Tuesday 24 October 2023

Land, Sea, Air And Time

Just south of here, the M6 Motorway passes above a canal and a railway line that run in parallel and aircraft are sometimes seen overhead. Road, rail, water and air: is anyone also time travelling at that point on the Earth's surface?

If either H. G. Wells' Time Traveller or one of Poul Anderson's mutant time travellers passes from the remote future to the remote past at that point, then he is present, invisible and intangible, every time I drive above that canal and railway line and beneath those planes. He might momentarily glimpse the M6 but will not notice individual vehicles. Time travel fiction is a good way to reflect on the transience of life.

A Time Patrol timecycle disappears from one set of spatiotemporal coordinates and appears at another set without existing between them. In Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis, the space-time vehicle called the anakro passes above land and water while travelling through time. Anderson's time corridors are underground and it should be possible to construct a corridor in ordinary space that will give access to any moment in the internal history of a time corridor. Lastly, with T-machines, as in Anderson's The Avatar, a time journey is also a long space journey and therefore does not involve remaining stationary on Earth.

One example from Wells, followed by five from Anderson.

6 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And of course Anderson examined the possibilities offered by using immutable (THE DANCER FROM ATLANTIS and THERE WILL BE TIME) and mutable (the Time Patrol stories, etc.) timelines.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

I've been told by physics types that FTL and time-travel are mathematically indistinguishable.

S.M. Stirling said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

I remember that, the first time being at the end of the third of your Nantucket books. Personally, I would prefer FTL to time travelling.

Ad astra! Sean

Jim Baerg said...

"FTL and time-travel are mathematically indistinguishable."

Which fits what I recall of the course on special relativity I took while getting a BSc in physics.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

And I want very much for there to be a real, practical, working FTL drive!!!

Ad astra! Sean