Abstract
Before going any further with time travel, it will be well worth the effort to take a closer look at time itself, the ‘stuff’ or ‘thing’ or … ? that we are interested in traveling ‘through’ or ‘around’ or ‘across’ or … ? Oddly enough, I’ll start with religion, as philosophical theologians had identified time as something unusual long before Newton’s words on time in his Principia that I mentioned in the Introduction, and many thousands of years before science fiction writers and their time travel stories.
“I do not believe that there are any longer any philosophical problems about Time; there is only the physical problem of determining the exact physical geometry of the four-dimensional continuum that we inhabit.”
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Notes
- 1.
H. Putnam, “Time and Physical Geometry,” Journal of Philosophy, April 1967, pp. 240–247.
- 2.
P. Horwich, Asymmetries in Time, MIT Press 1987.
- 3.
Another example from science fiction is the story by I. Hobana, “Night Broadcast,” in which a television signal from the past is picked up by a gadget that is probing the future: “By going far enough into the future one comes upon what we call the past.” You can find this tale in the Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction, Penguin Books 1986.
- 4.
See, for example, W. L. Craig, “What Place, Then, for a Creator?: Hawking on God and Creation,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, December 1990, pp. 473–491, and R. Le Poidevin, “Creation in a Closed Universe Or, Have Physicists Disproved the Existence of God?,” Religious Studies, March 1991, pp. 39–48.
- 5.
This fan’s idea was not new. For Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, time was motion (in a world in which nothing moved, argued Aristotle, there would be no time), and he expressed this view in his famous metaphor “Time is the moving image of eternity.” For Aristotle, then, time and change were inseparably intertwined. For Aristotle the world had existed for eternity, and the circularity of time was a central and powerful image; using his vivid illustration, it is equally true in circular time that we live both before and after the Trojan War.
- 6.
R. Taylor, “Time and Life’s Meaning,” Review of Metaphysics, June 1987, pp. 675–686.
- 7.
S. McCall, “Objective Time Flow,” Philosophy of Science, September 1976, pp. 337–362.
- 8.
J. H. Poynting, “Overtaking the Rays of Light,” in Poynting’s Collected Scientific Papers, Cambridge University Press 1920.
- 9.
As in, for example, G. A. England, “The Time Reflector,” The Monthly Story Magazine, September 1905.
- 10.
D. D. Sharp, “Faster Than Light,” Marvel Science Stories, February 1939. The year before saw the appearance of a story with the same idea, a story that specifically cites Flammerion: M. Weisinger, “Time On My Hands,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1938.
- 11.
Still, just to show how one can find support for almost any view in the same religious dogma, Ecclesiastes 1:9 would seem to be a claim not for linear time but rather for circular time!: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”
- 12.
For more on this, see R. T. W. Arthur, “Continuous Creation, Continuous Time: A Refutation of the Alleged Discontinuity of Cartesian Time,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, July 1988, pp. 349–375.
- 13.
J. E. McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind, October 1908.
- 14.
L. O. Mink, “Time, McTaggart and Pickwickian Language,” Philosophical Quarterly, July 1960, pp. 252–263. The phrase pons asinorum has its origin in a plane geometry theorem: the angles opposite the equal sides of an isosceles triangle are themselves equal. Seeing the truth of this is said to separate the quick-witted from the dull. It isn’t clear (to me, anyway), however, on which side of McTaggart’s ‘proof’ the quick-witted were imagined to fall. You’ll see what I mean in just a moment.
- 15.
Here’s a clever way to systematically generate McTaggart’s infinite regress of complex predicates, as presented by M. Dummett, “A Defense of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time,” Philosophical Review, October 1969, pp. 497–504): “Let us call ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ ‘predicates of first level.’ If, as McTaggart suggests, we render ‘was future’ as ‘future in the past,’ and so forth, then we have nine predicates of second level, where we join any of the three on the left with any of the three on the right:
past
past
present
in the
present
future
future
Similarly, there are twenty-seven predicates of third level … “Dummett’s construction clearly shows that, at the N-th level, there are 3N predicates, most of which are incompatible.
- 16.
F. Christensen, “McTaggart’s Paradox and the Nature of Time,” Philosophical Quarterly, October 1974, pp. 289–299.
- 17.
Q. Smith, “The Infinite Regress of Temporal Attributions,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Fall 1986, pp. 383–396. To this came a rebuttal a year later by L. N. Oaklander, in the same journal (Fall 1987, pp. 425–431).
