Time Travel. A History

*1 Rosalind adds: “I’ll tell you who time ambles withal, who time trots withal, who time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.”

*2 The philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach, a forebear of relativity, objected to absolute time in 1883: “It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time….Time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things.” Einstein quoted that approvingly when he wrote Mach’s obituary in 1916, but he himself could not go so far in expunging the convenient abstraction. Time remained an essential property of his universe.

*3 Time travel by circumnavigation? Poe seems to have been the first to make literary use of the possibility, in 1841 (“A Succession of Sundays,” Saturday Evening Post), before Jules Verne made it the surprise ending of Around the World in Eighty Days.

*4 The same thought came as a revelation to Israel Zangwill when he reviewed The Time Machine in 1895: “The star whose light reaches us to-night may have perished and become extinct a thousand years ago, the rays of light from it having so many millions of miles to travel that they have only just impinged upon our planet. Could we perceive clearly the incidents on its surface, we should be beholding the Past in the Present, and we could travel to any given year by travelling actually through space to the point at which the rays of that year would first strike upon our consciousness. In like manner the whole Past of the earth is still playing itself out—to an eye conceived as stationed to-day in space, and moving now forwards to catch the Middle Ages, now backwards to watch Nero fiddling over the burning of Rome.”

*5 Wien was the inventor of the Löschfunkensender, an early radio transmitter used, for example, on the Titanic.

*6 Peter Galison, an authority on this matter, suggests that Einstein and Besso, conversing on that fateful day in May 1905, must have been standing on a hill in northeast Bern, where they could simultaneously see both Bern’s old clock tower and another to the north, in the town of Muri.

FIVE

By Your Bootstraps

I don’t want to talk about time travel shit, because we’ll start talking about it and then we’ll be here all day talking about it and making diagrams with straws.

—Rian Johnson (2012)

A MAN SITS in a locked room with his cigarettes, pots of coffee, and a typewriter. He knows all about time. He even knows about time travel. He is Bob Wilson, a Ph.D. candidate struggling to complete his thesis, “An Investigation into Certain Mathematical Aspects of a Rigor of Metaphysics.” Case in point: “the concept ‘Time Travel.’ ” He types, “Time travel may be imagined and its necessities may be formulated under any and all theories of time, formulae which resolve the paradoxes of each theory.” More quasiphilosophical handwaving. “Duration is an attribute of consciousness and not of the plenum. It has no Ding an Sich.”

Behind him he hears a voice. “Don’t bother with it,” the voice says. “It’s a lot of utter hogwash anyway.” Bob turns to see “a chap about the same size as himself and much the same age”—or maybe just a bit older, with a three-day beard and a black eye and a swollen upper lip. The chap has apparently emerged from a hole hanging in the air: “a great disk of nothing, of the color one sees when the eyes are shut tight.” He opens a cupboard, finds the bottle, and helps himself to Bob’s gin. He looks vaguely familiar and he certainly knows his way around. “Just call me Joe,” he says.

We see where this is going—we, people of the future, the time-savvy twenty-first century—but this story is taking place in 1941, and poor Bob is slow to catch on.

Bob’s visitor explains that the hole in the air is a Time Gate. “Time flows along side by side on each side of the Gate….You can walk into the future just by stepping through that circle.” Joe wants Bob to walk through the Gate into the future. Bob doubts whether this is a good idea. As they discuss it, passing the gin bottle back and forth, a third man materializes. He bears a certain family resemblance to Bob and Joe. He does not want Bob to enter the gate. Now it’s a committee. The phone rings: a fourth man, checking on everyone’s progress.