I was watching the latest episode of Futurama and sipping a hot cup of tea when this question randomly popped into my head:

If I do succeed in making that time machine how the hell am I going to test it?

Ok that question has a lot to do with the latest episode of Futurama… In the episode the Professor invents a “One Way Time Machine”. For details watch the episode (it was pretty good too)

Back to the subject of this post… “How do you test a time machine?”

If it was a normal machine I would try and get it into the state required for it start properly and then check the outputs/results and iterate. But that wont work with a time machine!

Lets say I convince a poor bugger to test my machine(Of course I wont test it myself what if it blows up or something :P ), there are three possible results:

1. It works perfectly well – ‘Thats coz I am pretty good at building this stuff‘
2. It fails miserably (basically nothing happens) – ‘Ohh cant these assistants do one thing right, guess I have to do everything myself‘
3. It works partially – This is the case we need to talk about…

Lets say it worked fine for going back in time but not forward… I would expect the bugger to track me down and tell me I was successful. What if he went too far back? He cant pass on the message thru my great grand parents! – ‘Oh damn! thats what my granny meant when she said “Works fine, look at going forward” ‘

Basically it wont help my results now, how will I know what to fix…

Lets say it goes only forward… The future me would be thrilled to know but the present me just cant sit around waiting to know :D
Again if he goes too ahead in time, well thats pointless aint it…

My basic point about all this is that if I can invent a machine that can make people(and itself) disappear I should technically be able to pass it off as a partially working time machine… Right?