Sf writers usually imagine bodily continuity of a time traveller between his departure and his arrival. HG Wells' Time Traveller and Poul Anderson's mutant time travellers become mysteriously invisible and intangible but do continue to exist while time travelling whereas Anderson's Time Patrol timecycles and their occupants merely disappear and (re) appear. In Responses To Time Travel, I wrote:
"It is not logically impossible for a five minutes older version of me to appear and then to coexist with me for five minutes before I disappear. In other words, I would have time travelled five minutes into the past."
However, this event can be described non-chronokinetically, i.e., without reference to time travel: a duplicate of me with prescient memories is created five minutes before I am annihilated. Futureward time travel is even easier to account for: I am annihilated and later re-created.
Bon voyage.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
All this is interesting, but I still find alternate/parallel worlds stories like Anderson's A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST or my recent rereading of Stirling's IN THE COURTS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS to be more scientifically plausible.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: well, they're all non-falsifiable hypotheses at this point. That is, argument is pointless. They're -useful-, though.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, quantum mechanics allows for the theoretical possibility of alternate worlds, etc., but they have yet to be empirically proven.
Ad astra! Sean
Or maybe in principle cannot be proven? Because we are in one world and not in any other.
Paul; unless there's some way of accessing other timelines.
Kaor, to Both!
Anderson did wonder in one of his letters to me if it would be possible to access a parallel universe via traveling into a black hole?
Ad astra! Sean
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