Not Time

We have discussed time and time travel on the Logic of Time Travel blog and on this blog. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, three independent time travel novels and enough short stories to fill a collection are major works of sf and also major successors to HG Wells' The Time Machine.

Should we devote some time to addressing glaring errors about the nature of time in works by other sf authors? Not too much time.

I try to avoid lengthy quotations but sometimes they are unavoidable:

"One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is to-morrow and to-morrow is the past.

"Except, there wasn't any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one's mind. No past that one could reach. No film that one could run backward and see what-once-had-been."

-City, VII, p. 186.

"'We can't travel in the past.'"

-ibid.

"...there wasn't any past, there never had been any, there wasn't room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world.

"Like two dogs walking in one another's tracks. One dog steps out and another dog steps in. Like a long, endless row of ballbearings running down a groove, almost touching, but not quite. Like the links of an endless chain running on a wheel with a billion billion sprockets."

-ibid.

Writing worthy of Ray Bradbury but making no sense.

This three dimensional spatial universe moves along a fourth dimension to be identified with time? What does it move in relation to? Time is the measure of change within this universe, not a dimension that it moves along. Any such motion would take time. It may very well be the case that we cannot travel into the past but that is not because there is another world directly behind ours moving along a fourth dimension!

See:

Space and Time

We extend, move and endure:

extension is through space;

motion is through space and takes time;

endurance is through time;

endurance is neither extension nor motion.