Abstract
One way to communicate with the past is to ‘simply’ live backwards in time. Philosophers and other writers of speculative fiction were the first to wonder what things might be like in a world where the time asymmetry is reversed—that is, in a world where time ‘runs backward.’ Indeed, fascination with the idea of time reversal actually dates back thousands of years, long before science fiction, as it can be found in Plato’s dialogue Statesman, written (most probably) 15 years before Plato’s death in 347 B.C.
“[As for travel to or for signaling the past] you’d have to exceed light speed which immediately entails the use of more than an infinite number of horsepowers.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
An observation by Haskel van Manderpootz, professor of the “newer physics,” in S. G. Weinbaum’s “The Worlds of If,” Wonder Stories, August 1935. Compared to the ‘modest’ Van Manderpootz, all other physicists in the world are a mere “pack of jackels, eating the crumbs of ideas that drop from [his] feast of thoughts.”
- 2.
W. R. Inge (1860–1954), in his November 1920 Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society at the University of London Club, in a sympathetic treatment of the possibility of a time-reversed world.
- 3.
F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (2nd edition), Oxford University Press 1897, p. 190.
- 4.
J. N. Findlay, Philosophy (25) 1950, pp. 346–347.
- 5.
J. N. Findlay and J. E. McGechie, “Does It Make Sense to Suppose That All Events, Including Personal Experiences, Could Occur in Reverse?” Analysis, June 1956, pp. 121–123.
- 6.
M. C. Pease,” Astounding Science Fiction, “Reversion,” December 1949. See also R. A. Banks, “This Side Up,” Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1954, for a tale about the confusion caused by projecting a film the wrong way in time.
- 7.
The modern view that a time-reversed world would appear normal to someone living in it can be traced back at least as far as to J. J. C. Smart, “The Temporal Asymmetry of the World,” Analysis, March 1954, pp. 79–83, an analysis, alas, that may not convince everyone.
- 8.
M. Dummett, “Bringing About the Past,” Philosophical Review, July 1964, pp. 338–359.
- 9.
See, for example, D. L. Schumacher, “The Direction of Time and the Equivalence of ‘Expanding’ and ‘Contracting’ World-Models,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 1964, pp. 575–579; J. V. Narlikar, “The Direction of Time,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, February 1965, pp. 281–285; F. R. Stannard, “Symmetry of the Time Axis,” Nature, August 13, 1966, pp. 693–695.
- 10.
This issue is raised, several times, in Robert Silverberg’s 1968 novel The Masks of Time.
- 11.
J. R. Lucas, A Treatise on Time and Space, Methuen 1973, pp. 43–47.
- 12.
M. MacBeath, “Communication and Time Reversal,” Synthese, July 1983, pp. 27–46.
- 13.
In Goethe’s play Faust, the normal flow of time is routinely upset.
- 14.
Communication between beings in counterclock worlds, using written messages displayed through a window, appeared in science fiction years before MacBeath wrote: see I. Watson’s 1978 novelette “The Very Slow Time Machine.”
- 15.
There is no difference in the time sense of photons in either world because the flow of proper time for a photon—traveling at the speed of light, by definition—is zero (recall the discussion in Sect. 3.6).
- 16.
H. Putnam, The Journal of Philosophy, April 1962, pp. 213–216.
- 17.
N. Swartz, “Is There an Ozma-Problem for Time?” Analysis, January 1972, pp. 77–82.
- 18.
E. Bellamy, “The Blindman’s World,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1886.
- 19.
D. Knight, “This Way to the Regress,” Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1956.
- 20.
Wheeler’s comments can be found in the General Discussion at the end of The Nature of Time (T. Gold, editor), Cornell University Press 1966.
- 21.
An intriguing (if somewhat mysterious) thought from F. J. Yndurain, “Disappearance of Matter Due to Causality and Probability Violations in Theories with Extra Timelike Dimensions,” Physics Letters B, February 28, 1991, pp. 15–16.
- 22.
H. Schmidt, “Model of an Oscillating Cosmos Which Rejuvenates During Contraction,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, March 1966, pp. 494–509. An elaboration of Schmidt’s ideas is in A. Walstad, “Time’s Arrow in an Oscillating Universe,” Foundations of Physics, October 1980, pp. 743–749.
- 23.
