By coincidence yesterday our granddaughter spoke at length to me on the telephone about her English assignment for school; to produce, over the holiday break, a book review to be given orally to her class. Each student was assigned a classic piece of literature to read, admonished to read it at least twice, and then to produce an oral description of the book, citing relevant passages, so that the rest of the class would receive a picture of the novel's essence to more or less fire their imagination. the book she had been assigned was Jules Verne's Time Machine.

She is far more accustomed to reading novels that are current, very current, like Jodi Picoult's oeuvre; she had read every one of her novels and likes them immensely; they bring her into the world of present-day social concerns and how people deal with the adverse events of their lives. The infant we once looked after during the day while her mother worked, is now finding her place in society, as a young teen.

She has made it a habit of discussing with me the nature of each of the books she reads, what they portend, how society is impacted, and her impression of it all. She also consults with me concerning her English assignments. This one is interesting enough, she finds, albeit not her first choice of a topic, though she finds the language and the expressions stilted, a little antiquated, not surprising in a creative work among the first of its genre, dating almost a century back in time.

Later, in the evening, we settled down with our youngest child, enjoying his semi-annual visit with us from Vancouver, to view a film together that he had downloaded on his mini laptop from the Internet. Strangely enough, this film too focused on time travel, but with a very sinister, suspenseful undertone. It was a gripping film, enlarging on a topic that has always fascinated people; why time moved in one direction only, and why not explore the opportunity to go backward in time? The film, The Source Code, was gripping, melancholy, and brim-full of tension.

Very well done, in fact, although it had its faulty details; why, if someone had perfected an atomic-type bomb and was intent, as a brilliant, but psychotic lunatic, on expressing his contempt for society that is imperfect and unjust, to blow up the entire megalopolis of Chicago, would he first cause an explosion in a train? Why bother? And, why would it not be necessary to continue to ensure that a human brain has an energy source (glucose), when it is being used to experiment in time-travel, hooked up to electronic connections solely.

With the recent news out of CERN, and the experiment that was replicated by several teams of theoretical nuclear physicists, more than hinting at the final disclosure of evidence linked to the presence of the Higgs Boson, for a fraction of a second whose outcome will eventually - or perhaps, eventually - be the overturning and advancing of conventional wisdom, science fiction, as always predicts the future.