Looking out of your time machine window (which, fortunately, you had the foresight to make airtight and pressurized in case of an emergency), you can see a blue-green planet about nine thousand kilometres away. Being a fairly savvy scientist, you realize that that planet is earth, and somehow you’ve missed your rendezvous with your laboratory. Earth, for some reason, is very far away. What happened?
There isn’t much air in the time machine so you have to think quickly. Then, suddenly, you’re hit with the terrible certainty that you’ve been a complete dummkopf. “Of course!” you exclaim out loud, “Why didn’t I think of that?” What you’ve realized is that the earth moves in its orbit around the sun at 108,000 kilometres an hour, that our sun orbits the galactic centre at a speed of 792,000 kilometres per hour, and that our galaxy is moving relative to our local group of galaxies at about the same speed. Because time is also place, where you or your planet were a moment ago in the past is not where you or the planet are now. You and your time machine have hit the right time but the wrong place. Earth on October 5 was nowhere near where it was on October 6.
The old cliché about “spaceship earth” is quite correct—earth is moving faster than any rocket, though we don’t get much of a sense of that speed when we’re sitting in a comfortable chair reading a book, or strolling home from dinner at a local restaurant. The cliché should be changed to “timeship earth.” Even if a time machine only went five minutes into the past, it would still simply disappear, not only because in our present time we couldn’t see it, but because it would reappear five minutes back in time at that point in outer space, hundreds of kilometres away, where the earth had been five minutes earlier.
But is that really true? Perhaps I’m being naive. Although the jury is still out, there are some physicists who insist that special relativity compensates for the spatial difference. Here is where the counterintuitive weirdness of Einstein’s theory reveals itself again, both to confound classic Newtonian physics and to save H. G. Wells’ time machine from flying into space like the time machine in my example. According to some interpretations of special relativity, a time machine that follows a continuous timeline into the past or future will automatically travel through space as well. There’s no need to worry about co-ordinates in three dimensions as long as you’re on the timeline, which will always follow the curves of space-time.
TIME TRAVEL BY STOPPING IN TIME
What about a time machine that could idle, say, in a sort of temporal neutral gear—not quite in the present or the past or even the future—and stand still, motionless against the flow of time like a rock in a river, but more as if it were outside the dimension of time? I suppose that if you were able to stop, to let time flow past you, then the future would unfold around and ahead of you while you remained in stasis. Perhaps you would stay in one place, like a fixed date on the calendar, and sink into the past as the present moved increasingly ahead of you. Or if your time machine were just very slightly out of synchronicity with the flow of time, such a journey wouldn’t be all that much different from what we already experience. Maybe you would take on a golden hue, like gold, or glow with the blue aura of Cherenkov radiation.
Are we not all like time machines of identity, moving forward into the future at the constant rate of time’s passage? We pace time itself—“one second per second,” as the scientists describe it. And we travel backwards too, at least in our memories. Deep sleep is a kind of time machine, though it only works for short hauls into the future. If people could be put into suspended animation, then the sleep effect of time contraction would be even more pronounced. If not exactly time travel in the orthodox sense, for someone revived after a century of suspension it might as well be.
Culturally we have been enthralled by the idea of time travel since H. G. Wells’ groundbreaking The Time Machine. Other splendid novels such as Daphne du Maurier’s hallucinogenic The House on the Strand, Jack Finney’s Time and Again and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban have all dealt with the subject. As have hundreds of short stories, films and television movies.
When I was fifteen my favourite television show was a time-travel series called The Time Tunnel. It aired, disappointingly, for only one season. The tunnel of the title was housed in a top-secret underground facility in the desert. There were no signs to mark its presence, no fences, only a road with an invisible gate that hinged the whole road downwards. Visitors drove down the ramp into an underground passage that led to the high-tech complex in which the time machine was housed. Behind them the road hinged up again, leaving no sign of the entrance.
The time machine itself was a tunnel whose black-and-white striped walls spun like an op-art whirlpool when the machine was turned on. The time travellers would simply walk into the tunnel and disappear, reappearing at their chosen destination in time. In retrospect I wonder if the whirlpool shape of the machine wasn’t influenced by Wheeler’s wormhole theory. If so, then the The Time Tunnel was the first visual representation of a wormhole in science fiction.
The Time Tunnel’s main characters were two brave young men who had various adventures depending on their destination in time. By the end of the show’s run, probably due to budgetary constraints, the protagonists ended up doing most of their time-travelling to the American Wild West of the nineteenth century. I suppose western sets were cheaper to lease. Very rarely did they go farther back in time or into the future, and eventually the show degenerated into a western.
At least the 1985 film Back to the Future had a sense of humour about time travel, especially in the appearance of the time machine itself: the souped-up De Lorean sports car. The most dramatic part of the film (borrowed from the 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) was how the car/time machine travelled through time. The De Lorean had to race towards a brick wall or some other solid, immovable object and hope that it achieved the correct velocity to make the time-jump before it crashed. There’s something whimsical and yet accurate about this—the future, like an impervious wall, is an opaque barrier into which we cannot see, so we race headlong in the hope that we will penetrate it.
