Transitions

While out and about and engaged in mundane activities, my brain has again been unravelling the physical and literary aspects of "time travel," which is our common abbreviation of HG Wells' original "time travelling." I wanted to return to the literary tradition but sometimes the physical issues intrude.

In the previous post, we willfully conflated transition to the future with "travel" into it but greater precision is necessary. Everyone transitions. Everyone here has transitioned from nonexistence to existence and from childhood to adulthood (- although, of course, nothing has really begun or ceased to exist; mass/energy/being has changed form). Wells' Sleeper transitions to a later century just by sleeping long enough. What does Wells' Time Traveller do? And also the Time Traveller's literary successor, Poul Anderson's Jack Havig?

The Time Traveller does not move in any direction. What he experiences is time dilation accompanied by an inexplicable (in my opinion) sensation of headlong forward motion. He slows down while everything else (from his point of view) speeds up. He just sits still for far longer than anyone else, in both temporal directions. And, while this is happening, he should remain both visible and palpable to everyone else.

Jack Havig:

stands instead of sitting;

exercises a psychic power instead of driving a vehicle;

shares the perception of external events rushing past but not the sensation of headlong motion;

also becomes inexplicably invisible and intangible.

Futureward "time travel" by the Time Traveller and Havig is a fictional extension or exaggeration of the transitioning that all of us do anyway. It is not a kind of "travel" although we have inherited that word from Wells.

Matter both extends and moves through space, the difference being that motion takes time whereas extension does not. We endure through time. If we moved through time, then that motion would take time in a second temporal dimension which is unnecessary to describe our experience of time. Four dimensions suffice: three spatial; one temporal.