By Jonathan Aquino
Saturday Stories
July 3, 2019
I am great fan of Christopher Nolan as screenwriter and director. I like his twists like the twin in "The Prestige" and the spinning top in "Inception." His stories are grounded in logic, like in "The Dark Knight" where the batmobile is a prototype of a military vehicle. In "Interstellar," our astronauts were gone for decades because they landed on a planet next to a black hole, and the extreme gravity caused time to dilate so one hour on the surface became equivalent of seven years on earth.
Time is relative, not a universal constant, like the one by Planck, as we first thought. Einstein says, in simplest terms, that time slows down the faster you go. This naturally brings us to the Twin Paradox, where one stays on earth and the other one goes to space at the speed of light then comes back. Who is older? The one on earth will be older because the time for the one in space would have moved slower. So how could one twin be much older? That's the paradox.
Hundreds of years before space travel, a tale is told about a boy who vanished for many years, but to him it was only a few days. The story of the young fisherman Urashima Taro was a famous story with many versions in Ancient Japan. Taro rescues a sea turtle, who would later reward him by taking him to the Dragon Palace of the Sea King. There he met and fell in love with the Sea Princess, Otohime Sama, and they got married.
He was happy, but soon he felt homesick. He told his wife that he wanted to visit his parents. She reluctantly agreed, and she gave him a sealed box and told him never to open it, which doesn't make any sense at all. And so, Taro went home, but everything was different, and he knew no one, and no one knew him. They told him that a boy named Urashima Taro used to live in his house and he went to the Dragon Palace and was never seen again, but that was three hundered years ago.
Photo courtesy of eBay
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