HG Wells' Time Traveller returns to the late nineteenth century with an account of his experiences in 802,701 AD and beyond. Jack Finney tries to describe what it would be like to find yourself back during the younger days of your grandparents or great-grandparents. The reality of time travel hits Poul Anderson's Manse Everard in Victorian London. Anderson's Jack Havig says that earlier periods had a common orientalness when compared with the twentieth century.
I do not think that we need to refer to an immutable timeline, at least not specifically in relation to time travel. A time traveller can affect past events but any effects that he had are already a part of the past. He is in the same position as anyone else. If a newly released government document discloses that a British assassin had set out to kill Hitler in 1942, then we already know that any such assassination attempt failed even if we never learn why it failed. Exactly the same logic applies to a time traveller who now intends to travel to 1942 in order to kill Hitler then. Before he sets off, we know that, if he tried, he failed.
In present perception, the past is immutable and the future is unknown but every moment is the present to anyone who is conscious within it. Is there a perspective from which the entire timeline is immutable? Physicists describe it thus but their account is a mathematical abstraction.
A time traveller who does kill Hitler is not in our past so the questions: what is it like to experience the past? and: how can we resolve a time travel paradox? are entirely distinct.
5 comments:
Sean,
Not like being on Earth now. Not like being on another planet. Something in between.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
If I was to disappear from the NOW we are living and reappear in the Massachusetts of 1972, I might not blunder around too badly, at least at first. The ordinary clothes I wear would not look too out of place in that year. The New England accented English I speak would be much the same. Even any coins I have would probably be accepted without fuss unless somebody thought to look at the designs and mint dates (currency other than one dollar bills would not be so easy to use).
Ad astra! Sean
If time travel is possible, then the fixity of past time disappears.
Because if you're in the past, the future you came from -no longer exists-. It's merely a -potential-.
If you could 'rewind time' without any time travel, and just let it proceed over and over again, I'd bet anything you care to name that the results would be different every time.
Simply because events are so contingent and so unpredictable.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Would that necessarily be the case if time lines are immutable, not mutable? An idea examined by Anderson in THE DANCER FROM ATLANTIS and THERE WILL BE TIME. What happens if you go into the past but something occurs that prevents you from changing the past?
Merry Christmas! Sean
I think that, if there is a single timeline, then it is "immutable" only in the sense that the way an event happens is the way it happens. An event COULD have happened differently from the way it did but, by definition, it DID NOT happen any differently from the way it did in fact happen. This remains true whether there are time travellers or not.
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