rlr (08/10/82)
(This probably belongs in sf-lovers, but the discussion started here, so... ) The notion described in wing's article is on of several "effects of time travel" concepts prevalent in sci-fi, and the one that I believe is the most "realistic" (whatever that means when referring to the implausible). Among these concepts are: 1) people can go back in time, change the past, alter the course of history, and screw up the "space-time continuum" (oh,no!), or 2) people can go back in time, change the past, and then somehow get lost in some random current of the various possible routes through which the river of time may flow (iccch!), some current other than the one that we (in the "real" world) are in (one story I read--the name escapes me--had the "hero" go back in time, kill his wife's parents, return to see no effect on the present, and then do a number of silly things like kill Mohammed---that's the name, I think, "The Man Who Killed Mohammed" [???]----only to find himself a ghost, along with a friend, outside the realm of reality in his own time (huh?), and finally 3) whenever a person goes back in time and does something, he had already been there in his own present's version of the past; in other words, anything that a time traveler does when he/she travels into the past exists (so to speak) in the history books of his/her present. His/her travel to the past and the events that transpired there (then?) resulted in things that *happened in our present history*. Thus there is no changing history; what you do when you go back there has already been done (???). This sure is confusing. Question: has anyone thought out the idea that we only move forward in time due to some effect similar to gravity, i.e., since time is a dimension like any other, are we being drawn by some force (accelerating in terms of time?????) to some point on the time axis, the same way gravity draws a body to a point on the xyz axes???? Just a random inane thought... Rich Rosen pyuxjj!rlr
ss (08/10/82)
Rather then accelerating through time with something "pulling" us, how about just having been given a shove in the "forward-in-time" direction by some force during the Big Bang. We continue on due to inertia, and will continue to until some "outside force" influences us. --Sid--
burton (08/11/82)
There is a fourth concept of time, which I have read about in only a few books: that time is an elastic parameter, which seeks to 'correct' any paradoxes which occur. Only forces acting from 'outside' the flow can make changes, and these changes only affect the timestream locally; the elasticity of the flow returns it to normal after a period of time (i.e., distance along the time stream, or megaflow). Anyone seeking to create a paradox from within the system (i.e., a time traveller) gets ejected from the past back to his own time; forward time travellers are stuck in the future, because by returning to the past, they have advance knowledge and so could cause paradoxes. These type of concepts can be found, for example, in Asimov's 'The End of Eternity' (the idea of a force outside the megaflow affecting the megaflow, with elasticity), and in a lot of Michael Moorcock's works (The Dancers at the End of Time, for example, where the paradox ejection effect is called the Morphail effect). To avoid the Morphail effect, time travellers have to insinuate themselves into the society of the era without causing any paradoxes; a difficult thing to do (in Moorcock's works, the people who can do this successfully form an elite society called The League of Temporal Travellers; they have a base set up in the far past, from which they monitor the megaflow and act to keep things running smoothly -- a tremendous responsibility, and one which gives rise to situations which bring characters from other of Moorcock's books together in intriguing combinations). Although this sort of resembles the time stream effect mentioned in an earlier article, I believe it is different enough to warrant separate consideration. Doug Burton ihps3!inuxc!burton
doug (08/12/82)
and let's not forget Childhood's End, where the past is also affected by the future. This has to be one of the sappiest, over-written, anti- human books I ever read.