- 18.
G. Currie, “McTaggart at the Movies,” Philosophy, July 1992, pp. 343–355.
- 19.
But if, upon reflection, it starts to bother you, see R. Gale, “Some Metaphysical Statements About Time,” Journal of Philosophy, April 1963, pp. 225–237. We’ll soon get to some of the more common philosophical questions on the nature of four-dimensional spacetime, such as ‘is it deterministic or is it fatalistic?,’ and ‘does free-will have any meaning in four-dimensional spacetime?’ Even physicists are interested such questions!
- 20.
R. Weingard, “Space-Time and the Direction of Time,” Nous, may 1977, pp. 119–131.
- 21.
Quoted from B. Hoffmann, Albert Einstein: Creator & Rebel, New American Library 1972, pp. 257–258.
- 22.
Alasdair M. Richmond, “Hilbert’s Inferno: Time Travel and the Damned,” Ratio, September 2013, pp. 233–249.
- 23.
This line appears in Wells’ 1944 doctoral thesis, written for the University of London. You can find an abridgement of the thesis in Nature, April 1, 1944, pp. 395–397.
- 24.
I. Stearns, “Time and the Timeless,” Review of Metaphysics, December 1950, pp. 187–200.
- 25.
G. J. Whitrow, “On the Impossibility of an Infinite Past,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, March 1978, pp. 39–45. Whitrow adds modern scientific support to the idea of a finite past by citing the prediction from general relativity of a singularity in spacetime at some finite past time; that is, the theory’s prediction that time—and everything else—had its beginning in the now famous Big Bang.
- 26.
C. Gross, “Twelfth-Century Concepts of Time: Three Reinterpretations of Augustine’s Doctrine of Creation Simul,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, July 1985, pp. 325–338.
- 27.
See, for example, L. Sweeney, “Bonaventure and Aquinas on the Divine Being as Infinite,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Summer 1974, pp. 71–91, and S. Baldner, “St. Bonaventure on the Temporal Beginning of the World,” New Scholasticism, Spring 1989, pp. 206–228.
- 28.
For simple high school-level presentations on Cantor’s astonishing infinity results, see my book The Logician and the Engineer, Princeton 2013, pp. 169–171.
- 29.
The problem of ‘squaring the circle’ is, given a circle of area A, to construct (using only compass and straightedge) a square of area A.
- 30.
J. Bennett, “The Age and the Size of the World,” Synthese, August 1971, pp. 127–146. See also Q. Smith, “Kant and the Beginning of Time,” New Scholasticism, Summer 1985, pp. 339–346.
- 31.
See, for example, Q. Smith, “Infinity and the Past,” Philosophy of Science, March 1987, pp. 63–75, and then read E. Ells, “Quentin Smith on the Infinity of the Past,” Philosophy of Science, March 1988, pp. 453–455. Smith’s paper “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe” appeared in this same issue (pp. 39–57), stating that he believed, really, only in the logical possibility of an infinite past and that the universe had in fact originated in an uncaused (no God required) Big Bang singularity. And, indeed, he had so argued for a finite past, in “On the Beginning of Time,” Nous, December 1985, pp. 579–584.
- 32.
R. Weingard, “General Relativity and the Length of the Past,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, June 1979, pp. 170–172.
- 33.
C. W. Misner, “Absolute Zero of Time,” Physical Review, October 1969, pp. 1328–1333. In this view cosmic time is taken as proportional to the negative of the logarithm of the normalized volume of the universe (V = 1 represents maximum volume, and so time ‘stops’ at the end of the universe’s expansion). Thus, because V goes to zero as we go backward in time, time runs ever faster as we travel ever further into the past. This puts the Big Bang (with V = 0) infinitely long ago.
- 34.
This was not a new insight, of course, as Aristotle had long ago (in his Physics) declared an instant in time with no predecessor to be an absurdity.
- 35.
J. Hurley, “The Time-Asymmetry Paradox,” American Journal of Physics, January 1986, pp. 25–28.
- 36.
J. Kim, “Noncausal Connections,” Nous, March 1974, pp. 41–52.
- 37.
C. R. Giuliano, “Applications of Optical Phase Conjugation,” Physics Today, April 1981, pp. 27–35.
- 38.