CAR AS TIME MACHINE
Though not a modified De Lorean, my car, like all cars, is a time machine of sorts. This morning I was late for a dental appointment, so I used the car to gain time lost while I read a letter and watered the newly planted grass in front of my house. I drove three blocks south, then turned east on Davenport Road (the old Huron trail being the fastest route downtown). I went above the speed limit to make up for lost time, taking the risk that I wouldn’t lose more time by being pulled over.
As I sped through the traffic, it struck me that my vehicle is a nexus of time. The glistening, lubricated metal shafts turning within sleeves of steel, and the engine itself, smoothly exploding bursts of incandescent gases in a controlled, industrial rage, are technologies that have remained unchanged since the nineteenth century. The electrical system that insinuates itself throughout the car, and is its nervous system, is from the twentieth century. And the gasoline that powers everything represents an even longer economy of time, oil deposits being the liquefied organic remains of plants and animals that are millions of years old. My pistons are fired by ancient sunlight, gathered by living matter, stored for eons in geological darkness and then exploded briefly into light again, though within another darkness—the mechanical midnight of the car’s engine.
Then there’s the final layer of time: the skin of fashion. My car is five years old, and its chassis represents an era of automotive styling that is almost passé. Not yet a living fossil, it is nevertheless a part of cultural history—an aesthetic time capsule from a previous decade. All of these factors—the concatenation of motion, history, prehistory and recent past—have interwoven so many layers of time within my car that it is, if not exactly a time machine, then a machine filled with time.
I enjoyed my brisk ride through the October sunlight and found a parking spot right in front of my dentist’s building.
Riding the elevator up to his office, I looked at my watch and saw that I was ten minutes late. That wasn’t too bad, I thought, since my dentist is usually running behind schedule himself by this time of the morning. I opened the door to the waiting room and I could immediately tell by the expression on the receptionist’s face that I was unexpected. “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Dr. Kier,” I told her. She consulted her appointment book. “That’s tomorrow,” she said. “Isn’t this the eighth of October?” I asked. And she said, “No, today is Wednesday the seventh.”
I was one day ahead of myself. I had somehow gotten a day out of synch earlier in the week, and it was only this collision with the real calendar that put me back on track.
Afterwards, with my unexpected free time, I went to a sidewalk café and ordered a cappuccino. While drinking it, I tried to recollect the exact moment or day that I’d skipped twenty-four hours ahead. I remembered that Monday had felt more like Tuesday to me for some reason, so perhaps a subtle, unconscious association had triggered the time lapse. But in the end, I thought, how we measure time is arbitrary. We could have thirty-six 40-minute hours in a day, a week could be ten days long, and our calendar could have twenty months. What isn’t arbitrary is that time, like gravity and mass, is a fundamental quantity. No matter what we do, or where we go, we glide into the future at a rate of one second per second.
THE FUTURE
Chapter Twelve
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.
—William Gibson
Indian summer arrived yesterday, right in the middle of October. A few cicadas must have survived the cold nights last week, because in the heat of the afternoon they sang as loudly as on any August day. I hadn’t heard the cicadas for weeks, and their rasping buzz sounded almost wistful—the swan song of summer. During my jog this morning, I couldn’t make out the distant plume of vapour from Niagara Falls because the air was filled with a fine blue mist. It was as if sky pigment were flaking off in a dusty powder, and it tinged the far landscape blue and indistinct, like an impressionist painting. I’ve seen this blue mist before, not only in the city but in the country as well, as far away as the Appalachians. It isn’t pollution and it isn’t the smoke from hundreds of leaf fires.
I like to think of it as time vapour, as if time, normally invisible, thickens and reveals itself in this particulate haze. There is a nostalgic, slightly somnolent ambience to these misty fall afternoons. They remind me of the autumn afternoon in the Catskills when Rip Van Winkle fell asleep after bowling with the ghosts. Maybe his stupor wasn’t just a narcotic effect of the enchanted liquor he drank, but a consequence of inhaling too much time vapour from the mountain air. Like someone in a coma who, at least from his or her perspective, wakes up in the future, so did Rip Van Winkle awaken to a country transformed by revolution. Who would have predicted such change in a mere two decades?
As Yogi Berra once reportedly quipped, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The future has a way of throwing curves at even the most conservative prognostications, and as a result the history of prediction is strewn with disastrous prophecies. We can look back with irony at Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace in our time” as he waved the ill-fated treaty with Hitler. Not every prediction is wrong, though, and indeed, weather forecasting seems to be steadily improving, even if the long-range forecasts are still sometimes uncertain. According to today’s five-day forecast, there may be a frost this weekend, so I’ve arranged for my palm tree to be picked up and taken to the greenhouse for the winter.
