I
have only seen maybe one episode of Star Trek and only two of the six Star Wars
films, so I will not pretend to be an expert in science fiction. However, I am
obsessed with Doctor Who, LOST, and the book The Time Traveler’s Wife, plus I’ve read some of Stephen Hawking’s
stuff, so I will pretend to be an
expert in time travel.
THEMATIC ASPECTS
The use of time travel in fiction can aid the writer
in revealing a message about philosophical arguments that have been going on
for ages, particularly that of fate versus free will. While the answer to this
question as portrayed in the work is strictly the author’s opinion, if the time
travelling aspects of the work reinforce the theme successfully, then the
answer is valid. The second main contribution to theme that time travel can
provide is that history affects the present and the future in profound ways.
The sequence of events leading up to the present (whether they can be altered
or not) will always influence the future.
EXAMPLES
The novel The
Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is not the ordinary
man-in-time-machine cliché of time travel. In the book, a man is plagued by a
genetic condition that forces him to skip around on his own life timeline at
random intervals, though it can also be induced by stress. The time travelling
adds to the love story aspect of the book by requiring the time traveler’s wife
to learn to be strong and independent, as she never knows when he could simply
disappear to spend time with the child version of herself or the version twenty
years older. She develops a thick skin because she knows that his disappearing
at this point in time is necessary for a significant event in her life to occur
some time in the past or the future. Though she lives her life in the normal
sequence, her husband’s skipping around creates its own sequential story, and
they reinforce each other with their durability and the strength of their love,
which binds them through time.
The TV series Doctor Who is a prime example of time
travel in action. The Doctor travels in his time machine, called the TARDIS
(Time and Relative Dimension in Space) to any point in time. Cautiously
avoiding the 1980s, The Doctor has visited the creation of the earth, the
destruction of the earth, and hundreds of times in between, as well as before, and after.
The adventures his companions experience always help put their own minuscule
lives into perspective as they witness events that occurred millions of years
before their birth and events that won’t occur for millions of years after
their death.
In LOST, another television series (2004-2010), time
travel plays a significant role in the revelation of the plot. There is no
mention of time travel until the fourth season, where an individual’s
consciousness escapes their mind at one point in their life, and they go limp
while at another time they wake up. This phenomenon was caused by the island on
which they were stranded being out of sync with the rest of the world by about
a day, though in many instances, the characters were able to move the island
through time utilizing electromagnetism. (Note: if you have not seen the show
before, this probably sounds like the most screwed-up plotline you have ever
heard, but I assure you that you will not regret watching it.) In the fifth
season, the characters end up trapped on the island in 1977, and they decide to
blow up the electromagnetism station to prevent the incident which caused the
island’s strange properties, but as it turns out (*SPOILERS!*) them blowing up the
station was what caused the incident in the first place. Though the time travel
does not occur until the fourth and fifth seasons, it does fill in many of the
plot questions brought up during the first three seasons. Watching closely, there
are little to no plot holes, though there are dozens of characters who are
involved.
Other examples which I do not have enough room to
discuss here include the Back to the Future film trilogy, the film The
Butterfly Effect, and the short story A
Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury.
THE REAL SCIENCE BEHIND TIME TRAVEL
Theoretically, it is scientifically possible to travel
into the future, but probably not the past, unless worm holes exist. But let’s
take this one step at a time. As Stephen Hawking said, time is relative, which
means time does not progress minute by minute at the same interval for each and
every atom, and therefore, person. You see, time is a dimension, just like the
three we can see: height, width, and depth. Right now, you are moving through
the dimension of time, just as you move through the dimension of height when
you, say, raise your hand. The speed at which you raise your hand determines
how long it takes your hand to get there. If you move slowly, it takes longer.
Common sense. But if you think about it, since time is the “fourth dimension,”
you can move faster through time in a similar way.
Take the twin paradox, for instance. If a set of twins
are on earth, and one takes off in a spaceship that goes faster than light
(faster than the speed of light is the only way this would work in a noticeable
way) and the other stays on earth, the space twin will travel faster through
time than the earth twin. So when the space twin returns, he will noticeably younger
than his earth twin (and everyone else, really). It’s kind of a difficult
concept to grasp, but this is the theory. Unfortunately we do not have the
technology to go faster than the speed of light, so we can’t do this presently.
The twin paradox is an example of how we could travel
into the future (the space twin travels faster through time than the earth
twin), but there is another way. Worm holes. Now it took me a while to
understand this concept, but Stephen Hawkings’ book A Brief History of Time, explained it well, using the analogy of
two mountains. If you are standing on top of one mountain and wish to reach the
peak of the mountain next to you, you would have to climb down mountain A and
then back up mountain B, which would take a while. But what if there was a bit
of space-time that connected the tops of the two mountains? You could probably
cut your time in half by walking strait across (or whatever fraction; I’m not good with math). Don’t
take my word on this, but a worm hole might be able to work both ways, back and
forth between the two mountaintops. But no matter; we haven’t found any yet.
MY OPINION
Time travel is one of the most intriguing concepts in
science to me. I have attempted to write a novel with time travel in it (with a
similar concept as I mentioned from LOST, with their consciousness leaving
their body at one point in time and entering in another) and I must say, it is
extraordinarily difficult. I have put the project on hold for now while working
on something different because it was beginning to get a bit too complicated
with all that back and forth in time business, but I am planning on coming back
and finishing it eventually because I adore the story. I believe that writing
about time travel takes a lot of hard work, and though it may take a while (and
a lot of brain-draining intellectual thinking) to write a successful time travel
story, the end result is usually spectacular.
