like a Trader Vic’s mai-tai now and again, ersatz or not? Whatever my ambivalence and high-minded scruples, I will be watching the Mad Men season premiere, with a drink in my hand (dry gin martini, one olive) and more than likely a tie around my neck. But I draw the line at a fedora.

Q. I have to confess that I am one of those people who believe that “Julie & Julia” could have been two distinct movies, a classic Nora Ephron romantic comedy and a fascinating biopic.

A. If each of them had been a separate movie an hour and 45 minutes long, I think the stories might have worn out a little. I liked putting them together and showing that kind of strange relationship between the two women, even though their stories exist 50 years apart. I love the idea of time travel, and I believe that cooking is all about time travel. When you cook, you’re making what your mother made, or you’re making something that you made for an old boyfriend or whatever. Cooking is about traveling back in your memories.

–The Orange County Register

We don’t know what becomes of Global flight 33, but if the passengers ever reached their intended final destination, they would have seen Eero Saarinen’s nearly completed TWA terminal, which, at the date of broadcast, was just a year away from receiving its first passengers.

48 years later, I entered JFK (née Idlewild) airport, under the shadow of Saarinen’s now iconic structure. Empty once more and facing an uncertain future, the slumbering emblem of the Jet Age seemed unaware of the low semi-circle of building that had crept up around it in stunted imitation, like a thin, white ring of mold, sprung perhaps from spores dropped from the damp sheetrock and asbestos insulation that were being removed from the gutted terminal.

That was my welcome to Terminal 5 — or T5 as the new tenants would like us to call it: the new home of JetBlue Airways. And, in passing a very long afternoon there last spring waiting for the bank of thunderstorms that had engulfed the entire eastern half of the nation to break enough for my plane to squeeze through to California, I got to know it well.

Offering reasonably priced, comfortable air travel, JetBlue has further distinguished itself from the competition through “hip” and slightly impish branding, positioning itself as the Target of economy airlines. T5 — the first new U.S. terminal to have been constructed since the attack of 9/11 — opened last fall, amid much ballyhoo in the New York City area and a nationwide “Jetting” campaign — a hodge-podge of Swinging Sixties imagery meant to evoke an era when air travel was an event, and which was inspired as much by the proximity of the Saarinen terminal as the gathering Mad Men zeitgeist.

What the real life T5 offers, however, is Jetting 2.0 — a veneer of good, old-fashioned glamour, laid over the titanium skeleton of today’s entitlements: free wireless, palatable wine, strong coffee, and easily accessible reflexology. The effect is less a resurrection of the Richard Burton-Liz Taylor jet set than an idealized Silicon Valley — which, when you think about it, is to enter more fully into the spirit of the Jet Age. No one in 1961 wanted nostalgia. We believed in the future, in technology, in a consumerism that was itself proof that we lived in the best of all worlds.

I admit that during my protracted introduction to T5, the JetBlue designers seduced me into participating in their vision of today as the future that yesterday had imagined. Despite my stranded condition, I felt that I was a man on the go — tripping from hub to hub in a networked world of crisscrossing flight paths. What adventures awaited?

I found myself sitting in a wine cave, next to the trattoria, next to the steak lounge, happily paying twice as much as I should have for an under-seasoned octopus stew and a bottle of indifferent Tempranillo, because — well, really — who has casuelas at an airport? I’m sure they don’t even do that in Madrid.

I felt the present melting away — I swear it was more than the Tempranillo — and streams of past and future time coursing through me. Idlewild? JFK? Pan-American? Pangaea? I could no longer say for certain where I was, or who I was, or when I was. Had I become the Man of the Future, the giant for whom Saarinen had built his futuristic terminal?

“The Odyssey of Flight 33” and my experience at JetBlue T5 represent the two fundamental — and fundamentally different — avenues to time travel. One is technological, is circumscribed by the laws of physics, and fixated by machines and the great imponderables of history, like dinosaurs or whatever race of creatures will be inhabiting the desiccated remains of the post-apocalyptic earth; the other approach is psychological, is explored by neuroscientists, neurotics, artists, and aesthetes, and it exists in subjective experience. Both approaches have their defenders — some even in universities. At the University of Connecticut, for example, a professor is looking for funding to build a time machine that will use lasers to send subatomic particles into the past. Meanwhile in Auckland, a researcher is looking at brains and using the term “mental time travel” to discuss the way we mentally constitute past memories and future projections.

Both approaches speak to the imagination. As a child, under the influence of The Twilight Zone, and Star Trek, and The Time Machine, and a thousand other quasi-scientific representations, I thought of time travel as a type of physical transportation, facilitated by freak weather, glowing portals, or polished brass Victorian sleds. But as I aged and strangers’ faces began to evoke lost friends and every place seemed to resemble someplace else, I began to sense that the past and future press heavily against the present, seep into each other at times. And that ordinary objects — letters, books, records, vintage clothing, remastered films, picturesque buildings and humdrum wine — can become talismans through which disparate points in time converge. These are temporal shifts too subtle and profound to register on any Geiger counter or pH strip.

