Sunday 27 May 2018

The Growth Of An Idea IV

In The Growth Of An Idea, we set out to discuss:

"The Year of the Ransom";
The Shield Of Time, Parts Two, Five and Six;
"Star of the Sea."

So far, we have discussed only "The Year of the Ransom." Next, we consider Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1987 A.D., pp. 26-33. (This is just one chapter in Part Two.)

Everard lists twentieth century glimmerings of time travel:

non-inertial reference frames;
quantum gravity;
energy from the vacuum;
laboratory violation of Bell's theorem;
wormholes in the continuum;
Kerr metrics;
Tipler machines.

I decided against googling all these items but blog readers might like to.

Everard tells Wanda Tamberly that, if she prevented her parents from meeting, then she would have come ftom nowhere and nothing:

"'It's sort of like quantum mechanics, scaled up from the subatomic to the human level.'" (p. 30)

So she is not really a time traveler. There are:

time travelers;
quantum events;
quantum events that look like and think that they are time travelers.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And Everard could have listed science fiction writers who leaped boldly from cautious scientific speculations to actual stories about time travel. E.g., H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, and a certain author with the initials "P.A."!

Sean