Backward-thinking on time travel
As I listen over and over again to Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 prelude, I’m wishing it was longer. It is, after all though, a prelude, still though quite timeless. The composition bears a warm sound, one that washes over like hot water as you slide down up to your chin in a bath on a cold cold day. The prelude is sparse, naked, too and, like bath water its pleasurable warmth ends much too quickly.
It’s a duo-synchronistic companion thought to the post I have planned ever since Monday, when I read a passage from H.G. Wells’ 1895 story, The Time Machine, which, appears up to this point, to have launched quite a few billion stars. At least I think it was Monday, one does so easily lose track of time:
The Time Traveller smiled. “Are you sure we can move freely in Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men have always done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.”
“Not exactly,” said the Medical Man. “There are balloons.”
“But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.”
“Still they could move a little up and down,” said the Medical Man.
“Easier, far easier down than up.”
“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.”
“My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.”
“But the great difficulty is this,” interrupted the Psychologist. “You can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.”
“That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?”
“Oh, this,” began Filby,” is all —”
“Why not?” said the time Traveller.
“It’s against reason,” said Filby.
“What reason?” said the Time Traveller.
“You can show black is white by argument,” said Filby, “but you will never convince me.”
“Possibly not,” said the Time Traveller. “But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine — “
Books, of course, don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it this way, but books are word-heavy time machines. Each and every one creates a world, however poorly or fantastically constructed, and with only the small risk of a paper cut, readers can zip back and forward, within that world. You need a freshen-up on how Sally Jessop came into the world? Want to see how it ends before the events that created that ending occur? Turn the pages. You can do it with the book time machine. It’s worth thinking further, that they all exist at once, in one time.
Then, too, there are dreams.
Myself, my brother, and my step-dad represent a tertiary strata of appreciation of fantasy/science fiction. Of the past, and practical to a faultline, my step-dad scoffs at anything that veers away from man-made or terra firma. It’s painful to watch almost anything of this nature with him, because he is not capable of a suspension of disbelief. He’s spent his life around aircraft, which though graceful have critical, man-made limitations that keep the sky as the limit. Being English, his “absurd” sits squarely in the realm of humor.
My brother reads science fiction with the gusto of a person who likes the machines and the mechanisms. Humor is appreciated, as well, thus Piers Anthony’s Xanth series was a well-read treat (for me, too). He got into Anthony’s Tarot series and now I’m not entirely sure what he reads, though at last check he was making his way through the Shakespeare bibliography.
And then, I think all three of us would agree, there’s my mind that falls deepest into these created worlds and imagines himself so well in them that it no longer feels like imagining. And, of the three, again there would be agreement, I have the greater capacity to create new worlds of my own and to travel among many times and people of my own creation. Which isn’t to say both can’t offer critical new ways of looking at these worlds as the eyes of the different people who will both populate and interpret them. And thus improve the world.
But I clearly remember a conversation among us, where the extremes collapsed in on the moderate, for wont of a better, more even word. Neither I nor my step-dad could see time travel, as possible. True, such a discussion from any quarter is blackened and discolored by the very stories, films and movies that leave and have left gaping holes as well as clashing inconsistencies in their attempt to give a narrative to the impossible. (Stories of God have fared better, though an entirely different suspension of disbelief is required to believe.)
Our argument at the time was that nothing humans built would be able to withstand the extreme forces, the speeds and the subsequent pressures, to travel through years in a blur and the blinding picosecond blink of an eye. The very fact that the best descriptions and interpretations of time travel are as a blur - Quantum Leap, or Star Trek’s Warp 9 or even The Time Machine’s lever-grasping temporal tranversion - is a cloak of impossibility that fits perfectly.
The counter-point was simply that, we really don’t know what will be possible in the future. A few re-reads of that sentence will prove its falsity, or at least its weakness if indeed time travel is possible. Except for this. It still could be possible but its inventive, iconoclastic, intricacy has yet, in all the future years of human existence on earth or human populations on other planets, to have been discovered
Does light have mass?
“I’m traveling at the speed of light. I want to make a supersonic man out of you. Don’t stop me now, I’m having such a good time, I’m having a ball.”
