Abstract
As you might expect, there are those who look at a question like the one above as an opportunity for some jest. One such wit answered it with “Time is just one damn thing after another,” and another (perhaps the same person) thought “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” Amusing, sure, but we’ll try for something just a little bit deeper than that in this chapter!
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Notes
- 1.
Reprinted in Patrick Parrinder, H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan 1972.
- 2.
Stanislaw Lem, “Cosmology and Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies, July 1977, pp. 107–110.
- 3.
Gregory Benford, “On Lem on Cosmology and SF,” Science Fiction Studies, November 1977, pp. 316–317.
- 4.
Stanislaw Lem, “In Response to Professor Benford,” Science Fiction Studies, March 1978, pp. 92–93.
- 5.
You can find some interesting commentary on Hawking’s ‘theology’ in the book by the English philosopher Antony Flew (1923–2010), There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, HarperCollins 2007. Flew is the former atheist in the title who dramatically announced in 2004 that had ‘found God.’
- 6.
This is not always the case; for example, Asimov’s 1956 non-time travel story “The Last Question”, to be discussed later in this book, is based on circular time. And I have to mention, too, the strange 1967 novel Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) in which time runs backward (buried people come alive again and emerge from their graves as the “Sacrament of Miraculous Rebirth” is intoned by priests). Reversed time is an old fantasy, in fact, as you can find it in Plato’s 360 BC dialogue Statesman. It has continued to fascinate modern authors as well, including those we normally don’t think of as writing SF; see, for example, the famous 1922 story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940).
- 7.
One of Superman’s more interesting adversaries in the comics of the 1940s and 1950s was Mr. Mxyzptlk (pronounced mix-yez-pittle-ick), a being with seemingly magical powers who was from the Land of Zrfff in the fifth dimension. His powers weren’t really magic, of course, but resulted solely from his extra-dimensionality. The comics aren’t traditional SF, but some come pretty close and they have always been pulp.
- 8.
A. M. Bork, “The Fourth Dimension in Nineteenth Century Physics,” Isis, October 1964, pp. 326–338.
- 9.
S., “Four-Dimensional Space,” Nature, March 26, 1885, p. 481.
- 10.
See, for example, Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: a study of the Scientific Romances, University of Toronto Press 1961, pp. 31–32. When I wrote to the editorial offices of Nature about S., I was informed that the journal’s archives contain no clue as to S.’s identity.
- 11.
And so he actually was. Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) was an eminent American astronomer and, in 1897–1898, President of the American Mathematical Society. Wells read Newcomb’s December 28, 1893 Address to the New York Mathematical Society when it was reprinted in Nature, February 1, 1894, pp. 325–329.
- 12.
W. G., “Euclid, Newton, and Einstein,” Nature, February 12, 1920, pp. 627–630.
- 13.
William James, “On Some Hegelisms,” Mind, April 1882, pp. 186–208. The ‘Hegel’ in the title is the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)—whose endorsement of the block universe James greatly disliked—saying somewhat harshly of the German: “Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption with its scanty merits.”
- 14.
Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein: Creator & Rebel, New American Library 1972, pp. 257–258.
- 15.
A world line is the trajectory of a point in the four-dimensional spacetime of the block Universe. This imagery is due not to Einstein, but rather to Herman Minkowski (1864–1909), who was Einstein’s mathematics professor during his student days in Zurich. Minkowski first described the world line concept in 1908, in his famous geometrical interpretation of Einstein’s 1905 mathematical theory of special relativity.
- 16.
L. P. Horwitz, et al., “On the Two Aspects of Time: the distinction and its implications,” Foundations of Physics, December 1988, pp. 1159–1193.
- 17.
In SF the time police are charged with preventing time travelers from changing the past, either purposefully or by accident. Attempts to change the past are a popular device in theological SF, and I’ll say more on that topic later in the book.
- 18.
For this passage in the New Review version of the story, see The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells' Scientific Romance with Introduction and Notes (H. M. Ceduld, editor), Indiana University Press 1987, pp. 176–177.
- 19.
That is, there are nine billion real names of God, embedded in the vastly larger number of all possible character strings. To get a feel for just how large is that number, suppose the special alphabet used by the priests has 26 characters (just like English). Then, if we don’t worry about the restriction that there be no run of a given character longer than 3, there are a total of 26 + 262 + 263 + … + 269 strings, a geometric series easily summed to give \( \frac{26^{10}-26}{25}\approx 5.6\times {10}^{12} \). That is, five trillion strings plus six hundred billion more. When the run restriction is applied, the number of possible strings is of course reduced from this, but we are still left with a lot of strings. I think Clarke grossly overestimated the ability of any 1950s computer (as well as underestimating the amount of paper required to print all those strings)!
- 20.
We know this as we are told it has been a thousand years since the founding of The Society of Jesus (which was in the year 1540). As an aside, even though 600 years have passed the ship’s computer is just a Mark VI, only one generation beyond the computer in “The Nine Billion Names of God.” (This is a silly quibble, of course, as the world ended in Clarke’s earlier story!)
- 21.
This harsh characterization wouldn’t have shocked someone like Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who greatly disliked all organized religion: as he famously declared, “If there is a God, he is a malign thug.”
- 22.
Oliver Lodge, “The New World of Space and Time,” Living Age, January 24, 1920, pp. 240–244.
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Nahin, P.J. (2014). Time, Space, God’s Omniscience, and Free Will. In: Holy Sci-Fi!. Science and Fiction. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0618-5_3
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