Certainly, time travel is theoretically possible. And whatever physicists are allowed to do, they seem eventually to get around to doing. But every technique so far conjectured for manipulating time requires at least one, shall we say, outré condition — such as the harnessing of a black hole, which risks engulfing the earth and crushing it into oblivion; or the accelerating of a wormhole to near light speed, which could consume nearly all the energy in the universe; or the encasing of our would-be chrononaut in a sort of minivan with the space–time-bending density of Jupiter, which is just crazy talk.

My mother’s afraid to pump gas, and she won’t drive on the freeway. One day she’s going to be surfing time on the back of a black hole? Call me a defeatist, but I don’t see it happening.

But let us shed no tears for the time machine. In fact — if I may continue to be utterly candid with you — in my view, these yet-to-be-invented gimmicks of some infinitely distant future are already passé. An embarrassment. An albatross around the neck, like that Friendster account that’s still garnering sporadic e-mails from Brandi69, who says she’s seen your profile pic and likes to party with older men.

Yes: To Hell with the time machine, I say. For I have seen the history of innovation, and I know where this story ends.

Humanity is gifted with a marvelous capacity for adaptation and innovation. But the flipside of the bargain is a staggering propensity for complacency. We’re restless and self-satisfied at the same time. We crave novelties and conveniences, which we immediately take for granted, noticing them only through the indignation we feel when the NPR stream keeps overloading the router, so you have to reach across the desk and turn on the tinny-sounding, god-damned clock-radio instead. For instance.

And so it always has been, from cell phones and cable TV, to indoor plumbing and the wheel. Yesterday’s miracle of innovation becomes today’s high-end convenience and tomorrow’s mundanity.

Doubtlessly, any real-life time machine would debut amid a welter of messianic promises. But what would we actually do with one?

Would we go back and preserve papyruses from the library at Alexandria? Would we try to warn Moctezuma that Cortés was not in fact a god, but a very bad man? Or would we even just go back to see if it’s Cleopatra or Lillie Langtry who rates as the hottest woman of all time?

Consider this, you who would unlock history’s secrets: It is humiliating and exhausting enough to travel around present-day Europe with a phrase book and a distant memory of sophomore French. Now imagine that Europe had never seen a TV. Would you really have anything to say to each other? Would you even have enough cultural common ground to be intelligible at all? Rather than appearing as omniscient demigods among superstitious children, we visitors from the future would more likely be regarded as stammering imbeciles. Our pleas not to vote Hitler ’33 would be dismissed as lunatic ravings.

Thus, I suspect that any initial vogue for hard-core time travel would pass quickly. As we adjusted to our new role as consumers of temporal displacement technologies, it’s the time machine that would be domesticated to serve the tyranny of daily life, and not our lives that would be expanded and enriched by the miracle of time travel.

Eager children, for example, would nudge Christmas closer. College students could get that extra day to finish a term paper, and then jump directly from a sober afternoon to an evening of legless drunkenness, without the intervening tedium of half a dozen Red Bull and vodkas. Parents would visit the future grandchildren they’ve given up demanding in the here-and-now. And Republican stalwarts could bask in the sunshine of Reagan’s Morning in America, eternally prolonged.

Of course, there would be those individuals who’d go ride the Oregon Trail or march with Alexander on Persepolis — they’re the same people who today climb K2 or canoe the Amazon. The fact is, any one of us could fly to Nepal and explore the Himalayas if we wanted to, right now. It’s just the case that most of don’t — not when we can opt for putting granite countertops in the kitchen.

And once it got to that point, once the time machine became the Travertine tile of its day, the inevitable backlash would set in.

Just as the skips and scratches and staticky pops of vinyl were rendered charming in the face of the MP3’s frigid clarity, temporal connoisseurs in the age of time travel will extol previously unrecognized virtues of living in the present. They would savor time’s very slowness, marvel at the exquisite unfolding of causality, and boggle at the subtle profundity in what you and I today call “boredom.”

For indeed, is there not something Philistine about jumping time, willy-nilly? Forever cutting to the chase, voyeuristically peering into the future, or reliving past glories on an endless loop. Isn’t that almost the definition pornography, to rush directly and capriciously to history’s climaxes, unearned and excised from any context or consequences?

Which brings us back to the point where we started — to a point that we, in fact, have never left through the course of these lengthy reflections — the inauspicious present. Life isn’t an orgy of experience. Our triumphs are small and seldom, punctuated by long periods of routine. But without the overlooked mid-tones, highlights and shadows lose their definition. Our lives would become a meaningless muddle of gray.