by James Gleick
Then again, a theory that posits an infinity of universes is an insult to Occam’s razor: Do not multiply entities needlessly.
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?
Usually, time travel does not incur physical symptoms—discomfort or illness. In that it differs from air travel, which often causes jet lag. The original time travel of Wells did involve some queasiness:
I’m afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are exceedingly unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like one has on a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.
This is echoed here and there in the literature. Maybe we don’t want a magic so profound and consequential to come free of bodily stress.
Ursula K. Le Guin goes a step further in “Another Story; or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.” Here the travelers obey the laws of physics as we Newtonians and Einsteinians know them. Their spaceships go Nearly as Fast as Light. A journey of four light-years takes just over four years. Relative to the people left behind, the travelers age scarcely at all. If they make an immediate round-trip, on returning home they will seem to have leapt eight years into the future. And how does that feel?
“Of the journey itself,” writes Hideo after his first experience, “I have no memory whatever. I think I remember entering the ship, yet no details come to mind, visual or kinetic; I cannot recollect being on the ship. My memory of leaving it is only of an overwhelming physical sensation, dizziness. I staggered and felt sick.”
But Hideo’s second trip is different. On his second trip, he has the more “usual” experience. It is as if time stops—as if there is no time. The journey is a moment—a period? an interval?—in which time does not exist:
…an unnerving interlude in which one cannot think consecutively, read a clockface, or follow a story. Speech and movement become difficult or impossible. Other people appear as unreal half presences, inexplicably there or not there. I did not hallucinate, but everything seemed hallucination. It is like a high fever—confusing, miserably boring, seeming endless, yet very difficult to recall once it is over, as if it were an episode outside one’s life, encapsulated.
We’ve left scientific realism by the roadside. According to relativity, for the people moving at near light speed, time would feel normal. (If time has a normal feeling.) Le Guin is reaching for something else, something unimaginable, the absence of time. When Richard Feynman met a group of schoolchildren and one of them asked what time is, he answered with another question: What if there were no such thing as time? What then?
God knows. He is outside of time, supposedly. He is eternal.
—
A MAN STEPS INTO a time machine, no need for preliminaries anymore. It has rods, controls, and a starting lever. This one is called “the kettle,” and it doesn’t resemble a bicycle so much as an elevator. He senses a shimmering, an “unseeable haze,” “gray blankness which was solid to the touch, though nonetheless immaterial.” He feels a touch of nausea, “the little stir in his stomach, the faint (psychosomatic?) touch of dizziness.” The kettle rides in a vertical shaft. So is he going up? Of course not. “Neither up nor down, left nor right, forth nor back.” He is going upwhen.
By the way—a man, again? Never a woman? Rule: Time travelers are rooted in their authors’ time. When our current hero, a Technician named Andrew Harlan, gets into the kettle, he thinks he’s a native of the ninety-fifth century, but w
e recognize him as a man of the year 1955, when Isaac Asimov published his twelfth novel (of forty), The End of Eternity. Reading the book now, we can infer some facts of the year 1955:
• Notwithstanding the legacy of H. G. Wells and three decades of pulp magazines, time travel remains a rare and unfamiliar concept to readers in the mainstream. (The New York Times went awry by titling its book review “In the Realm of the Spaceman.” Spaceman was a better-known concept. The reviewer, Villiers Gerson, raised what he thought was an original question: “If a time traveler were able to go back to 1915 and cause Adolf Hitler to be killed by a bullet in World War I, would our present reality change?” He was neither the first nor the last to wonder.)
• A “computer” is a person who calculates. A reckoner, an arithmetician. A machine for mathematical calculation is called a “computing machine”—in this story, a “Computaplex,” capable of “a summation of thousands and thousands of variables.” For input and output, a Computaplex uses perforated foil.
• Women are for childbearing. Also for sexual temptation.*1
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.
Perhaps instead an immortal deity is with us in time, enjoying experience, working his will. He sends plagues upon Pharaoh and great winds into the sea, and when the need arises, he sends angels or hornets. Jews and Christians say, “It came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage….And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham.” Some theologians would say that when Augustine was confessing, God was listening, and now He remembers. They would say that past is past, for us and for God. If God interacts with our world, it could be in a way that respects our memories of the past and expectations for the future. Perhaps when we discovered time travel, He was suitably amused.
These are deep waters. Even within the Abrahamic religions, theologians have found many divergent ways to speak of God’s time or timelessness. All religions, one way and another, conceive of entities whose relation to time transcends our own. “There are two forms of Brahman, time and the timeless,” says one Upanishad, though Buddhism is more comfortable than most with the idea that permanence is an illusion:
Time consumes all beings
including oneself;
the being who consumes time,
cooks the cooker of beings.
The word eternity goes back to the beginning, as far as anyone can tell, of our species memory, the beginning of written language. Aeternus, in Latin; the Greeks wrote αἰών, which also became eon. People needed a word for permanence, or endlessness. Sometimes these words seem to have denoted a duration without beginning or end, or perhaps just without a known beginning or end.
No wonder modern philosophers, adapting to a scientific world, continue to torment themselves with such questions. The intricacies multiply. Maybe eternity is like a different reference frame, in the sense made popular by relativity. We have our present moment, and God has a timescale distinct from ours and, indeed, beyond our imagining. Boethius seemed to say something of the kind in the sixth century: “Our ‘now,’ as though running time, produces a sempiternity, but the divine ‘now,’ being quite fixed, not moving itself and enduring, produces eternity.” Sempiternity is mere endlessness—duration without end. To get outside of time altogether, you need the real thing. “Eternity isn’t a long time,” the mythologist Joseph Campbell explained. “Eternity has nothing to do with time….The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.” Or as it is said in Revelations, “There shall be time no longer.”
We might decide that the words outside of time are a trick of language. Is time a thing to get “outside o
f,” like a box, or a room, or a country—a place invisible to us mortals? In Corinthians it is written: For thinges which are sene, are temporall: but thynges whiche are not sene, are eternall.
This last is roughly the premise of Asimov’s End of Eternity. On the one hand is all humankind, living in time. On the other hand is a place unseen, called Eternity. With a capital E. Only instead of God, this version of Eternity belongs to a self-selecting group of men. (Again, no women may join the clubhouse. Women are for childbearing, and this isn’t that sort of place.) These men call themselves Eternals, although they are not eternal at all. Nor, as we learn, are they very wise. They engage in backbiting and office politics. They smoke cigarettes. They die. But they act as gods in one way. They have the power to change the course of history, and they use it, again and again. They are compulsive remodelers.
The Eternals form a closed hierarchical society, meritocratic but authoritarian. They are stratified in castes: Computers, Technicians, Sociologists, Statisticians, et al. New arrivals to Eternity, plucked from ordinary Time when young, are Cubs. If they fail in their training, they end up in Maintenance, wearing dun gray uniforms and handling the importation of food and water from Time (even an Eternal has to eat, apparently) and the disposal of waste. Maintenance men are the untouchables, in other words. And how are we to visualize this place, this domain, this realm existing outside of Time? Drearily, it seems rather like an office building: corridors, floors and ceilings, ramps and anterooms. Offices, decorated to suit the taste of the current occupant. An antiquarian might have a bookshelf. (“ ‘Actual books!’ He laughed. ‘Pages of cellulose, too?’ ”) Most centuries prefer more innovative technology for information storage: “book-films” or “micro-films,” which can be spooled through a handy pocket viewer.