Time Travel in Fiction Flashcards
When did Time Travel stories become popular?
The concept of time travel by mechanical means was popularized in H. G. Wells’ 1895 story, The Time Machine.
What is H.G. Wells “The Time Machine” about?
Published in 1895, H. G. Wells’ post-apocalyptic science fiction novella “The Time Machine” is credited with popularizing the concept of time travel using a purposeful vehicle or device, and the term “time machine” coined by Wells has become universally synonymous with such means; the narrative, set in Victorian England, unfolds through a frame story focusing on the Time Traveller’s journey into the distant future, exploring themes of speculative evolution and social commentary on class divisions, projecting a world where the fair Eloi and savage Morlocks represent the separated upper and lower classes of Wells’ contemporary society.
What is the overall story of “The Time Machine”
In H. G. Wells’ novella “The Time Machine,” a Victorian English scientist known as the Time Traveller demonstrates a machine to his dinner guests, revealing its capability to transport individuals through time. After a subsequent journey to the distant future, he encounters the Eloi, a childlike society, and the Morlocks, their subterranean counterparts. The Time Traveller discovers that humanity has diverged into these two species, with the Eloi serving as a docile aristocracy and the Morlocks as their brutal, subterranean counterparts. During his exploration, he rescues an Eloi named Weena, and they form a bond. However, tragedy strikes when the Morlocks attack, and Weena is lost in a forest fire. The Time Traveller makes additional leaps through time, witnessing Earth’s gradual decay, before returning to his original time, recounting his incredible tale to skeptical guests, and ultimately leaving on another journey from which he never returns.
Time Slip
A time slip, a common plot device in fantasy and science fiction, involves individuals seemingly traveling through time by unknown means, with early examples including Washington Irving’s 1819 Rip Van Winkle and Mark Twain’s 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, while the Charles Dickens 1843 novel A Christmas Carol is the first to incorporate both past and future time travel; distinguished from time machine plots, time slip stories feature protagonists with no control over or understanding of the time-travel process, often left stranded in a different time and compelled to adapt or returned through an unpredictable and unexplained mechanism, a narrative device prevalent in both general and children’s literature, exemplified by the 2011 film “Midnight in Paris,” where time travel occurs without a specified mechanism.
Communication from the future
In literature, the plot device of receiving communication from the future is explored in some science fiction and fantasy stories, with early examples noted by Forrest J. Ackerman, such as H.G. Wells’s 1932 short story “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper” and the 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow, as well as a 1972 short story by Robert Silverberg titled “What We Learned From This Morning’s Newspaper,” where characters, upon receiving a newspaper from the future, inadvertently disrupt the spacetime continuum; this theme is further depicted in the television series Early Edition, resembling the film, where a character daily receives the next day’s newspaper and attempts to alter foreseen events. Such newspapers from the future can either be fictional editions of real newspapers or entirely imaginary, as exemplified by John Buchan’s 1932 novel The Gap in the Curtain, where people catch a glimpse of a future item in The Times, and the Swedish liberal party’s 2006 election posters titled Framtidens nyheter (“News of the future”), presenting a vision of the party’s desired future. This narrative device, questioning human control over destiny, is also explored in the visual novel Steins;Gate, where characters send text messages back in time to prevent disasters, only to face unforeseen consequences due to the unpredictable actions of individuals in the past.
Precognition
In fiction, precognition serves as a form of time travel, with J. B. Priestley exploring it in both fiction and non-fiction, discussing testimonials and “temporal anomalies” in his book Man and Time, featuring narratives of time travel to the future through dreaming, leading to memories from the future upon waking up, potentially resulting in déjà vu experiences; he notes infallible precognition’s potential for causal loops, as seen in Newcomb’s paradox. The film 12 Monkeys delves into predestination themes and the Cassandra complex, emphasizing the inability to change the past during time travel. Additionally, the protagonist of the short story “Story of Your Life” experiences life superimposed with the totality of her future as a consequence of learning an alien language, a concept rooted in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Time Loop
A “time loop” or “temporal loop” is a narrative device involving the repetition and re-experience of specific time periods by characters, often with the possibility of breaking out of the cycle; distinct from causal loops, time loops constantly reset, triggered by specific conditions, like a character’s death or a clock reaching a certain time, and may involve characters retaining memories from previous loops, with narratives frequently emphasizing the learning process across successive iterations.