The TCP-theorem says that the ‘mirror-image’ of a physical process is a legitimate process, too, if the ‘mirror’ reverses time (T), electric charge (C)—so that particle and anti-particle are interchanged, and parity (P)—which is the measure of left and right. There is strong reason to believe in the validity of the TCP theorem because quantum field theory is compatible with special relativity only if the TCP theorem holds.
- 39.
F. Pohl, “Target One,” Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1955.
- 40.
J. Earman, “The Anisotropy of Time,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, December 1969, pp. 273–295.
- 41.
K. Hutchinson, “Is Classical Mechanics Really Time-Reversible and Deterministic?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, June 1993, pp. 307–323.
- 42.
S. F. Savitt, “Is Classical Mechanics Time-Reversal Invariant?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, September 1994, pp. 907–913.
- 43.
A science fiction use of this idea is in B. W. Aldiss, “Man In His Time,” Science Fantasy, April 1965, the story of an astronaut who returns from a trip to Mars and finds himself 3.3077 min ahead of everybody else.
- 44.
Science fiction had used a twist on this idea long before the film; see E. Binder, “The Man Who Saw Too Late,” Fantastic Adventures, September 1939, a tale of what it might be like to have a 3 min delay in your vision.
- 45.
J. Earman, “Causation: A Matter of Life and Death,” Journal of Philosophy, January 1976, pp. 5–25.
- 46.
B. Brown, “Defending Backwards Causation,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, December 1992, pp. 429–443.
- 47.
See, for example, D. H. Mellor, “Fixed Past, Unfixed Future,” in Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy (B. M. Taylor, editor), Martinus Nijhoff 1987.
- 48.
J. J. C. Smart, “A Review of The Direction of Time,” Philosophical Quarterly, January 1958, pp. 72–77.
- 49.
R. F. Young, “The Dandelion Girl,” The Saturday Evening Post, April 1, 1961.
- 50.
See also P. Mackie, “Causing, Delaying, and Hastening: Do Rains Cause Fires?” Mind, July 1992, pp. 483–500.
- 51.
P. Forrest, “Backward Causation in Defense of Free Will,” Mind, April 1985, pp. 210–217.
- 52.
P. A. M. Dirac, “Classical Theory of Radiating Electrons,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A, August 1938, pp. 148–168.
- 53.
P. C. W. Davies, The Physics of Time Asymmetry, University of California Press 1977.
- 54.
J. Earman, “An Attempt to Add a Little Direction to ‘The Problem of the Direction of Time’,” Philosophy of Science, March 1974, pp. 15–47.
- 55.
A. Grunbaum, “Is Preacceleration of Particles in Dirac’s Electrodynamics a Case of Backward Causation? The Myth of Retrocausation in Classical Electrodynamics,” Philosophy of Science, June 1976, pp. 165–201.
- 56.
D. G. McKeon and G. N. Ord, “Time Reversal in Stochastic Processes and Dirac’s Equation,” Physical Review Letters, July 6, 1992, pp. 3–4.
- 57.
See, for example, J. Blish, “Beep,” Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1954.
- 58.
A similar bilking paradox had actually appeared the year before in the 1931 novel Many Dimensions by the English writer Charles Williams (1886–1945), which reads like a suitable script for an Indiana Jones movie.
- 59.
E. Binder, “The Time Cheaters,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, March 1940. There is an amusing reference in this tale to Orson Welles’ famous radio-drama-hoax, from just 2 years earlier, of just such an alien invasion based on H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
- 60.
G. N. Lewis, “The Symmetry of Time in Physics,” Science, June 6, 1930, pp. 569–577.
- 61.
Editorial essay, “Two-Way Time,” Astounding Stories, September 1931.
- 62.
M. Visser, “Wormholes, Baby Universes, and Causality,” Physical Review D, February 15, 1990, pp. 1116–1124.
- 63.
M. Dummett, “Bringing About the Past,” Philosophical Review, July 1964, pp. 338–359.
- 64.
G. Nerlich, “How to Make Things Have Happened,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, March 1979, pp. 1–22.
- 65.
From “Hellhounds of the Cosmos,” Astounding Stories, June 1932, by Clifford Simak (1904–1988). Simak went on to write a number of much better tales, but this passage lends credence to the editorial introduction to the 1957 anthology Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Random House) that declared so much in the early pulp science fiction was “science that was claptrap and fiction that was graceless.”
- 66.
