But with every new and potentially revolutionary technology comes great responsibility (and a host of moral dilemmas that protesters and media spinsters are just waiting to sink their teeth into.) With the ability to alter the flow of time, even on an atomic level, we will be forced to consider the implications of most, if not all of our actions. Does pushing an atom back in time half a second interrupt the original process of doing so, therefore proving to the scientist that it can't be done, simply because every time he has attempted it, it has failed (and for the same reason?) Does randomly pushing atoms out of phase with reality constitute a risk to our past, or are we safeguarded against the potentially serious danger of temporal contamination until we start working with, say, objects that can actually be seen with the naked eye? With future improvements, making trips to the past or the future as easy as a trip to another country, what kind of guidelines will need to be put in place? We can't just let whole herds of tourists (complete with a spouse, two kids, a camera, and a dog!) swarm unchecked into 14th century Europe, snapping pictures of the peasants and royalty alike, buying up everything within reach at the marketplace, or teaching the locals tricks, modern slang terms, and dirty limericks! And what about bringing people back to ‘our' present? Is it okay to bring someone from the future to the present day and wrong to bring someone from the past foward, or vice versa? Will there be laws against both? What about the risk of exposure to diseases long since wiped out? Will the advent of Time Travel (in the classic sense) mean a sudden epidemic of smallpox, polio, and tuberculosis? Even with laws and a resurgence in vaccines, what's to stop a person infected with a disease from the present or future to accidently cause a devastating epidemic in say, the 12th century B.C.? These and a thousand more questions, at one time raised only by writers and filmmakers, will doubtless be on the minds of lawmakers and concerned citizens the world over as soon as this technology becomes viable.

And so we come back to our original question: is Time really something we can manipulate? Can it be harnessed and bent to our will, allowing us to access alternate realities, dimensions, and universes, to make instantaneous transportation from point A to point B a reality or create the ultimate tool in the future of espionage? Not with our current technology, (and our understanding of physics could probably use a little work too!) but who knows- with Quantum Physics gaining support and being acknowledged as a different, yet very accurate way of looking at the structure and as-yet mysterious workings of the universe, who knows what the future will bring! Once, humans were convinced that not only was the world flat, but that the sun revolved around the earth, and mankind would never manage to break the sound barrier but, in each of these cases, we know otherwise now. Who knows, maybe someday humans will look back and laugh at how backward we were, wondering at how we could live such primitive, slow, and boring lives in the years before mankind "woke up" and discovered just how to harness the power of time.