G. Matthews, “Time’s Arrow and the Structure of Spacetime,” Philosophy of Science, March 1979, pp. 82–97.
- 24.
More than half-a-century ago one writer asserted that two-dimensional complex time was old hat in the theories of spinning particles—see M. Bunge, “On Multi-dimensional Time,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, May 1958, p. 39. For a summary of many of the objections to multi-dimensional time see J. K. Kowalczynski, “Critical Comments on the Discussion About Tachyonic Causal Paradoxes and the Concept of Superluminal Reference Frames,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics, January 1984, pp. 27–60 (and the reply by E. Recami, September 1987, pp. 913–919).
- 25.
R. Heinlein, “Elsewhen,” Astounding Science Fiction, September 1941.
- 26.
This story has an amusing scene in which one of the professor’s students accidently ‘jumps time tracks’ and so enters a new track with his arrow of time pointing backwards.
- 27.
N. L. Knight, “Bombardment in Reverse,” Astounding Science Fiction, February 1940.
- 28.
A. S. Eddington, The Mathematical Theory of Relativity (2nd edition), Cambridge University Press 1924, p. 25.
- 29.
J. Dorling, “The Dimensionality of Time,” American Journal of Physics, April 1970, pp. 539–540.
- 30.
C. Isham, “Quantum Gravity,” in The New Physics (P. Davies, editor), Cambridge University Press 1989.
- 31.
D. Zeilicovici, “Temporal Becoming Minus the Moving-Now,” Nous, September 1989, pp. 505–524.
- 32.
J. W. Meiland, “A Two-Dimensional Passage Model of Time for Time Travel,” Philosophical Studies, November 1974, pp. 153–173. Jack Meiland (1934–1998) was a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan.
- 33.
A critic of time travel (see note 119 of Chap. 2) used what he claimed to be the absurdity of such a statement to support his ejection of time travel. One of Meiland’s reasons for developing his two-dimensional model of time was, in fact, to be able to reply to that critic (Donald Williams).
- 34.
Many of the arguments against multi-dimensional time can be found in M. MacBeath, “Time’s Square,” in The Philosophy of Time (R. Le Poidevin and M. MacBeath, editors), Oxford University Press 1993. MacBeath concludes, however, with “I would not want to rule out the possibility … that time is three-dimensional. Or worse.” See also Alasdair Richmond, “Plattner’s Arrow: Science and Multi-dimensional time,” Ratio, September 2000, pp. 256–274.
- 35.
The Victorian writer Samuel Butler (1835–1902), in the “Imaginary Worlds” entry of The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (published posthumously in 1912), commenting on the chaos that communication across time might cause.
- 36.
K. Popper, “The Arrow of Time,” Nature, March 17, 1956, p. 538. See, too, note 110 (and its discussion) in Chap. 2.
- 37.
It was thought, in nineteenth century physics, that electromagnetic waves need a medium through which to propagate (like ocean waves need water, and sound waves need air), a mysterious substance called the aether (or ether) that exists even in a vacuum. The 1871 Michelson-Morley experiment, however, implied that the aether simply does not exist.
- 38.
See, for example, S. L. Schwebel, “Advanced and Retarded Solutions in Field Theory,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics, October 1970, pp. 347–353, and L. M. Stephenson, “Clarification of an Apparent Asymmetry in Electromagnetic Theory,” Foundations of Physics, December 1978, pp. 921–926.
- 39.
L. Page, “Advanced Potentials and Their Application to Atomic Models,” Physical Review, September 1924, pp. 296–305.
- 40.
For more on this, see O. Costa de Beauregard, “No Paradox in the Theory of Time Anisotropy,” Stadium Generale 1971, pp. 10–18.
- 41.
J. A. Stratton, Electromagnetic Theory, McGraw-Hill 1941, p. 428.
- 42.
J. A. Wheeler and R. P. Feynman, “Classical Electrodynamics in Terms of Direct Interparticle Action,” Reviews of Modern Physics, July 1949, pp. 425–433.
- 43.
P. C. Aichelburg and R. Beig, “Radiation Damping As An Initial Value Problem,” Annals of Physics, May 1976, pp. 264–283.
- 44.
J. L. Anderson, “Why We Use Retarded Potentials,” American Journal of Physics, May 1992, pp. 465–467.
- 45.
See M. B. Hesse, Forces and Fields, Philosophical Library 1961.
