Paul J. Nahin - Time Machine Tales: The Science Fiction Adventures and Philosophical Puzzles of Time Travel
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This book contains a broad overview of time travel in science fiction, along with a detailed examination of the philosophical implications of time travel. The emphasis of this book is now on the philosophical and on science fiction, rather than on physics, as in the authors earlier books on the subject. In that spirit there are, for example, no Tech Notes filled with algebra, integrals, and differential equations, as there are in the first and second editions of TIME MACHINES. Writing about time travel is, today, a respectable business. It hasn t always been so. After all, time travel, prima facie, appears to violate a fundamental law of nature; every effect has a cause, with the cause occurring before the effect. Time travel to the past, however, seems to allow, indeed to demand, backwards causation, with an effect (the time traveler emerging into the past as he exits from his time machine) occurring before its cause (the time traveler pushing the start button on his machine s control panel to start his trip backward through time). Time Machine Tales includes new discussions of the advances by physicists and philosophers that have appeared since the publication of TIME MACHINES in 1999, examples of which are the chapters on time travel paradoxes. Those chapters have been brought up-to-date with the latest philosophical thinking on the paradoxes.
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Nick Redfern
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Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Paul J. Nahin Time Machine Tales Science and Fiction 10.1007/978-3-319-48864-6_11. A Broad Look at Time Travel
Paul J. Nahin 1
(1)
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
William Blake, writing in Auguries of Innocence (1863), with words that could quite well describe what it would be like to time travel
I need a place to hide, thats why I believe in yesterday.
The Beatles ( Yesterday , 1965)
1.1 Time Travel in the Fantasy and Science Fiction Literature
Woodnt it be grate to go back in tyme and correct your mistakes? Wouldnt it be great to go back in time and correct your mistakes?
motto of Time Twisters comics
To travel in time.
Could there possibly be a more exciting, more romantic, more wonderful adventure than that? I dont think so, and in this opening section I want to just briefly discuss how fascinating many writers (and their readers) have found the concept of time travel, and to point out that the fascination began long before mathematical physicists discovered time travel lurking in Einsteins general theory of relativity.
Before the arrival of humans on the surface of the Moon in 1969, the only other fantastic voyage that could compare with time travel was traveling through outer space. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in fact, such voyages were the center of a genre of fiction (now called science fiction ) called the imaginary voyage or extraordinary voyage. Marjorie Hope Nicolsons 1948 book Voyages to the Moon carefully documents just how popular that form of literature wasand still is. Since 1969 the first such voyages have become history, of course, and time travel has replaced space travel as the modern imaginary voyage.
It seems a safe bet that that, given a random selection of middle-aged adults, the vast majority of them would respond enthusiastically if asked whether time travel interests them. This fascination with time travel has actually been scientifically documented. In one intriguing study,
Fiction writers have, for centuries , recognized the fantasy appeal of time travel. The common fairy tale theme of The Three Wishes, in which the recipient ends up using the final wish to undo the unforeseen consequences of the first two, is the precursor to all modern change-the-past time travel stories. Indeed, the means of time travel in the Norwegian poet Johan Wessels 1781 play Anno 7603 is a fairy. Some of the best modern science fiction stories have played with the fantasy appeal of time travel by having gifts arrive by accident from the future: the moral of such tales is generally that unearned gifts usually bring grief. This is the motivation for the time traveler in Stephen Kings 2011 novel 11/22/63 , who uses what appears to be a naturally occurring wormhole (connecting a Maine diner to 1958) for his attempts at preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
A character in the 1985 novel The Bird of Time by George Effinger nicely captures the fantasy appeal of time travel with the declaration The past is the home of romance. On a less poetic level, time travel and the movies and stories about it fascinate most people because they turn our everyday world view upside down and inside out. Such movies and stories make people think . It is therefore not surprising that time travel movies have been popular for decades, from the pioneering Berkeley Square in 1933, to the classic 1960 filming of The Time Machine , to Back to the Future in 1985 ( the top film that year in a Boxoffice magazine poll), to the flawless 1989 Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure , to the clever Terminator action films, to the ingenious 2012 Looper , to the commercially successful 2014 Interstellar . Each of these films, and others, too, will be discussed later in the book.
When we discuss time travel, we should really be careful to distinguish between two quite different versions: to the future, and to the past. There is no dispute, today, about the first. As two severe critics of the possibility of time travel to the past wrote decades ago, After 1900, special relativity made scientific discussion of time machines possible..) This astonishing conclusion from special relativity, that time travel to the future makes physical sense, literally put a lot of Victorian-era trained physicists into shock.
A quite sophisticated use of this idea appeared early in science fiction, in the tale of a space traveler who returns from a high-speed trip out to the blue supergiant star Rigel in the constellation Orion. The 900 or so light years of the round trip had taken just 6 months of ship or personal time (proper time), but a thousand years of back-home time. The traveler returns to Earth to find all he had left behind long dead and returned to dust: Sometimes I waken from a dream in which they are all so near all my old companions and for a moment I cannot realize how far away they are. Beyond years and years.
Another story of a trip into the future that delivers an equally powerful emotional impact, this time via a Wellsian-type time machine (more on what that means later in this chapter) rather than by rocket travel, tells of a time traveler trapped in post-nuclear war times, where there is no energy available to power his machine for the return trip. As the story ends, he finds the woman he had loved and left behind in the past. She is now the elderly widow of another man, having married his rival because the time traveler (just like Wells Time Traveller) never returned.
A trip into the future does not have to be serious or sad. A nice example of that is the story of a spaceship crew that sets off for the Alpha Centauri triple star system, more than four light years distant., knowledge of FTL travel is equivalent to knowing the secret of travel into the past, and so the crew is sent back in time, to Earth, to just one year after they leftand they listen to their own radio communications arriving from deep space.
The real adventure in time travel, as suggested by Far Centaurus, would be to go backward in time, to visit the past. The editor of the science fiction pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories used the powerful emotional hook of changing the past in a 1950 blurb announcing a time travel story coming in the next issue: Whats the biggest mistake you ever made? Dont worry about it. You may have pulled some awful boners in your time, but theres a sure-fire remedy for them all. Its simple. Just look up at that old time-clock on the walland turn it back to the moment just preceding your terrible blunder. Then make your correctionsand set your time-clock back to the present. You may be starting a new chain of error, but why fret? You can go back in time again Or, as the promotional text on the video package of the 1986 movie Peggy Sue Got Married says, to do it again is the golden opportunity almost everyone has longed for at least once.
Writing less romantically, a philosopher declared that a major source of interest in the time travel question is our general fascination with the exotic and the child-like frustration we sometimes feel at being confined to the present. We wish that the benefits of moving through space could be supplemented with the benefits which would accrue from movements through time. set in a year when time machines actually exist. Even so, the characters use their imaginations to explore their fantasy worlds and wisheswishes that could (if they really wanted to) be realized with a real time machine. Time travel fiction is, you see, the ultimate escapist literature!
The adventure promised by time travel to the past doesnt necessarily mean pleasant adventure, and science fiction has used that idea to great effect. The unstated horror of a trip backward in time, if you think just a bit about it, is that it would bring the dead past, filled with all its dead occupants, alive again, literally resurrected from dank and moldering graves. The top of Mount Everest, the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the sands of Marsnone of these exotic places can even be mentioned in the same breath with the past . The capture of the mystery and, yes, the sheer terror of the past, is in this opening line to a 1950s tale: When Dr. Flitter came into the room, it seemed as though the past and its dead people came in with him, clinging to him like stale surgery smells, like the cold sweat of ancient autopsies.
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