Mongrels

There Will Be Time, VII.

Caleb Wallis on the twentieth-century Israelis:

"'A mongrel people, racially no relation to the Hebrews of the Bible, but tough fighters and clever.'" (p. 69)

A great many years ago, I attended a debate between a Palestinian who said that modern Israelis were not descended from Biblical Hebrews and a Chief Rabbi who maintained that they were. I think that the Palestinian claimed that Israelis were descended from Tatars but that is where my knowledge of this subject ends and I would welcome some input. Religiously, it is possible to convert to Judaism or to any other religion irrespective of descent. Personally, I do not set any great store by descent because each of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight grandparents etc so I am conscious of our relatedness to everyone and everything else - in fact, common descent from an original self-replicating molecule. An Irish Catholic priest told me that I was Irish because my mother was Irish whereas I am primarily conscious of being a human being. However, I know that descent matters to some.

Some Details Of Time Travel

There Will Be Time, VI.

In Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion, Eyrie agents recruit half a dozen time travelers, including Jack Havig and an infiltrator from a rival group that Havig has not founded yet. One of the Eyrie men:

"led the way, first to the stop after Pentecost, which yielded naught, then to the twenty-first century." (p. 64)

How does he lead the way through time, especially through that much time? Are time travelers visible to each other while time traveling? Yes, as we learn in Chapter XII when Havig is captured and held as his captors and he move through time. Why does Wells' Time Traveler not see himself returning as he moves forward through time, then seen see his future-bound self as he returns? The same rules do not necessarily apply to Havig as to the Time Traveler. The latter can breathe as he time travels whereas Havig and his fellow mutants must pause to breathe or carry miniature oxygen bottles.

For the Eyrie men and their recruits, arrival in the twenty-first century has been facilitated:

"Return was easier, because they'd erected a kind of big billboard in the ruins, on which an indicator was set daily to the correct date." (ibid.)

Some Force II

 

See Some Force.

Someone might reply that the Time Traveler and Jack Havig move through time, not through space. However, the Time Traveler spends the first part of The Time Machine explaining that material bodies do not not move but merely extend along the Fourth Dimension. Then he contradicts himself. Poul Anderson refers to world lines, which are static in space-time.

If all three-dimensional material objects did move at a uniform rate along a fourth dimension, then:

what would they move in relation to?;

their motion along the fourth dimension would take time, therefore that dimension would not be time;

any object that accelerated along the fourth dimension would leave everything else behind and would have to wait for everything else to catch up.

I made these points in early articles on the Logic of Time travel blog but the questions recur every time we discuss time or time travel or reread There Will Be Time.

Some Force

There Will Be Time, IV.

Jack Havig, time traveler, says:

"'...it must be some kind of force that moves me.'" (p. 37)

But he doesn't move, does he? He remains stationary on the Earth's surface, seated on a chair in his first demonstration to Robert Anderson. He continues to move around both the Sun and the galactic center with the Earth but so does everyone else. What happens is that Jack experiences time dilation. Thus, he slows down by comparison with everyone else. He becomes statue-like. And there is no reason why he should become invisible and intangible. Robert Anderson feels the chair "...and no form occupied it." (p. 36) But Jack is still in the chair. He has not gone anywhere else.

Wells' Time Traveler says that he becomes invisible because he is moving too fast to be seen but he is not moving, indeed has slowed down. And, even though a bullet or the spoke of a wheel moves invisibly fast, we will certainly feel it if we stand in front of the flying bullet or put our finger between the moving spokes.

Wells' account of time travel is hopeless and Anderson's would benefit from some reconceptualization.

Another Dip Into Jack Havig's Pamphlet

There Will Be Time, III, WITHIT'S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY.

I have discussed Jack Havig's Pamphlet before. 

There Will Be Time is a rich sf novel and a worthy successor of HG Wells' The Time Machine. However, I dislike Chapter III and have usually skipped past it when rereading. 

"Black: Of whole or partial sub-Saharan African descent; from the skin color, which ranges from brown to ivory. Not to be confused with Brown, Red, White, or Yellow. This word replaces the former 'Negro,' which today is considering insulting since it means 'Black.'" (p. 27)

What is being satirized here? There is universal use of words for skin color that do not correspond to other uses of the same words. White people are pink. Color terms are contextual. White coffee can be the same color as black skin.

"Negro" is considered insulting because it has been used insultingly, not because it means "Black." Racism is a serious issue. Flippancy is inappropriate.

An Eccentric Millionaire

There Will Be Time, II.

On pp. 24-26, Robert Anderson summarizes much information about the year 1951, when I was two. I will not reproduce it all here but one sentence is ironically prophetic:

"Space flight was for the next century, when an eccentric millionaire might finance a project." (p. 25)

When Poul Anderson wrote that sentence, he thought that it expressed an expectation that had been disproved by recent and current events. Now, in that next century, the eccentric millionaire seems more likely - but we still do not know what will happen.

He Meant Well

There Will Be Time, II.

Of Eleanor Havig's second husband, Robert Anderson tells us that:

"Sven Birkelund meant well." (p. 21)

A fellow Lancastrian suggested "She meant well" as an ironic epitaph for a common acquaintance!

When I was training as a Careers Adviser, I observed two interviews conducted by a qualified Adviser. The first was with an ethereal girl who wanted to "help people." The second was with a focused young man who wanted a well-paid job. We enjoyed the contrast. Our job was not to make any value judgments but to help each of these clients to achieve their aims. Maybe the first client needed more help with clarifying aims.

Later, I had to help pupils who wanted to leave their Catholic school as soon as possible "to get away from the religion" and another who wanted to attend Cardinal Newman College because it was Catholic. We learned a measure of objectivity and neutrality. We helped the well-meaning and the self-interested.

Free Choices

There Will Be Time, II.

Jack Havig discusses philosophy with the oldest of Robert Anderson's three sons:

"'- was the history of the universe written before its beginning? if so, why do we know we make free choices? if not, how can we affect the course of the future...or the past?'" (p. 21)

We can know that some of our choices are free in the sense of uncoerced and unconstrained but it does not follow from this that such choices are not causally determined. Actions are either determined or random and neither of these kinds of action is free in the philosophical "free will" sense. How would indeterminism prevent us from affecting the future? Our actions are physical events with effects. We cannot affect the past because we are not Jack Havig.

Havig And Haertel

Also comparable to Poul Anderson's Jack Havig experimenting with time travel is James Blish's Adolph Haertel experimenting with space travel. Dolph has no superhuman physical abilities but, since he is the intellectual successor of Einstein, he is able first to discover antigravity, secondly to fly his tree house to Mars and thirdly, later, to design the first FTL drive. Havig's group supervises the research and development that leads to the first STL interstellar travel. Thus, both characters play pivotal roles in founding interstellar civilizations. Haertel's branching futures include The Quincunx Of Time, quoted recently.

Four More Clues

There Will Be Time, I.

(i) "'...his remarkably fast physical and mental development, these past months.'" (p. 14)

(ii) Jack's (apparent) creative imagination:

he describes the smell of drying hides and dung fires in an Indian camp;

his Uncle Jack took him in a "jet," a propeller-less airplane bigger than a house, where they watched a film in Technicolor.

(Robert Anderson thinks that such imagination may be evidence of genius. This overlaps with the theme of "The Saturn Game.")

(iii) Two bullies complained that Jack had called an army to help him.

(iv) When Jack's father, Tom, went to war in 1942, Jack hysterically claimed that he had seen his mother crying because of his father's death. Tom was killed in Italy in '43.

Thus ends Chapter I.