11 March

Space and time. Ramesses II died over 3000 years ago. This is him. Some suspect him to have been the Egyptian Pharaoh who dealt with Moses. Recent studies suggest he may have died of tuberculosis. If you found a machine gun in ancient Egyptian tombs, you’d suspect that somebody modern had been there and left it? But we don’t pause for a second in saying Ramesses died of tuberculosis, even though it wasn’t isolated in a lab until 1882. The TB bacterium is as much a technological object as a machine gun, without a laboratory you wouldn’t even know it existed. So why can it travel in time, but not a machine gun?