Uninformative ‘explanation’ given to a befuddled, inadvertent time traveler who emerges miles away and one hour backward in time after a wild ride through the fourth dimension in a gadget (constructed from a bicycle tire!) in the shape of a three-dimensional Möbius strip (see note 99 in Chap. 1). From the story by H. Nearing, Jr., “The Maladjusted Classroom,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1953.
- 67.
A. Einstein, Relativity: the Special and General Theory, Crown 1961, p. 33.
- 68.
From A. A. Ziadat, “Early Reception to Einstein’s Relativity in the Arab Periodical Press,” Annals of Science, January 1994, pp. 17–35.
- 69.
G. F. Rodwell, “On Space of Four Dimensions,” Nature, May 1, 1873, pp. 8–9.
- 70.
R. R. Dipert, “Peirce’s Theory of the Dimensionality of Physical Space,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, January 1978, pp. 61–70.
- 71.
See, for example, I. M. Freeman, “Why Is Space Three-Dimensional?” American Journal of Physics, December 1969, pp. 1222–1224, and L. Gurevich and V. Mostepanenko, “On the Existence of Atoms in n-Dimensional Space,” Physics Letters A, May 31, 1971, pp. 201–202.
- 72.
B. Olsen, “Four Dimensional Transit,” Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1928.
- 73.
R. Hughes, “The Vanishing Man,” reprinted in The Mathematical Magpie (C. Fadiman, editor), Simon and Schuster 1962.
- 74.
This astounding insight appeared in early pulp science fiction in, for example, M. J. Breuer, “The Appendix and the Spectacles,” Amazing Stories, December 1928. The concept appeared even earlier in Bob Olsen, “The Four-Dimensional Roller-Press,” Amazing Stories, June 1927, and then later in Olsen’s “The Great Four Dimensional Robberies,” Amazing Stories, May 1928 to rob locked safe deposit boxes, and “The Four Dimensional Escape,” Amazing Stories, December 1933, in which a man sentenced to die by hanging at San Quentin Prison is rescued, while standing on the gallows’ trap, by an inventor who pulls him through the fourth dimension.
- 75.
N. Bond, “Dr. Fuddle’s Fingers,” in Mr. Mergenthwirker’s Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales, Coward-McCann 1946.
- 76.
J. Cramer, “The Other Forty Dimensions,” Analog, April 1985. ‘Monsters in hyperspace’ stories were numerous in pulp science fiction. Three examples (in no particular order of literary merit!) are: M. J. Breuer, “The Einstein See-Saw,” Astounding Stories, April 1932; P. Ernst, “The 32nd of May,” Astounding Stories, April 1935; “The Monster from Nowhere,” Fantastic Adventures, July 1939.
- 77.
M. Duclos, “Into Another Dimension,” Fantastic Adventures, November 1939. See the illustration for this story in “Some First Words.”
- 78.
M. J. Breuer, “The Gostak and the Doshes,” Amazing Stories, March 1930.
- 79.
A space is simply connected if all the points on the straight line that joins any two points in the space are also in the space. The interior of a sphere is simply connected. The interior of a sphere with a hole in it is not simply connected.
- 80.
A. Einstein, “The Particle Problem in the General Theory of Relativity,” Physical Review, July 1, 1935, pp. 73–77.
- 81.
J. M. Cohen, “The Rotating Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” in Relativity and Gravitation (C. G. Kuper and A. Peres, editors), Gordon and Breach Science Publishers 1971.
- 82.
A. Ori, “Inner Structure of a Charged Black Hole: An Exact Mass-Inflation Solution,” Physical Review Letters, August 12, 1991, pp. 789–792.
- 83.
See, for example, J. G. Cramer, Einstein’s Bridge, Avon 1997 (this is the same Cramer cited in note 76). The Rosen comes from the American-Israeli physicist Nathan Rosen (1909–1995), who was a collaborator of Einstein’s.
- 84.
F. Pohl, “The Mapmakers,” Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1965.
- 85.
I. Asimov, “Take a Match,” in New Dimensions II: Eleven Original Science Fiction Stories (R. Silverberg, editor), Doubleday 1972.
- 86.
G. O. Smith, “The Möbius Trail,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1948.
- 87.
E. L. Rementer, “The Space Bender,” Amazing Stories, December 1928.
- 88.
J. V. McConnell, “Avoidance Situation,” If, February 1956.
- 89.
B. Olsen, “The Four-Dimensional Auto-Parker,” Amazing Stories, July 1934. “Bob Olsen” was the pen-name for Alfred Johannes Olsen.