- 46.
J. R. Pierce, “Pre-Vision,” Astounding Stories, March 1936.
- 47.
M. Schere, “Anachronistic Optics,” Astounding Stories, February 1938.
- 48.
G. G. Simpson, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, St. Martin’s Press 1996.
- 49.
D. Stapleton, “How Much to Thursday?” Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1942.
- 50.
S. Schmidt, “Worthsayer,” in More Whatdunits (M. Resnik, editor), DAW 1993. The author, Stanley Schmidt, has a Ph.D. in physics and is a former editor of Analog Science Fiction magazine.
- 51.
For a fictional illustration of this (a so-called bilking paradox), see W. Tevis, “The Other End of the Line,” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1961.
- 52.
R. C. Tolman, The Theory of the Relativity of Motion, University of California Press 1917.
- 53.
Take a look back at Sect. 3.5, where we showed that the time order of two events can appear reversed for a subluminal observer if the two events are not causally related. Introducing FTL motion results in extending reversal to causally connected events; that is, FTL motion, reversed causation, and time travel to the past, go hand-in-hand-in-hand.
- 54.
On page 591 of the issue of December 19, 1923.
- 55.
F. B. Long, “Throwback in Time,” Science Fiction Plus, April 1953.
- 56.
A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, Macmillan 1929.
- 57.
A. Einstein, “La Théorie de la Relativité,” Bulletin de la Société Francaise de Philosophie 1922, pp. 91–113.
- 58.
Such as, for example, the intersection point of two very long, closing scissor blades. The explanation for how this can be is that the point is massless and does not participate in a causal chain (and so carries no information). Thus, special relativity is not violated.
- 59.
See, for example, G. Nerlich, “Special Relativity Is Not Based On Causality,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, December 1982, pp. 361–388. This same point was made nearly two decades earlier, in a study of the possibility of superluminal sound in superdense matter, by D. A Kirzhnitz and V. L. Polyachenko, “On the Possibility of Macroscopic Manifestations of Violation of Microscopic Causality,” Soviet Physics JETP, August 1964, pp. 514–519.
- 60.
See G. Diener, “Superluminal Group Velocities and Information Transfer,” Physics Letters A, December 16, 1996, pp. 327–331. For more on the modulation of a light-speed carrier wave in everyday AM radio, and in a more sophisticated single-sideband transmitter, see my book The Science of Radio, Springer 1999.
- 61.
N. Bond, “Lightship, Ho!,” Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939. The author provides an interesting, detailed description of the gadget, and I think it would make a good question on a Ph.D. qualifying exam in physics or electrical engineering to explain the flaw in it.
- 62.
Bob Brier, Precognition and the Philosophy of Science: An Essay on Backward Causation, Humanities Press 1974. Brier is an Egyptologist (!) at Long Island University—with a Ph.D. in philosophy—who specialized at one time in parapsychology.
- 63.
J. A. Wheeler and R. P. Feynman, “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation,” Reviews of Modern Physics, April–July 1945, pp. 157–181.
- 64.
C. W. Berenda, “The Determination of Past by Future Events: A Discussion of the Wheeler-Feynman Absorption-Radiation Theory,” Philosophy of Science, 1947, pp. 13–19.
- 65.
R. P. Feynman, “Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics,” Physical Review, September 15, 1949, pp. 769–789. See also C. Teitelboim, “Splitting the Maxwell Tensor: Radiation Reaction Without Advanced Fields,” Physical Review D, March 15, 1970, pp. 1572–1582.
- 66.
G. N. Lewis, “The Nature of Light,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 15, 1926, pp. 22–29.
- 67.
P. Fitzgerald, “Tachyons, Backwards Causation, and Freedom,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (volume 8), 1970, pp. 415–436. Even more extreme examples of such paradox machines are described in Tim Maudlin, “Time Travel and Topology,” PSA 1990, Philosophy of Science Association, volume 1, pp. 303–315.
- 68.
Cramer has written provocatively on advanced waves. See, for example, “The Arrow of Electromagnetic Time and the Generalized Absorber Theory,” Foundations of Physics, September 1983, pp. 887–902, and “Generalized Absorber Theory and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” Physical Review D, July 15, 1980, pp. 362–376.
- 69.
