Time.. I

What price can one put on the future?

Ever since time began, people have been trying to think their way around it. There have been crystal balls and seers for as long as man has any memory. There have always been those whom we say can see into the future. But for the most part, our world is confined to merely three dimensions.

I do not plan to explore the physics of time travel, is at all, such speculation is possible .. you will have to ask a theorist for that. No, this blog has to do only with the way that time travel has been viewed in popular culture.

There seem to be two broad views around: the first is the chaotic viewpoint. This essentially means that changing the tiniest event of the past can cause catastrophic changes in the present and in the future. The theory rests on the assumption that every event in spacetime is somehow connected to every other event in spacetime… which is a pretty decent assumption.. and that ‘reality’ as we see rests on an unstable maximal point in the infinite dimensional space of ‘events’. Changing any single event from its ‘ordered’ occurrence can cause reality to go tumbling downhill, and Gawd knows what will happen after that.

This viewpoint was the one shown, in say.. ‘Back to the Future’.. where MJ Fox tries his best to get his parents together when they were high school students… or else his own existence is in jeopardy. This was also the perspective taken by Ray Bradbury is his short story… drat! I just can’t remember the name.

Nice. The other viewpoint is that reality sits in a minima in the aforementioned space of events. Changing any event is not going to do much, as negative or ‘restoring’ forces act to bring reality back to where it was. The Universe, in other words has a certain amount of ‘elasticity’.. that allows it to spring back from deformations of reality to what it is supposed to be like. This is the perspective taken by relatively fewer writers. But it has had its adherents.

The great Asimov has shown an interesting perspective in his book, ‘The End of Eternity’. Here he talks about the Universe being truly, accessibly, four dimensional. Hence, there are people who can move back and forth through time.. regulating it.. and policing it. If this sounds even slightly like the ridiculous Van Damme movie ‘Timecop’, then this would be a good time to buy the BOOK and read it. Anyway, these people, the ‘Eternals’ work to the ultimate end of human development and peace… and their motto is MPE/MPE. Which stands for ‘Minimum Possible Effort, for Maximum Possible Effect’.. hence perturbations in spacetime are supposed to be just as much as needed and not a bit more. But again, Asimov recognizes a fundamental truth… that to live is to achieve and if achievement is taken away.. then life itself becomes pointless. If we know what is to happen, then our future has not been revealed to us.. it has been taken away from us. Hence, the end of the book proceeds along this line of thought… any more would be a nasty spoiler.

To be continued…