My mom used to have a 'pipowagen' - a trailer with the charm of an old traveling circus - parked at the Amsterdam waterfront. We spent a lot of time there.
I fantasized about the possibility of tying a rope between our 'pipowagen' and the moon. Since the moon travels around us in approximately a day, I thought the rope could take me around the world and bring me back in a day. The cart would need some upgrading for all the different places we would be visiting and the enormous speed at which we would be traveling. The greatest part of this contraption would be that it would stay the same time of day, all day long. It would be always day, or night, depending on the length of the rope.
By giving up a fixed point in space I could stand still in time. I wondered what would happen at the dateline in the middle of the Pacific. Would it just suddenly become the next day while it is still noon?
I spent a lot of time on this fantasy: designing a possible cart that could travel across sea as well as land and thinking about how it would interact with the world at these enormous speeds.
The notion of time and space started somewhere here. Clearly aware of the impossibilities, it got stuck in my head. When biking through Amsterdam I still like to think about how space and time relate - that we are standing still and the earth is a giant treadmill, only moving because it is pushed around by me and many others. Relativity.
