Concept And Experience

Time travel involves physics, philosophy and fiction. I can only read popular accounts of the physics but am more familiar with the philosophy and the fiction. 

Any time travel narrative has at least two aspects, conceptual and experiential: a conceptual framework, whether explicit or implicit, for time travel and the experiences of the time travellers.

In HG Wells' The Time Machine, the framework is explicit although confused, a detailed discussion of the nature of time. There are two experiential stages. First, the process of time travelling is itself experienced. The Time Traveller perceives everything outside himself and his vehicle as accelerated. Secondly, his experience of several future periods is described, vividly and colourfully.

In Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol," the conceptual framework is provided by some brief instruction in the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene. Instead of the Time Traveller's four dimensions, the Time Patrol deals with 4N dimensions.

The experiential aspect is present but different. First, there is no experience of time travelling as such because each temporal transition is subjectively instantaneous. Secondly, although Manse Everard has been shuttled to the Oligocene for training, then back to the twentieth century, the reality of time travel does not strike him until he is travelling through London in a hansom cab in 1894. Thereafter, this and every other historical period is described in detail.