- 90.
G. S. Whiston, “‘Hyperspace’ (The Cobordism Theory of Space-Time),” International Journal of Theoretical Physics, December 1974, pp. 285–288.
- 91.
L. Padgett, “When the Bough Breaks,” Astounding Science Fiction, November 1944.
- 92.
A. M. Bork, “The Fourth Dimension in Nineteenth-Century Physics,” Isis, October 1964, pp. 326–338.
- 93.
E. Meyerson, The Relativistic Deduction, volume 83 of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, D. Reidel 1985, p. 78.
- 94.
S., “Four-Dimensional Space,” Nature, March 26, 1885, p. 481. The editorial staff at Nature has informed me that, more than a century-and-a-quarter later, there is no longer any record of the identity of S. in the journal’s archives.
- 95.
M. Leinster, “The Runaway Skyscraper,” Argosy, February 1919.
- 96.
H. Gernsback, “Plausability in Scientifiction,” Amazing Stories, November 1926.
- 97.
W. P. McGivern, “Doorway of Vanishing Men,” Fantastic Adventures, July 1941.
- 98.
R. Heinlein, “—And He Built a Crooked House,” Astounding Science Fiction, February 1941. Here we read of a Los Angeles architect who builds a house in the shape of a tesseract as it would appear if collapsed into normal three-dimensional space. It isn’t stable in 3-space (we are told), however, and so a California earthquake is sufficient to topple the house into a stable 4-D configuration, along with its occupants.
- 99.
A. C. Clarke, “Technical Error,” Fantasy No. 1, December 1946.
- 100.
T. Sturgeon, “Yesterday Was Monday,” Unknown Fantasy Fiction, June 1941.
- 101.
M. Leinster, “The Middle of the Week After Next,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1952.
- 102.
And so Newcomb actually was. Wells, it is certain, routinely read Nature (one of his college friends, Richard Gregory, eventually became the journal’s editor), and Wells must have read Newcomb’s address of December 28, 1893 to the New York Mathematical Society when reprinted in the February 1, 1893 issue (on pp. 325–329), where he called hyperspace “the fairyland of geometry.” From the Time Traveller’s own words, then, that wonderful Victorian dinner party must have taken place in January or February of 1894.
- 103.
From a letter written by Einstein on March 21, 1955, to the children of Michele Besso, his dearest friend, who had just died. Einstein’s use of the word briefly was due to his knowledge that he was nearly out of time, too (he died just a month later).
- 104.
For a study that includes the original German text, careful English translations, and photographs of Minkowski’s agonized corrections to his pre-address manuscript, see P. L. Galison, “Minkowski’s Space-Time: From Visual Thinking to the Absolute World,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (volume 10), 1979, pp. 85–121.
- 105.
C. W. Misner and J. Wheeler, “Gravitation, Electromagnetism, Unquantized Charge, and Mass as Properties of Curved Empty Space,” Annals of Physics, December 1957, pp. 525–603.
- 106.
General relativity had already explained the long-puzzling excess precession of the perihelion (point of closest approach to the Sun) of Mercury’s orbit. The excess was an observational (and so experimental) fact which Newton’s gravity cannot completely explain.
- 107.
W. G., “Euclid, Newton, and Einstein,” Nature, February 12, 1920, pp. 627–630. As with the mysterious S. (note 94), the editorial staff at Nature has informed me that, nearly a century later, there is no longer any record of the identity of W. G. in the journal’s archives.
- 108.
And for some it was all nonsense. The British philosopher Peter Geach (1916–2013), for example, declared the Minkowskian view to be “very popular with philosophers who try to understand physics and physicists who try to do philosophy.” See P. T. Geach, “Some Problems About Time,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (P. F. Strawson, editor), Oxford University Press, 1968. In his introduction to Geach’s essay, editor Strawson put in his two cents by stating the four-dimensional view of reality to be nothing but “fanciful philosophical theorizing.”
- 109.
L. P. Horwitz, R. I. Arshansky, and A. C. Elitzur, “On the Two Aspects of Time: The Distinction and Its Implications,” Foundations of Physics, December 1988, pp. 1159–1193. See also Einstein’s own book (note 67) where he wrote “From a ‘happening’ in three-dimensional space, physics becomes, as it were, an ‘existence’ in the four-dimensional ‘world’.”
- 110.
