Poul Anderson's
"The Barrier Moment" posits an earliest moment. Might that moment be like a temporal pole? There is no point further north than the North Pole. However, if we travel to and beyond the North Pole, then we neither enter a void not encounter an impassable barrier. Instead, we move south again. However, we do not turn back and retrace our steps but instead move forward through a different hemisphere. Thus, if we travel to and beyond the earliest moment, do we move forward in time again but through a different volume of space? I think that modern physics allows for this possibility but am not sure.
It would be as meaningless to ask, "What was before the earliest moment?" as it is to ask, "What is further north than the North Pole?" Both causality and indeterminacy occur
after the earliest moment but nothing occurs
before it. However, Anderson's story is called "The
Barrier Moment" (my emphasis). Thus, it does not seem to allow for a temporal pole.
Regular readers might ask, "What has become of Anderson's
The Byworlder?" It is still here in the timeless moment when we contemplate all of Poul Anderson's works simultaneously.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
If God exists, COULD there be an earliest or first moment? I would say no, because with God is infinite, there never was a moment when God did not exist. So time is infinite, even if material things are not.
I'm too slowly rereading THE WINTER OF THE WORLD, having reached Chapter 8. AT the beginning of that chapter I noticed Anderson's odd use of "glade." And see Captain General Sidir reflecting that ancient records from 10,000 years before described Mars as red, not blue! So, did men managed to reach Mars and begin terraforming that world before the Ice came again?
Sean
Sean,
I had missed "glade" in THE WINTER OF THE WORLD but spotted it twice in WORLD WITHOUT STARS.
A terraformed Mars is the obvious explanation of its blueness.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't understand this baffling use of "glade" by Poul Anderson! The way he use the word simply doesn't fit the meaning given in the dictionaries I checked. An error, a truly obscure legitimate meaning, or a neologism?
I even made a note about this use of "glade" and a "blue Mars," a new hominid species, etc., to leave at the beginning of Chapter 8 of WINTER. And the idea of a "blue Mars" niggles at me. Men managed to get as far as Mars before the Ice came, and terraform it. Were the efforts needed to do that so "draining" that the colonists lost the means of traveling back to Earth? Because, if NOT, contact with Earth would have CHANGED the history seen on the Earth of THE WINTER OF THE WORLD.
Sean
Sean,
God, as creator of the apace-time continuum, is regarded as transcending time as we understand it, not as enduring through it.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, God is not bound by time, He transcends it.
Sean
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