What tomorrow may bring�
9:12 a.m.
Wait, I�ve just remembered one! For Brumalia my daughter gave me an anthology of science-fiction time-travel stories which I have been reading before lights out, and the one I read last night was about a scientist who is about to leave his hotel room in order to give the lecture which will reveal to the public at large his new discovery, i.e. time travel. However, before he can leave, the hotel is engulfed in flames, and he uses the time machine to escape into the past. But he always returns to the exact moment he left, to that smoke and flame filled room, and takes another second to punch into the keypad his destination in the past so he can escape again. One of the premises in this story is that you can�t change the past, so he cannot prevent the fire, even though he has tried several times. He always returns to it. So he leaves you with the knowledge that every time he returns to the burning hotel he has less and less time before he himself ultimately dies from smoke inhalation or the heat. It gave me much food for thought.
I have my own theories about time and �time travel� related to my having read Michio Kaku�s book Hyperspace a few years ago, and other things that I hear and read about. For instance, it is not uncommon for someone to dream about an event in the future and then experience it almost verbatim, so to speak. My mother told me of one such experience in her life. She wasn�t very popular as a child. She made a friend at school who invited her to come visit on the weekend, and this was such a novel occurence that she was extremely excited about the whole thing. The night before the visit she dreamed that she was entering the friend�s backyard, meeting the girl�s mother. She described the way the garden looked, the dress the mother wore, etc. When she actually arrived at the house, it was exactly as she had dreamed it.
My explanation for this reeks of the worm-hole aliens in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but it can�t be helped. I believe that time is like a path upon which we can only move forward. Looking behind us we can recall where we�ve been, but the future is only revealed to us as it becomes the present. We are truly creatures of the moment. However, if we were able somehow to lift ourselves up off of the path, we would get an overview of it: we would see where it had been and where it was going. In my mother�s case, she had done just this while she slept, and had a glimpse into tomorrow.
Now a time machine would take advantage of this �lifting� process, and would be able to settle back onto the path at a different point from where it took off. Raise yourself up, say, �That looks like a likely spot,� and settle down a year ago or a month from now. The question of course is if this would create time paradoxes, the plot matter of sci-fi stories. If we accept the theory that every time a choice is made from a possible bundle of options a parallel universe is created, then it would seem that a time traveller trying to change the past would only create a new timeline in an alternate reality. His own time that he returns to would not be changed. So the man in the story I read last night had altered the past, but simply not for himself. He was firmly attached to his own timeline, no matter how many times and in how many ways he attempted to change it. The one path we are born on can only move in one direction.
But that doesn�t mean that there aren�t those among us who are strong in the ability to transcend the gravitational perspective (to coin a phrase) of the time path, and float above it to get a better view. We call these people mystics, seers, fortune tellers. There�s a lot of mumbo-jumbo surrounding what they do, but what if it is simply another mental ability, like problem solving, that could be trained or at least made less �mysterious�? Of course, there�s a lot of scepticism surrounding those abilities, but only because the majority of the adult population doesn�t have them. If we could catch this ability in children, monitor and train it, we would have more far-seers among us. On the other hand, who really wants to know their future?
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