See the Seventh International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, volume 4 (Salzburg, Austria, 1983), p. 176. Popper describes his early discussions with Einstein on the reality of time and the four-dimensional Parmenidean block universe in some detail in his autobiography: see volume 1 of The Philosophy of Karl Popper (P. A. Schilpp, editor), The Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court 1974, pp. 102–103.
- 111.
In the Foreword to the book by B. Gal-Or, Cosmology, Physics and Philosophy, Springer-Verlag 1981.
- 112.
F. B. Long, “Throwback in Time,” Science Fiction Plus, April 1953.
- 113.
A. Einstein, “La Théorie de la Relativité,” Bullentin de la Société Francaise de Philosophia (volume 17), 1922, pp. 91–113.
- 114.
A famous line from James, one that perhaps illustrates his sort of reasoning about free will, is “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” If only proving theorems in math and physics were that easy.
- 115.
G. C. Eggleston, “The True Story of Bernard Poland’s Prophecy,” American Homes, June 1875. George Cary Eggleston (1839–1911) had served as a soldier in the Confederate Army.
- 116.
F. Flagg, “The Machine Man of Ardathia,” Amazing Stories, November 1927.
- 117.
See, for example, H. Stein, “Newtonian Space-Time,” Texas Quarterly, Autumn 1967, pp. 174–200; G. Berger, “Elementary Causal Structures in Newtonian and Minkowskian Space-Time,” Theoria (volume 40), 1974, pp. 191–201; J. Earman and M. Friedman, “The Meaning and Status of Newton’s Laws of Inertia and the Nature of Gravitational Forces,” Philosophy of Science, September 1973, pp. 329–359.
- 118.
D. C. Williams, “The Sea Fight Tomorrow,” in Structure, Method and Meaning, The Liberal Arts Press 1951. Donald Williams (1899–1983) was a professor of philosophy at Harvard.
- 119.
D. C. Williams, “The Myth of Passage,” Journal of Philosophy, July 1951, pp. 457–472.
- 120.
In a footnote, Williams sort of admits this when he writes “I should expect the impact of the environment on such a being to be so wildly queer and out of step with the way he is put together, that his mental life must be a dragged-out monstrous delirium.” I think this a great understatement.
- 121.
As it was for some of Williams’ fellow philosophers, one of whom bluntly called the ‘myth-of-passage’ paper “an interesting piece of science fiction”: see M. Capek, “The Myth of Frozen Passage: The Status of Becoming in the Physical World,” in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (volume 2), Humanities Press 1965. Capek’s title reflects his view of the block universe as simply a giant refrigerator and so, turning the tables on Williams, we have ‘passage’ changed to ‘frozen passage.’ See also note 136.
- 122.
G. Wolfe, “The Rubber Bend,” Universe 5 (T. Carr, editor), Random House 1974.
- 123.
F. B. Long, “Temporary Warp,” Astounding Stories, August 1937.
- 124.
R. Heinlein, “Life-Line,” Astounding Science Fiction, August 1939.
- 125.
R. Cummings, “Bandits of Time,” Amazing Stories, December 1941.
- 126.
“Berkeley Square” by J. L. Balderson. This play was made into a 1933 movie of the same name, and again in 1951 as the film I’ll Never Forget You.
- 127.
O. Saari, “The Time Bender,” Astounding Stories, August 1937 (see also note 137 in Chap. 1).
- 128.
Examples include the novels Lest Darkness Fall (Henry Holt 1941) by L. Sprague de Camp, and The Time Hoppers (Doubleday 1967) by Robert Silverberg.
- 129.
In the context of mathematical physics (not science fiction) it has been shown that time travel does not imply any fatal violation of conservation of energy. See, for example, J. L. Friedman et al., “Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves,” Physical Review D, September 15, 1990, pp. 1915–1930, and D. Deutsch, “Quantum Mechanics Near Closed Timelike Lines,” Physical Review D, November 15, 1991, pp. 3197–3217.
- 130.
The lament of Victorian physicist Oliver Lodge (1850–1940) in his essay “The New World of Space and Time,” Living Age, January 1920.
- 131.
H. Reichenbach, The Direction of Time, University of California Press 1956, p. 11.
- 132.
H. Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, Princeton University Press 1949, p. 116. Sir James Jeans had already said the same, somewhat less elegantly, in his 1935 Sir Halley Stewart Lecture: “The tapestry of spacetime is already woven throughout its full extent, both in space and time, so that the whole picture exists, although we only become conscious of it bit by bit—like separate flies crawling over a tapestry … A human life is reduced to a mere thread in the tapestry.” Jeans then immediately rejected this fatalistic view: see his Scientific Progress, Macmillan 1936, p. 20.
- 133.
From a book review in Scientific American, April 1962, pp. 179–185.
- 134.
H. A. C. Dobbs, “The ‘Present’ in Physics,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, February 1969, pp. 317–324.
- 135.
L. Silberstein, The Theory of Relativity, Macmillan 1914, p. 134.
- 136.
E. Cunningham, The Principle of Relativity, Cambridge University Press 1914, p. 191. The use of the words timeless and changeless explain the characterization of the block universe as being frozen (in note 121).
- 137.
W. L. Craig, “Was Thomas Aquinas a B-Theorist of Time?” New Scholasticism, Autumn 1985, pp. 475–483. For the B-theory of time, look back at the discussion in the first section of this chapter.
- 138.
A science fiction story by Norman Spinrad, “The Weed of Time” (Alchemy and Academe, Doubleday 1970) graphically describes what a nightmare that could be!
- 139.
R. Silverberg, “What We Learned From This Morning’s Newspaper,” Infinity Four, November 1972.
- 140.
This refers to the discovery that two events, which occur simultaneously for one observer in a spacetime, may not be simultaneous for another observer in the same spacetime. This will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
- 141.
For the complete exchange between these two philosophers, see W. Hasker, “Foreknowledge and Necessity,” April 1985, pp. 121–157, B. Reichenbach, “Hasker and Omniscience,” January 1987, pp. 86–92, and W. Hasker, “The Hardness of the Past: A Reply to Reichenbach,” July 1987, pp. 337–342, all in the journal Faith and Philosophy. Hasker is the ‘first’ philosopher, and Reichenbach is the ‘second’ one. See also D. P. Lackey, “A New Disproof of the Compatibility of Foreknowledge and Free Choice,” Religious Studies, September 1974, pp. 313–318.
- 142.
J. G. Bennett et al., “Unified Field Theory in a Curvature-Free Five-Dimensional manifold,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A, July 1949, pp. 39–61. A theological interpretation is given in G. Stromberg, “Space, Time, and Eternity,” Journal of the Franklin Institute, August 1961, pp. 134–144.
- 143.
L. A. Eshbach, “The Time Conqueror,” Wonder Stories, July 1932.
- 144.
For more on this, in the context of time travel, see the penultimate question in the For Future Discussion questions at the end of this chapter.
- 145.
See, for example, the two papers by R. L. Purtill, “The Master Argument,” Apeiron, May 1973, pp. 31–36, and “Foreknowledge and Fatalism,” Religious Studies, September 1974, pp. 319–324.
- 146.
In his The Sirens of Titan, a 1959 novel meant to be a parody of God’s omniscience, Kurt Vonnegut gave the curious name of chrono-synclastic infundibulated vision to God’s power to see the past and future.
- 147.
G. I. Mavrodes, “Is the Past Unpreventable?” April 1984, pp. 131–146, and A. Plantinga, “On Ockham’s Way Out,” July 1986, pp. 235–269, both in Faith and Philosophy.
- 148.
W. L. Craig, “Tachyons, Time Travel, and Divine Omniscience,” Journal of Philosophy, March 1988, pp. 135–150. Tachyons are hypothetical faster-than-light particles that theoretically travel backwards through time. They will be discussed in Chap. 5.
- 149.
W. Kubilius, “Turn Backward, O Time,” Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1951.
- 150.
Figure 2.2 is based on a similar one in C. K. Raju, “Time Travel and the Reality of Spontaneity,” Foundations of Physics, July 2006, pp. 1099–1113.
- 151.
There is another view of time even darker than St. Augustine’s, which denies the existence of both future and past, and doesn’t offer us much either for that special moment we call the present (or now). This view, called presentism, was hauntingly expressed in some lyrics I heard in the final episode of the second season (2015) of the HBO series True Detective: “There is no future/There is no past/In the present nothing lasts.” Now that is depressing! Still, there are philosophers who believe even this view can support time travel: see S. Keller and M. Nelson, “Presentists Should Believe in Time-Travel,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, September 2001, pp. 333–345.
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Nahin, P.J. (2017). Philosophical Space and Time. In: Time Machine Tales. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48864-6_2
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