Planning for the future is a basic condition of existence. We arrange for mortgages with twenty-five-year terms, we schedule vacations and we make payments towards the university education of six-month-old babies. We even plan for our own nonexistence—a paradox, and probably the most palpable evidence of our abstract relationship to time. All life prepares for the future, even if it doesn’t do it abstractly, as we do. Plants are constantly thinking ahead. My rhododendrons have already set their flower buds for next year. The horse chestnuts in the park have ripened, and the branches are laden with hundreds of spiked green globes, every one cleaving open and containing two chestnuts, like polished wooden geodes mated belly to white belly, a future tree within each. The squirrels have stashed their hoard of black walnuts in my yard and even in my garage; I keep finding walnuts lodged earnestly in the woodpile.
On that rainy day last April, when I went to my publisher’s and we discussed the timetable for the production of my book, we agreed that there would likely be galleys (the first typescript version of the manuscript) by February, provided I delivered the manuscript in September. Well, here it is almost November already and I’m still writing. If my publisher gets impatient, maybe I’ll just quote Einstein, who once wrote, “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.”
Even though most scientists are great skeptics about anything remotely paranormal, physicists don’t even skip a beat when they claim that the past, present and future exist at once. The Einstein quote about the illusory distinction between the three realms of time comes from a letter he wrote to console the widow of his friend and associate Hermann Weyl. Einstein himself was only weeks from death and was wrestling with the problem of the present. In conversation with the philosopher Rudolph Carnap, he said that there was “something essential about the now,” though that essential core lay “just outside the realm of science.” To Weyl’s widow he seemed to be intimating that her husband still lived, and would always live, somewhere in the timescape. He knew it was possible.
But if the timescape does indeed exist, it seems to be dominated by the one-way flow of time, and that flow, the flow of “now,” is terrifically fast—a billion billion femtoseconds per second. How could anything cross such a bottleneck from the past or the future? Oddly, there is an outside chance of it happening. A handful of scientists, most notably William Unruh, Theodore Jacobson and Renaud Parentini, have been publishing reports about space-time behaving like a fluid. They are particularly interested in black holes because of the way black holes contradict the general rules of physics. Even light, the fastest thing there is, gets sucked into the monstrous gravity of a black hole. Yet, as I discussed earlier, in a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation a small number of photons escape the hole, driven out by the very energy that sucked them in.
Jacobson and Parentini believe that Hawking radiation is evidence that something extraordinary could take place—that ripples travelling through space-time could, with enough speed, move upstream of a quickly flowing medium, much the way that a stationary rock in a river creates a little series of upstream ripples around it that move against the flow of the current. The unstated implication of this theory is that perhaps the flow of time itself, though tremendously fast, could also retroactively transmit similar sorts of ripples “upstream.” If, as most physicists believe, the future already exists alongside the present and past in the timescape, then perhaps a large enough event in the future might be able to broadcast ripples backwards against the entropic flow of time towards the future. What form those ripples might take, or if they’d even be detectable, is wide open to speculation, but it seems to provide a mechanism for a kind of physical precognition.
Many philosophers have contemplated the idea of the future influencing the past, though in more practical ways. Aristotle was one of the first to come up with the notion of entelechy, or the acme at which the entire potential of a thing’s or a person’s essence is realized. The thing or person moves towards and is influenced by it. Entelechy is similar to teleology, the doctrine of final causes, defined as that which lies at the end of tendencies, goals, aims, directions. In other words, the end of the means. More recently, a number of technologically minded thinkers, including Ray Kurzweil, have come up with the idea of a future singularity, a decisive, watershed event in the evolution o
f technology that will change what it means to be human. Some think that this singularity (a word that seems borrowed from black-hole terminology) will occur when the first replicator, a microscopic nano-robot capable of building other nano-robots, is created; others believe that the singularity will arrive with the advent of artificial intelligence.
Interestingly, many of these individuals are convinced that a kind of entelechic or teleological field surrounds this event in the future. For them, our present age is converging irrevocably towards a singularity and, what’s more, the singularity is so massive it casts a reverse shadow, backwards in time, from the future, through the present and into the past. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was thinking along the same lines when, in his 1821 book A Defence of Poetry, he wrote, “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” This singularity is, I suppose, not that much different from manifest destiny, except writ large for all of mankind. If you are fascinated, as I am, by the notion of a singularity, you’ll have to take these theorists on faith. Keep in mind, though, that scientists have got things fantastically wrong in the past.
The Victorian era was a golden age of science that laid down the infrastructure for the achievements of the twentieth century, but its fearless enthusiasm also produced claims that turned out to be dramatically amiss. In 1874 Sir J. E. Erichsen, one of England’s most preeminent surgeons, wrote, “The abdomen, chest, and brain will forever be closed to operations by a wise and humane surgeon.” Who could have predicted neurosurgery and heart transplants back then?
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