See note 34 in Chap. 3. There Wheeler also wrote “The particles of the absorber are either at rest or in random motion before the acceleration of the source. They are correlated with it in velocity after that acceleration. Thus radiation and radiative reaction are understood in terms, not of pure electrodynamics, but of statistical mechanics.”
- 70.
R. B. Partridge, “Absorber Theory of Radiation and the Future of the Universe,” Nature, August 3, 1973, pp. 263–265.
- 71.
M. L. Herron and D. T. Pegg, “A Proposed Experiment in Absorber Theory,” Journal of Physics A, October 1974, pp. 1965–1969.
- 72.
J. E. Hogarth, “Cosmological Considerations of the Absorber Theory of Radiation,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A, May 22, 1962, pp. 365–383. Hogarth, however, rejected the static universe, asserting instead that the observed expansion of the universe provides the required asymmetry, resulting in the cosmological arrow of time as the primary arrow and the electromagnetic arrow as a consequence.
- 73.
S. W. Hawking, “Arrow of Time in Cosmology,” Physical Review D, November 15, 1982, pp. 2489–2495.
- 74.
F. Hoyle and J. V. Narlikar, “Time Symmetric Electrodynamics and the Arrow of Time in Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A, January 1964, pp. 1–23.
- 75.
Besides his scientific work, Hoyle also wrote science fiction. One work, the 1966 novel October the First is Too Late, deals with travels in time but fails to say anything about paradoxes.
- 76.
Poul Anderson, “Earthman, Beware!,” Super Science Stories, June 1951.
- 77.
J. P. Hogan, Thrice Upon a Time, Ballantine 1980.
- 78.
J. Blish, “Beep,” Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1954.
- 79.
The signal separation problem is also hinted at by physicist/science fiction author Gregory Benford, in a tale that was a precursor to his famous 1980 novel Timescape (in which the present attempts to warn the past of a future ecological disaster that threatens life on Earth). See Benford’s “Cambridge, 1:58 A.M.,” Epoch, Berkeley 1975.
- 80.
Words exchanged by the first officer and the captain of a starship on its way to Alpha Centauri in a story by N. Schachner, “Reverse Universe,” Astounding Stories, June 1936. The captain, we are told, “had heard, of course, of the limiting velocity of light, but it meant nothing to him.”
- 81.
G. Feinberg, “Possibility of Faster-Than-Light Particles,” Physical Review, July 25, 1967, pp. 1089–1105. Feinberg was anticipated in this name by Edward Page Mitchell (the Victorian pioneer in the time travel paradox genre who was discussed back in Sect. 4.2 and its note 37). In his story “The Tachypomp: A Mathematical Demonstration” (Scribner’s Monthly, March 1874), he describes a gadget for reaching any speed, no matter how great (tachypomp is literally “quick sender”).
- 82.
G. Benford, “Time and Timescape,” Science-Fiction Studies, July 1993, pp. 184–190.
- 83.
A poetic allusion to something traveling faster than light appears, in of all places, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In Juliet’s words (Act II, scene 5), “… love’s heralds should be thoughts, Which ten times faster glide than the sun’s beams, Driving back shadows …”
- 84.
S. Tanaka, “Theory of Matter with Super Light Velocity,” Progress of Theoretical Physics, July 1960, pp. 171–200. See also O. M. Bilaniuk and E. C. G. Sudarshan, “Particles Beyond the Light Barrier,” Physics Today, May 1969, pp. 43–51 (and the resulting discussion in the December issue, pp. 47–52).
- 85.
O. M. P. Bilaniuk, V. K. Deshpande, and E. C. G. Sudarshan, “‘Meta’ Relativity,” American Journal of Physics, October 1962, pp. 718–723.
- 86.
A. Italiano, “How to Recover Causality in General Relativity,” Hadronic Journal, January 1986, pp. 9–12.
- 87.
R. G. Newton, “Particles That Travel Faster Than Light,” Science, March 20, 1970, pp. 1569–1574.
- 88.
W. B. Rolnick, “Implications of Causality for Faster-Than-Light Matter,” Physical Review, July 25, 1969, pp. 1105–1108, and D. J. Thouless, “Causality and Tachyons,” Nature, November 1, 1969, p. 506.
- 89.
G. A. Benford, D. L. Book, and W. A. Newcomb, “The Tachyonic Antitelephone,” Physical Review D, July 15, 1970, pp. 263–265.
- 90.
