What If You Had the Power to Stop Time?
Stopping time is an exciting concept among storytellers. Whatever the version-books, films, or television shows-many of the characters freeze time whenever they want. Usually, these stories treat time as malleable: for example, walking through crowds encased in ice, dodging bullets, or changing events without anyone noticing anything out of the ordinary.
But if you really could stop time, the practical implications would be far more complicated than anything fiction suggests. So, if time were stopped and you moved objects or people around, you would have to have a way to counteract inertia; even taking your pen across a table would entail infinite energy since all the molecules of the pen would be frozen in place. But what would happen to your body, including your lungs, if time were stopped? Even in such a hypothetical case, if all the air molecules, for example, were stilled, you could not breathe. Are you frozen, too, or floating in some other dimension beyond time? This thought experiment drives home how difficult-and perhaps deadly-it would be to have control over time.
