No going back in time
One of my very favorite movies is “The Twelve Monkeys” (1995). The story is that in 1996 two thirds of all humanity perish from a virus and the rest of humanity goes underground. By 2030 they have developed a time machine which allows people to be sent back and investigate the origin and the nature of the virus. The key figure is a man in 2030 who is sent back to 1996 only to actually ignite the events that lead to the killer virus in the first place. It is wonderful fiction and anyone who will watch the movie ends up in a turmoil of paradoxes and challenges to his or her sense of logic. What is ‘past’ and what is ‘present’?
The world in 2030
The whole idea of time travel – i.e. traveling to “the past” or to “the future” is as nonsensical as is – for instance – the idea that we could un-birth ourselves or revert our lives to the stage of our youth. I am not saying that rejuvenation is out of the question nor am I saying that one day we could not travel so fast that in relative terms we will experience a “time difference” compared with those who we have left behind. Certainly not. But actually going out and visit Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810 or George Bush IV in 2130 from where we are today is a fairy tale unworthy of scientific thought.
Still, people who profess to be a scientist get serious attention when they babble about the subject and they are all over the place in documentaries saying that time is a river and we only need power and speed to master it. Well, a huge amount of power, admittedly – the power that explodes an entire star. But even so, it remains – great - fiction.
This is the kind of serious stuff presented to make time travel credible
Time is an experience only known to humans (as much as we know): that each event is preceded by another and so on, and that this succession of events can be measured in terms of the clicks of a clock: in seconds, minutes, years, eons. We have a sense of the past (and the future) and in our minds we are capable of reliving it almost as if we can take it from a shelve and touch it. But the reality that once determined “the past” can not be touched nor can it be visited. Where to go? Left or right, up or down? The past is nowhere and the future is nowhere. We might just as well say that the past and the future are everywhere and still we have nowhere to go.
So what about traveling to nowhere – or everywhere? What machine and what concept of physics and astronomy could ever help us making any move that could resemble this idea of “time travel”? The best time machine we have so far constructed is the archive, the documents we keep, the records we hold, the pictures we take – and the movies we make. Our mind can travel into them and indeed in this sense our possibilities for time travel are boundless.
But actually moving in a sphere called ‘time’ and go to places and moments long gone is hypothetical at best. We can advance our own movements and we can slow them down, possibly. We could freeze ourselves, at least in theory, and reawaken at some time ten, hundred or even thousands of years in the future if we like ( I wouldn’t ) but none of this constitutes ‘time travel’.
And however seemingly credible some scientists have pictured the rivers or warps in space and time through which they lay their claims on the possibility of traveling time, none of them have solved in convincing terms the evident paradox that accompanies any such idea.
If time travel were possible, people of the future would have descended on Berlin in 1933 and sniff the life out of Adolf Hitler. But they didn't.
Essentially an event – any event – can not at the same instant be both past and future. Any intelligent being would say: but of course not! Still, this is the fundamental requirement for any journey through time, back and forth. The present, that is: every instant we call “now” is a unique event. We can link the present to the past and to any conceivable future, but in reality no chain exists. Whatever happens, passes into oblivion the moment it has occurred.
Human beings can reflect (‘look back’) and anticipate but we can not physically escape this reality.
But the most fundamental paradox that we can not solve, of course, is the reversal of cause and effect. Many examples have been given and they are generally referred to as the grandfather paradox: what if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he had the opportunity to sire your own father? By the same token we can not think of giving our young father a watch that subsequently we inherit … to pass on to our young father. How do we solve the actual origin of the watch? It can only be solved if the past constitutes multiple young fathers, one of whom has actually bought the watch. Alternatively the young father ends up with two watches and so on.
But all of this is water under the bridge. And if anyone would still wish to argue that perhaps you can’t travel into the future - because yes, the future does not “exist’ - but one can still go to the past, all of the above still applies. How could anyone go to the past and thus come from the future if actually from any given moment “in time”, there is no future to come from in the first place? Even so, we would have to think in terms of multiple dimensions – infinite universes – to solve all the riddles and this is indeed one of the solutions that our so-called scientists offer. Their prophecies take the world upside down – and science upside down: there is no thread of evidence or any phenomenon that could only be explained by the existence of such multiplicity but it comes in handy because we need it to “prove” the possibility of time travel.
Image of past, present and future
The famous physicist Stephen Hawkins once raised the question why we haven’t been flooded by visitors from the future and why there is no viable record of any such visit throughout the history of human civilization. Many people still hesitate to answer that question in unambiguous terms. This is because we do not wish to irrevocably relinquish our belief in the concept, not because we have any evidence to support it.
The idea of time travel indeed is like religion. We need it. We need it to project and nourish our hopes, even our hopes for a better past. We do not want to acknowledge that at any point in our own ‘time’ we are confined by here and now, from one moment to the other. The present is inescapable and we can’t skip any of it however fast or however slow we re going, wherever in the Universe.
I believe that is a good thing.
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