It has long been an Old Wives' Tale that the journey home from a day out feels to take less time than the trip there. Psychologists have suggested this is all in the mind, but as they only deal in the mind, they would say that.
Having been through most other Old Wives' Tales in order to complete PhDs, Doctorate students at Norwich University of Canals and Fireworks turned their attention to the so called Return Day Trip Time Compression Conundrum.
What they discovered was that distances are not the same in both directions, ripping a hole into Einstein's basic premise that the universe is the same in all directions that stands at the heart of relativity.
Over a standard journey, this discrepancy is tiny, just over a centimetre per kilometre, but as the distance to get to your destination increases, so the discrepancy follows. Thus a trip to Australia from the UK of about 17,000 kilometres translates into approximately 22,000 centimetres or about a mile and a half, whilst the return trip from the moon as made by Armstrong and co was 384,403 kilometres going, but only 350,000 kilometres coming back.
"It's completely counter-intuitive," said Professor Stephen Hawkins after typing for some thirty minutes, "but I can find no fault with their moths. Dratted predictive speaking."
What impact this will have on future space missions to planets as far away as Mars or further, is open to speculation, but it is expected that astronauts will require about a day's less provisions for the journey home.
"It's remarkable to discover," said Hawkings long after it had been assumed he'd finished speaking, "That the journey home does indeed take less time."
