The Penguin once noted (back in 2008) that time was a genuinely 'slippery' customer; it is very difficult to pin down a definition of what it actually is. For theoretical physicists and mathematicians, it is simply another 'dimension' to be measured in an infinite multi-dimensionality; no more worthy of a privileged place that we accord to it than any other dimension. For human beings in general, it is a unique, measurable mechanism which charts our passage from birth unto death, from order into chaos. For animals, birds, insects etc, it is unknowable, for us at least, a perennial 'what is it to be a bat' question (passim), although some at least manage to track time as we perceive it even if they do not do so in the same way that we do now; my cat is usually bothering me around the same time of each day for food even if there is not a clock around (so we can safely assume that they, or Mugwump if you do not want generalise, cannot tell the time that way) and Magicicadas (see previous post) do it on, what seems to us to be, an inordinately lengthy scale.
By and large, quantum mechanical equations are time-invariant; it makes little difference whether the value for time ('t') is a positive or negative number. This raises spectres of time travel at a quantum level but not necessarily at a 'macroscopic level', the realm of normal human experience. Feynman, and later Wheeler, both sought to argue that viewing the positron, the anti-particle to the electron, was mathematically equivalent to viewing an electron moving backwards in time. The macroscopic, linear scenario of 'cause' followed by 'effect' do not have any real meaning in the quantum world.
Strangely enough, although the novel is a fairly recent addition to the literary canon (around 1700 in English), there were few stories written about time travel until the middle of the nineteenth century and almost all of those were written from a present perspective looking into the future. Possibly the earliest known which travels into the past is a short story written anonymously for the Dublin University Magazine entitled 'Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism'; for a novel, one has to wait for Mark Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in 1889, although the main purpose of Twain's book was, likely as not, a thinly veiled satire on the works of Sir Walter Scott, for example 'Ivanhoe' and its imitators.
Perhaps, the dearth of visits to the past, as opposed to the future, had to wait for the rise in the disciplines of paleontology, geology and the early stirrings of the multiverse in popular culture to lend credence to a tale of actual time travel into the past, although the so-called 'grandfather paradox' presents a problem - you step back into the past and shoot your grandfather before he sires your father thus precluding your birth. I have never seen this as a paradox because, so long as one believes in the veracity of cause and effect at the human level, you clearly do not go back with the express intention of murdering your grandfather nor will you be 'allowed' to; at best it can only be a paradox in that most paradoxical of realities, to human minds at least, the quantum world.
At the very worst, all that a time traveller can do in the past has already happened simply because the world is as it is; history has already witnessed your actions in the past and has written them in 'tablets of stone'. So, even if time travel into the past were possible by some means, you could still not effect even the minutest of changes to your past behaviour or alter events.
However the position becomes much more interesting if you consider that with every 'event', quantum or macroscopic, the universe 'buds' another universe in the infinity of universes that make up the multiverse. You kill your grandfather, as in the scenario above and the universe changes into an alternate version in which you do not exist but since you do exist, when you return to your own present, you return to the universe that you left not to the alternate one. Despite having a clear and vivid memory of pushing your grandfather off the 4ieme étage of the Tour Eiffel and seeing him splatter like so much strawberry jam on the pavement below, you 'know' that you did not do itl The 'protected' nature of the past is preserved.
I often, in the quiet of my time, muse on such things as time, its nature and its passage, but, as Alexander Pope once famously pointed out*, 'A little learning is a dangerous thing, Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.' I find that it is primarily a function of age as you realise that three quarters (at best) of your life is past and you should have at least tried to do more than warm your hands under her fur coat.
The title owes its provenance to Mr David Bowie, Esq ('Time' from 'Aladdin Sane') which miraculously escaped an edit in the US release of the single; the poor record company bozos did not perhaps understand the word 'wanking'. That, 'Aladdin Sane' that is and 'Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars' probably constitute the high point of Bowie's career, although I have a soft spot for 'Scary Monsters' but only if Fripp is on guitar.
Postscript:
Anyone who has read even a small proportion of this blog will know that the Penguin and I share a deep affection for coincidence. Well, here is another one. The well-known, and loved, BBC series Dr Who, about the time-travelling 'Time Lord', has, since its reboot, been accustomed to having a Christmas 'special' as a way of bridging the six to nine month gap between one series and the next.
Between the third series and the fourth, a further mini-episode was inserted, in support of the BBC's 'Children in Need' campaign to raise money for worthy causes. This was composed of a five minute episode in which the then current Doctor, the tenth, played by David Tennant, meets up with the fifth Doctor played by, a now much older (and paunchier), Peter Davidson
The sixth episode of the fourth series, called 'the doctor's daughter' (actually a female 'clone') featured one Georgia Moffett, an English actress who just happens to be the daughter of the afore-mentioned Peter Davidson and Sandra Dickinson, who played Trillion in the TV version of the 'Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy'. David Tennant and Georgia Moffett were married in 2012! Just how spooky is that?
* 'Essay on criticism' which was written in 'heroic couplets' and which also includes 'To err is human, to forgive divine' and 'Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear to Tread'. Damned fine poet was our Mr Pope for all that he could, at times, be such a pompous ass.
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