Time Reversal
In certain narratives, characters are depicted moving backward through time, an ancient concept exemplified by myths of figures like Merlin, who supposedly lived in reverse and could foresee the future as a recollection; this notion is echoed in modern fictional portrayals, such as in Piers Anthony’s “Bearing an Hourglass,” where the character Norton embodies Time, living backward. Additionally, the 2016 film “Doctor Strange” and the movie “Tenet” employ variations of backward time travel: the former using the Time Stone in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the latter featuring characters experiencing past reality in reverse after passing through a ‘turnstile’ device, coexisting with their forward-traveling counterparts and introducing reversed thermodynamics for time-traveling individuals and objects.
Time Record
Protagonists in these narratives don’t physically travel through time but instead access other temporal periods through a record, utilizing technology that allows minimal consultation or maximal interaction, resembling a simulated reality deviating causally from the original timeline upon interaction; this record can be revisited multiple times, creating a time loop mechanism, exemplified in Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle” where books report on an alternate timeline, adapted in the TV series as newsreels, serving as meta-references to the historic timeline experienced by both authors and consumers; similarly, the film “Source Code” centers on a plot involving a simulated and time-looped reality based on the memories of a deceased individual.
Paradox
A temporal paradox, time paradox, or time travel paradox, is a paradox, an apparent contradiction, or logical contradiction associated with the idea of time travel or other foreknowledge of the future. While the notion of time travel to the future complies with the current understanding of physics via relativistic time dilation, temporal paradoxes arise from circumstances involving hypothetical time travel to the past – and are often used to demonstrate its impossibility.
Bootstrap Paradox
A boot-strap paradox, also referred to as an information loop, ontological paradox, or “predestination paradox,” presents a temporal dilemma in which any event, whether an action, information, object, or person, becomes its own cause due to retrocausality or time travel, resulting in instances where information, people, or objects seemingly lack a discernible origin in spacetime, as exemplified by the movie “Somewhere in Time,” where a watch circulates between characters without a clear origin.
Information Paradox
A second class of temporal paradoxes is related to information being created from nothing.
Predestination Paradox
Chris Smeenk & Christian Wuthrich wrote a paper on time travel and time machines at Oxford. The paper explores the logical, metaphysical, and physical feasibility of time travel, focusing on closed worldlines traced by physical objects, arguing that paradoxes do not preclude time travel based on logic or metaphysics, and delving into the implications of modern spacetime theories, such as general relativity, and quantum theories of gravity, like string theory and loop quantum gravity, on the potential for time travel.Smeenk uses the term “predestination paradox” to refer specifically to situations in which a time traveler goes back in time to try to prevent some event in the past.
Grandfather Paradox
The consistency paradox or grandfather paradox occurs when the past is changed in any way, thus creating a contradiction. A common example given is traveling to the past and intervening with the conception of one’s ancestors (such as causing the death of the parent beforehand), thus affecting the conception of oneself. If the time traveler were not born, then it would not be possible for them to undertake such an act in the first place. Therefore, the ancestor lives to offspring the time traveler’s next-generation ancestor, and eventually the time traveler. There is thus no predicted outcome to this.[8] Consistency paradoxes occur whenever changing the past is possible.[9] A possible resolution is that a time traveller can do anything that did happen, but cannot do anything that did not happen. Doing something that did not happen results in a contradiction.[8] This is referred to as the Novikov self-consistency principle.
Novikov self-consistency Principle
The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and Larry Niven’s law of conservation of history, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s. Novikov intended it to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity that contain what are known as closed timelike curves. The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any “change” to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes.
Variants
The grandfather paradox encompasses any change to the past, and it is presented in many variations, including killing one’s past self, Both the “retro-suicide paradox” and the “grandfather paradox” appeared in letters written into Amazing Stories in the 1920s. Another variant of the grandfather paradox is the “Hitler paradox” or “Hitler’s murder paradox”, in which the protagonist travels back in time to murder Adolf Hitler before he can instigate World War II and the Holocaust. Rather than necessarily physically preventing time travel, the action removes any reason for the travel, along with any knowledge that the reason ever existed. Physicist John Garrison et al. give a variation of the paradox of an electronic circuit that sends a signal through a time machine to shut itself off, and receives the signal before it sends it.
