Time Travel
in Modern Fiction
Part 1: The Bad Science of It
It
seems that we are in the center of a recent deluge of written and
film fiction that relies on time travel as the basis, or hook to
the story. “A Shortcut in Time”, the film “The
Butterfly Effect”, “The Time Traveler’s Wife”,
by Audrey Niffennegger”, the film “Kate and Leopold”,
and many others all draw in the reader or the filmgoer with the
originally Victorian fancy of being able to visit the past, possibly
changing the order or nature of the way things happened, or by traveling
to the future for an early-bird view of things to come. This prospect,
of course, has its natural attraction: what a thrill it would be
to be able to travel back to the ancient Middle East and watch,
for example, the birth of Christ, or to confront the crew of the
Titanic, trying to avert the disaster, or to visit one month, or
one week in the future for racetrack results, and scores of sporting
events. More romantic notions include a trip to the past to unravel
mistakes that led to loss of a loved one, or to construct a new
pathway for relationships to better flourish.
These
are romantic and adventurous notions indeed, but they are also rooted
in the foundation of a sandy marsh. (Note: this is where the discussion
usually begins to deliver or cause a severe headache, so be prepared
with your pain reliever of choice before reading further) Let’s
take the grandfather of time travel novels as an example of this
slippery slope: “The Time Machine”, by H.G. Wells. If
you haven’t read it, you have certainly heard of it, or have
seen one or both of the films. In “The Time Machine”,
the Time Traveler moves through time while seated in a wondrous
machine of his own creation. He is able to travel both forward and
backward in time, or to the past or future, with his present
being the starting point. And Wells makes a point of emphasizing
that the Time Traveler is moving only through time, that
is to his past or future, and is not traveling though space.
This is a vital distinction. Remember that the Time Traveler starts
and ends his journey from a fixed site in London; he does not, for
example, send himself into the future and reappear in Paris. The
machine can move only along the pathways of time, that is,
according to Wells, and practically every other author who dares
to attempt a time travel story. The problem with this proposition,
however, is that it is not rooted in any branch of science, and
this is supposed to be, in fact, science fiction.
In
“The Time Machine”, the Time Traveler watches the world
around him change as he sits in his contraption inside his laboratory
in London and propels himself into the future. The reader (or filmgoer)
watches as the trees shed their leaves, season after season changes,
the years rocket by, and yet the actual physical position or the
Time Traveler and his machine do not change; they are as affixed
to the site from which they began, thus underscoring the author’s
theory that the Time Traveler moves only through time, and not through
space. But is this theory correctly underscored by this example?
Remember
that while you appear to be sitting in your chair, quite still,
reading from your computer screen, you are actually in motion. The
Earth, after all, is spinning, one complete rotation each 24 hours.
And the Earth itself is also rotating around the Sun, one complete
rotation every 365 days or so. Because of this, the physical space
that you occupy in you chair near your computer screen is changing,
or shifting in space, even if you never leave your chair. So that,
if you really had a time machine, and traveled from your bedroom
to fifty years into the future (or the past for that matter), your
arrival destination would be different, relative to the rest of
the world around you, than when you left on your journey. So you
may appear across the street in the neighbor’s driveway, or
actually appear several hundred feet above (or below) the ground.
See the way it would really work if we could travel through time?
(See; I told you the headache would start)
So
what does this mean? Simply that most time travel stories are based
upon bad science. That doesn’t make them bad stories, just
harder to deal with once you start to really think about them.
Next: The Twisted Logic of the Time Travel Paradox
©
MyShelf.Com. All Rights Reserved. |