 Fantasy: May 11, 2016 Issue [#7635] |
  Fantasy
This week: Out of Time, Part 3 Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
-Chuck Palahniuk
The past is never where you think you left it.
-Katherine Anne Porter
The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
-Kiran Desai |
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In all this discussion of time, we haven't addressed the most basic question of all, which is "What is time, really?"
All the glib answers don't cut it. "It's what keeps everything from happening all at once," is probably the worst of all the non-answers.
The problem is that no one really knows what time is. Entropy increases over time, on a large enough scale, but does that make entropy the defining attribute of time, or does time define entropy? What, in other words, would it take to put Humpty Dumpty back together?
While I was working on this editorial, I happened upon this video, which explains the whole "time" thing in a more interesting way than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rVHr6OwjI
Physics doesn't provide us with a conclusion. Is time a thing, something that can be traveled through like other dimensions, or is it more of an abstraction? If it's the latter, no discussion of time travel will be meaningful, so I've been assuming the former for the purposes of these editorials. And philosophy is worse than useless in the discussion, as any philosophical exploration of time travel will necessarily boil down to free will vs. determinism, as most philosophical discussions do.
There's little support, scientifically speaking, for the idea of wholesale time travel; that is, being able to send one's self or consciousness into the past to change something. Of course, science doesn't rule fantasy, so it's important, when writing about this sort of thing, to create a consistent framework and stick with it. In other words, just because other writers decided it works for, say, Back to the Future, Quantum Leap, Doctor Who, or Star Trek or whatever, doesn't mean it has to work in that way for your story. And actually, coming up with some new ideas about time travel would be a good thing.
There is one type of time travel that isn't paradoxical or a violation of universal laws, and that is travel into the future. We all do it, all the time, at the rate of about one second of personal time to one second of common time. People who go into orbit move into the future at a slightly different rate, as described by general relativity. Hypothetically, we could design spaceships to move at a significant fraction of the speed of light, which also changes the personal time to common time ratio. Something like this was explored in the movie Interstellar, but I didn't pay much attention because it was mostly about saving Matt Damon - AGAIN. That guy needs to stop needing rescue.
And there's the idea of suspended animation, a common trope in both fantasy and science fiction (though the mechanisms tend to differ), something that would bring bodily processes (including consciousness) to a halt and resume them at some later date - one way of exploring the future, or, from the point of view of the non-suspended people, having a window into the past.
In conclusion, while there's no real scientific basis for it, time travel can be a rewarding topic for fictional exploration, though as with anything else, it's important to set up a self-consistent set of principles for it in your story. |
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Last time, in "Out of Time, Part 2" , I presented Part 2 of this time-travel editorial series.
A*Monaing*Faith  : Ooooo, another thought provoking topic. So simple, and yet I never considered this...
Glad to help out!
Quick-Quill  : Writing time travel is not based on reality. It's based on romance. Our love for the time and culture. If one is writing horror or SciFi then trot out the mean germs. After all that make a great story line. What if a Character went back and found our why dinosaurs became extinct and used modern tech to combat it? How would our world look now? Hmmm?
I loved Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. What better way to have fun with basic science.
I have to admit to a bias here - while I'd be interested in seeing what happened in the past, rather than just reading about it or inferring it from scant evidence, it's like someone once said: "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." When I see someone romanticizing the past in fiction, or presenting time-travelers that choose to live in past eras, I simply can't relate. (The future, on the other hand... maybe.) As for the dinosaur thing, yes, that and similar storylines make for great speculation.
That's it for me for May! See you next month. Until then,
DREAM ON!!! |
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