Newcomb’s Paradox
Newcomb’s paradox is a thought experiment showing an apparent contradiction between the expected utility principle and the strategic dominance principle. The thought experiment is often extended to explore causality and free will by allowing for “perfect predictors”: if perfect predictors of the future exist, for example if time travel exists as a mechanism for making perfect predictions, then perfect predictions appear to contradict free will because decisions apparently made with free will are already known to the perfect predictor. Predestination does not necessarily involve a supernatural power, and could be the result of other “infallible foreknowledge” mechanisms. Problems arising from infallibility and influencing the future are explored in Newcomb’s paradox. Newcomb’s paradox was created by William Newcomb of the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. However, it was first analyzed in a philosophy paper by Robert Nozick in 1969 and appeared in the March 1973 issue of Scientific American, in Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games”. Today it is a much debated problem in the philosophical branch of decision theory.
Decision Theory
Decision theory, a branch of applied probability theory and analytic philosophy, involves making decisions by assigning probabilities to factors and numerical consequences to outcomes, with normative decision theory focusing on optimal decisions, prescriptive decision theory describing observed behaviors, and descriptive decision theory analyzing how individuals actually make decisions, spanning interdisciplinary studies in management sciences, medical research, mathematics, data science, psychology, biology, social sciences, philosophy, and computer science, often employing statistical and discrete mathematical approaches for empirical applications.
Logical Impossibility
The logical impossibility of changing the past is asserted through modal logic, positing that if the past necessarily happened in a certain way, any attempt to change it leads to a logical contradiction, suggesting that time travel to the past may be considered paradoxical and logically impossible; however, debates arise, with some philosophers and scientists, such as proponents of the Novikov self-consistency principle, contending that time travel into the past might not be logically impossible if there is no chance of altering the past.
Illusory Time
Consideration of the possibility of backward time travel in a hypothetical universe described by a Gödel metric led famed logician Kurt Gödel to assert that time might itself be a sort of illusion. He suggests something along the lines of the block time view, in which time is just another dimension like space, with all events at all times being fixed within this four-dimensional “block”.
Physical Impossibility
Sergey Krasnikov writes that these bootstrap paradoxes – information or an object looping through time – are the same; the primary apparent paradox is a physical system evolving into a state in a way that is not governed by its laws. He does not find these paradoxical and attributes problems regarding the validity of time travel to other factors in the interpretation of general relativity
Self-sufficient Loops
In a 1992 paper, physicists Andrei Lossev and Igor Novikov coined the term “Jinn” to describe objects or information with no origin in the context of time loops, drawing inspiration from the Quranic Jinn, entities that leave no trace when they disappear; Lossev and Novikov categorized them into “Jinn of the first kind” for objects and “Jinn of the second kind” for information, arguing that objects making a circular passage through time must remain identical in each iteration, addressing potential contradictions with the second law of thermodynamics by suggesting that Jinn could interact with their environment to restore entropy.
Self-consistency Principle
The self-consistency principle proposed by Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov posits that backward time travel can occur without generating paradoxes, as events within closed timelike curves must adhere to universal laws of physics, ensuring self-consistency and preventing inconsistencies; while physicist Joseph Polchinski considered a potential paradox involving a billiard ball sent back in time, Kip Thorne and colleagues proposed multiple self-consistent solutions, suggesting the possibility of consistent extensions for various trajectories, although this remains unproven, and debates persist regarding the acceptance of Novikov’s views, with some proposing alternative explanations like the cosmic censorship hypothesis to prevent the observation of causal loops.
Multiple Universes
The interacting-multiple-universes approach, a variant of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, posits that time travelers end up in a different universe, leading to debates on the authenticity of such time travel; while Stephen Hawking supports the chronology protection conjecture, suggesting time travelers remain within their world to ensure a single self-consistent history, David Deutsch proposes quantum computation with a negative delay as producing only self-consistent solutions, though challenges exist regarding the precision of this condition and its implications on macroscopic objects according to arguments by Allen Everett.