P. Fitzgerald, “On Retrocausality,” Philosophia, October 1974, pp. 513–551.
- 91.
W. L. Craig, “Tachyons, Time Travel, and Divine Omniscience, Journal of Philosophy, March 1988, pp. 135–150.
- 92.
F. A. E. Pirani, “Noncausal Behavior of Classical Tachyons,” Physical Review D, June 15, 1970, pp. 3224–3225.
- 93.
G. Feinberg, D. Albert, and S. Levine, “Knowledge of the Past and Future,” Journal of Philosophy, December 1992, pp. 607–642.
- 94.
L. S. Schulman, “Tachyon Paradoxes,” American Journal of Physics, May 1971, pp. 481–484.
- 95.
A study of similar situations can be found in L. L. Gatlin, “Time-Reversed Information Transmission,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics, January 1980, pp. 25–29.
- 96.
Taken from Frank Arntzenius and Time Maudlin, “Time Travel and Modern Physics,” in Time, Reality & Experience (C. Callender, editor), Cambridge University Press 2002, pp. 169–200.
- 97.
More on the Wheeler-Feynman continuity idea, and of its limitations, can be found in D. Kutach, “Time Travel and Consistency Constraints,” December 2003, pp. 1098–1113, and Phil Dowe, “Constraints on Data in Worlds with Closed Timelike Curves,” December 2007, pp. 724–735, both in Philosophy of Science.
- 98.
J. S. Bell, “On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press 1987.
- 99.
A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” Physical Review, May 15, 1935, pp. 777–780. See also N. D. Mermin, “Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks? Reality and Quantum Theory,” Physics Today, April 1985, pp. 38–47.
- 100.
E. Fermi, “Quantum Theory of Radiation,” Reviews of Modern Physics, January 1932, pp. 87–132.
- 101.
G. C. Hegerfeldt, “Causality Problems for Fermi’s Two-Atom System,” Physical Review Letters, January 1994, pp. 596–599. This mere suggestion of a possible failure of causality so stunned the editor of Nature that he felt compelled to quickly write a ‘calming’ reply: “Time Machines Still Over the Horizon,” February 10, 1994, p. 509.
- 102.
The issue of the sign of energy density is very important in the analyses of wormhole time machines (see note 135 in Chap. 1), and we’ll return to it in the next chapter.
- 103.
For more on hidden variables, see E. P. Wigner, “On Hidden Variables and Quantum Mechanical Probabilities,” American Journal of Physics, August 1970, pp. 1005–1009.
- 104.
For an analysis that argues against an FTL mechanism in quantum mechanics, see G. C. Ghirardi, et al., “A General Argument Against Superluminal Transmission Through the Quantum Mechanical Measurement Process,” Lettere Al Nuovo Cimento, March 8, 1980, pp. 293–298.
- 105.
You can find a discussion of the possibility of ‘explaining’ Einstein’s “spooky actions” of quantum mechanics by invoking backward causation in R. I. Sutherland, “Bell’s Theorem and Backwards-in-Time Causality,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics, April 1983, pp. 377–384.
- 106.
The details are not important here, but a lovely exposition (for the lay person) can be found in Bell’s essay “Bertlmann’s Socks and the Nature of Reality,” in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press 1987. See also M. G. Alford, “Ghostly Action at a Distance: A Non-Technical Explanation of the Bell Inequality,” American Journal of Physics, June 2016, pp. 448–457.
- 107.
A. Aspect, “Experimental Tests of Realistic Local Theories via Bell’s Theorem,” August 17, 1981, pp. 460–467, and A. Aspect, et al., “Experimental Realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm Gedanken-experiment: A New Violation of Bell’s Inequalities,” July 12, 1982, pp. 91–94, and “Experimental Test of Bell’s Inequalities using Time-Varying Analyzers,” December 20, 1982, pp. 1804–1807, all in Physical Review Letters.
- 108.
See N. D. Mermin in note 99. For more on the enigmatic letter on the FTL submarine C3 system, see Jack Sarfatti’s letter to Physics Today, September 1987, pp. 118 and 120.
- 109.
J. Cramer, “Paradoxes and FTL Communication,” Analog Science Fiction, September 1988.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nahin, P.J. (2017). Communication with the Past. In: Time Machine Tales. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48864-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48864-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48862-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48864-6
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)