Not Time Travel

We are back home after two nights as paying guests in the Coachman's Quarters at Muncaster Castle.

The current agenda for this blog is:

Poul Anderson's The Star Fox, when we get back to rereading it;

Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife, especially as this novel is comparable to Anderson's time travel works.

Being away from the blog for nearly three days gives me more time to think. The basic concepts underlying The Time Machine and its successors are inexhaustible inspirations for reflection and speculation.

Let us describe an experience, then discuss whether "time travel" is an appropriate interpretation or explanation of this experience. In 1960, a man embarks on a journey. He travels through space, time or other dimensions. Let us not specify which yet. At the end of his journey, he is surrounded by events that are indistinguishable from those of 1943, a year that he had lived through. He does not relive his experiences of that year. Instead, it as if he, bringing with him his memories of having lived until 1960, physically arrives on Earth in 1943. Because he knows where he was at a particular date and time in 1943, he can and does locate a younger version of himself. However, he also can and does influence events, making them different from the way that he remembers them. For example, he introduces himself to the younger version of himself even though he knows for certain that no older version of himself had contacted or communicated with him in 1943. Furthermore, he can and does impart to the authorities military intelligence that enables them to shorten or otherwise alter what is left of the war.

It follows that he is not in the 1943 that he remembers. He has not arrived in his own real past, the past that had led to and produced him as the person with a particular set of memories who had lived until 1960, then embarked on a mysterious journey. Surely "time travel" should mean travel/displacement etc along the single temporal dimension that links our remembered and recorded past to our immediate present? Travel to Mars means travel to the Mars in our Solar System, not to an alternative Mars in an alternative Solar System.

If our "traveller" arrives in his real past, then his problem is not that he cannot introduce himself to his past self - this is perfectly possible - but that, in our scenario, he already knows that he did not do this, therefore, if he tries to do it, then he will fail. Something will happen to prevent the encounter. I think that it follows that real time travel as I call it is either physically impossible or at best difficult and infrequent. If it were not only possible but also easy and frequent, then an unacceptably high number of implausible events would be necessary to prevent alterations to the past - like every time traveller who sets out to change the past is instantly killed by a meteor, a thunderbolt or a heart attack etc? In order to preserve both logical consistency and the known laws of statistics, it is necessary to infer that real time travel is either impossible or infrequent. And that seems to be the universe that we are living in. England was conquered in 1066 by a Duke of Normandy who had merely crossed the English Channel, not by Neldorians who would have had to travel from the 205th millennium. We do not live in a history where a time traveller prevented Hitler's grandfather's affair with his maid or where pro-Nazi time travellers ensured German victory in World War II.

A good time travel story, in my opinion, is one that shows that a time traveller has just as much freedom of action as anyone else but, however it happens, he does not change the past. But this rules out the Time Patrol series as good time travel stories! That series does present a lot of convincing travel to various periods of the past despite its premise that contradicts what I argue here. Poul Anderson pulls it off.

Reflection on return from Muncaster: time travel and ghosts can connect. Remember the character in Anderson's The Shield Of Time who time travels to a couple of occasions after his death and thus appears as a ghost.

Ghosts are from the past whereas time travellers come from the present or future but past, present and future connect.