Time Travel. A History

Everett’s paper did not attract much notice at the time, and it was the last he ever published. He did not continue a career in physics. He died at the age of fifty-one, a chain-smoker and an alcoholic. But perhaps only in this universe. Anyway his theory outlives him. It has acquired a name, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, an acronym, MWI, and a considerable following. In its extreme form, this interpretation obviates time altogether. “Time does not flow,” says the theorist David Deutsch. “Other times are just special cases of other universes.” Nowadays, when parallel worlds or infinite universes are pulled into service as metaphor, they come with semiofficial backing. When someone talks about alternate histories, it could be literature or it could be physics. The path not taken and the road not taken became common English expressions starting in the fifties and sixties—not earlier, despite Robert Frost’s most famous poem. Now any hypothetical scenario can be introduced with the familiar phrase, In a world where…It becomes harder to remember that this is only a figure of speech.

If we have only the one universe—if the universe is all there is—then time murders possibility. It erases the lives we might have had. Borges knew he was engaging in fantasy. Still, when Hugh Everett was a ten-year-old boy, Borges anticipated the many-worlds interpretation with eight precise words: “El tiempo se bifurca perpetuamente hacia innumerables futuros.”

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

*1 To the extent that Heraclitus’s actual words can be reconstructed and translated into English, another version is this: On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.

*2 Nabokov took the same jaundiced view a century later: “We regard Time as a kind of stream, having little to do with an actual mountain torrent showing white against a black cliff or a dull-colored great river in a windy valley, but running invariably through our chronographical landscapes. We are so used to that mythical spectacle, so keen upon liquefying every lap of life, that we end up by being unable to speak of Time without speaking of physical motion.”

*3 Seeing a photograph album in 1917, he wrote to his mother, “It gives one the feeling that Time is not before and after, but all at once, present and future and all the periods of the past, an album like this.”

*4

Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now.

*5 And corridors. “When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of an impeccably narrowing corridor.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor.

*6 Nor, by the way, did Borges express great love for Eliot. “You always think—at least I always feel—that he’s agreeing with some professor or slightly disagreeing with another.” He accused him of a rather subtle form of humbug: “the deliberate manipulation of anachronisms to produce an appearance of eternity.”

*7 In English “long” is almost forced; in other languages, that would sound bizarre. They might say “big.”

*8 Even before Borges, a twenty-year-old in Colorado named David Daniels wrote a story for Wonder Stories in 1935 called “The Branches of Time”: a man with a time machine discovers that when he returns to the past, the universe splits into parallel world lines, each with its own history. The next year, Daniels killed himself with a gun.

*9 And by the way, why stop with mice? Can’t a machine be an observer? “To draw the line at human or animal observers, i.e., to assume that all mechanical apparata obey the usual laws, but that they are somehow not valid for living observers, does violence to the so-called principle of psycho-physical parallelism,” he writes.

EIGHT

Eternity

St. Peter speaks modestly, when he saith, a thousand years to God are but as one day; for, to speak like a Philosopher, those continued instances of time which flow into a thousand years make not to Him one moment: what to us is to come, to His Eternity is present.

—Thomas Browne (1642)

WHAT IF THERE were no such thing as time? What then?