Time Travel. A History

Asimov was just a few years into his career as a science-fiction writer. His first novel, Pebble in the Sky, appeared in 1950, when he was a junior professor of biochemistry at the Boston University medical school. It begins with a retired Chicago tailor walking innocently along the street, reciting some verse to himself, when, boom, a nuclear accident in a nearby laboratory transports him fifty thousand years into the future, to a time when Earth is an insignificant planet in the Trantorian Galactic Empire. By then—by 1950, that is—Asimov had sold dozens of stories to Astounding Science Fiction. He had been reading the pulps since he discovered them as a child in his father’s candy store in Brooklyn. His own origins were, to himself, murky. He knew that his name had originally been Исаак Юдович Озимов, but he never knew his birthday.

As a graduate student, bored by the dissertation he was supposed to be preparing, he invented a chemistry paper titled “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline,” complete with charts, graphs, and citations of nonexistent journals.^*2 The paper describes a made-up substance, thiotimoline, derived from the imaginary bark of a fictitious shrub, which has a mind-bending property dubbed “endochronicity”: when placed in water, it dissolves before its crystals touch the water. The way quantum mechanics was going, this was only mildly preposterous. Asimov explained it by giving the molecule a peculiar geometrical structure in spacetime: while some of its chemical bonds lie in the usual spatial dimensions, one of them projects into the future and another into the past. You can imagine the possibilities for this quirky crystal. Later, Asimov wrote another paper about its micropsychiatric applications.^*3

He was soon averaging three to four books a year, but apart from the stage-setting blast to the future in Pebble in the Sky, he had not tried time travel. The idea that led to The End of Eternity came in 1953, when he found a set of bound volumes of Time magazine in the stacks of the Boston University library and started reading them through—systematically, from 1928 onward. In one of those early volumes, he was startled to see an advertisement featuring a line drawing with the unmistakable mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast, an image much in people’s minds in the fifties, but not in the twenties and thirties. When he looked again, he realized he was actually looking at a drawing of the Old Faithful geyser, but by then his mind had already leapt to the only other possibility: time travel. Suppose the anachronistic mushroom cloud was some sort of message, sent by a desperate time traveler.

In devising his first novel of time travel, Asimov took the genre in a new direction. This is not the usual hero going on an adventure, hurling himself forth to the future or back to the past. It’s a whole universe restructured.

The End of Eternity begins as a play on words, because the one thing everyone knows about eternity is that it has no end. Eternity is everlasting. Traditionally, eternity is God. Or God’s bailiwick. (At least in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, where He is not just eternal but also singular, masculine, and uppercase.) “What times existed which were not brought into being by you?” Augustine asked the Lord in his Confessions. “In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present, you are before all things past and transcend all things future, because they are still to come.” We mortals live in time, but God is beyond that. Timelessness is one of His best powers.

Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant—complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His “now” encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe. Either way, one might believe that God sees it entire. For Him, the story does not have a beginning, middle, and end.

But if you believe in an interventionist god, what does that leave for him to do? A changeless being is hard for us mortals to imagine. Does he act? Does he even think? Without sequential time, thought—a process—is hard to imagine. Consciousness requires time, it seems. It requires being in time. When we think, we seem to think consecutively, one thought leading to another, in timely fashion, forming memories all the while. A god outside of time would not have memories. Omniscience doesn’t require them.