Time Travel

In this section we'll attempt to identify the film and television works that touch on the subject of time travel. Since Time is considered by many as a dimension, we will also fold in interdimensional subjects as well, however we will make best attempts to identify them as such.

First let's review time itself. According to college level physics text in the late 20th century, time is a relative dimension. Now while its relativity might be disputed (Albert wouldn't think that correct so be precise if you do dispute it) it only takes a few moments to realize that we mere mortals can only view time as a beginning and end. Measurement being one method of substantiating something we postulate to exist, then time is perhaps the easiest to prove existence for. It is, it will be or it was. Simple.

But time travel? Well we all travel ALONG with time, travelling forward. And in terms of our existence, we skip through time a bit every time we go to sleep. However, our body ages, electron clouds still spin about (positively and negatively) regardless of our sleep.

So it is difficult for us mere REAL mortals to travel forward in time. Perhaps an astronaut's physiology might skip one or two seconds as they orbit at very high relative velocities, however, I am not sure if all but a handful of physicists or physicians could measure and document that bit of relativity involved.

Einstein's theory of relativity says that as we get closer to the speed of light we begin to experience a time dilution factor. We can measure this with a radar gun, or even with the sound of a train whistle on a fast moving train.

But of course we don't get very close to speed of light in our existence. Where photons go at the speed of light, man can only go at several hundred magnitudes slower (not a precise definition to say the least).

So back to time travel. Going back in time, physically and in the real sense is at present states of knowlege impossible. To skip forward in time while theoretically possible, won't be doable in my lifetime. So...time dilution aside, Time Travel is impossible for use mere mortals at this time. Oooppsss there it is again. And of course that is why it is such a popular subject.

Doctor Who, a BBC television series also shown on Public Television in the U.S., (the longest running series in BBC history, and if you don't count endless spinoffs of the U.S. Star Trek group of series, the Doctor is the longest in TV history) postulates that "...if I've already done that and been there, then it's not a question of how...but when!". So to begin speaking in terms of time travel, we must encloak ourselves with the best of the time traveller's trappings.

So let's list some the things time travellers would have to deal with:

• Paradox: This always comes to mind...what if I perchance to meet my grandfather while travelling in time and somehow effect to have him killed. Do I cease to exist, or is the flow of time untarnishable...does a thing change simply because I go back and change it or is the timeline rigid and uneffectable. If it is uneffectable (is this a word?), then what is the use of time travel if only to go back and look how things really happened? Is time travel read only?

  According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by John Clute and Peter Nicholls 1, one of the first novels to discuss this topic was Time Bargain, written by F. Anstey in 1891 (also seen under the title Tourmalin's Time Cheques).

  Films like Time Cop show us how paradoxes work, with the twist sometimes unexpected...what if the guy who sent you back to correct an evil-doer's meddling, suddenly doesn't know why you went back, and futher, you are now disallowed from going back to fix this new problem? Oopps!!!

  Another impressive pair of films on this topic are the Terminator and Terminator 2 films. We have a rebel leader sending back a soldier to prevent a computer created android from killing his mother before he is born, and then again sending a machine to defy a newer design machine to keep the young rebel leader from being killed as a teenager.

• Pre-Ordained Paradoxes: This time travel attribute is based upon the idea that time travellers have already effected the time stream, and therefore,there altering of history is now pre-ordained. For instance, if one does not know the "correct" events to choose to support in your time meddling (i.e. like in Time Cop...when our hero finds out that a U.S. Senator has altered a business relationship in the past, can the time cop kill him in the past, or must he be careful to only kill the time travelling doppleganger? Which one is the correct path to support? Which one is pre-ordained to occur in order for the "normal" timestream to continue?)

  A better example might be the assassination of Lincoln at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. If Mary Lincoln were to be the victim instead of the former President, what would be the results in time? Suppose you find out that the murderer Booth, is actually a time traveller who is trying to continue slavery. Perhaps he failed in his mission to end slavery, perhaps because killing Lincoln makes him a more important figure (Lost Presidents have a better success at their programs than many alive), instead of preventing the nation to continue on its path to abolishing slavery. If Mary Lincoln were to suddenly move, unintentionally into the line of fire, a pre- ordained event would be altered. But if Booth misses Lincoln, perhaps Lincoln grieves so for his wife that he neglects his duties and is impeached in disgrace, setting slavery and equal rights back 400 years.

  A time fixer has quite the problem with this scenario, since it is a time traveller that kills Lincoln, which is the correct time track to support? The paradox is as follows: If Booth decides to kill Lincoln to continue slavery, and succeeds, then why does Booth need to time travel at all? If Booth manages to kill Lincoln and it STILL doesn't effect history, then perhaps the pre-ordained event is the abolishment of slavery, and if Lincoln doesn't make it happen, perhaps someone else will.

• Aging: In the television show Babylon 5 we see Ambassador Sinclair age rapidly as he is beset by being in the same place at the same time, his aging thing being tied to the Babylon 3 timeframe for a period of time. Once he unlocks himself from the Babylon 5 timestream, he stops aging. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long for him to add on a bunch of years, damn quick.

  Is this a "real" phenomenon or is it just a science fictional artifact of a vivid imagination?

• Sensitivity: Again, using the Doctor Who series as an example, does one become sensitive to time distortions if one travels a lot through time? The Doctor and Romana seem to have several cases of this during her brief visit to the series.

• Inter-dimensional Confusion: If two bodies of different timestreams occupy the same region in timespace, then a horrible interdimensional rift occurs at that spot, destroying those two entities. From Time Cop, we see this happen to our unlucky villian while Jon Claude Van Damme looks on. The Belgian wonder not withstanding, is this one believeable? The Doctor also makes every attempt to prevent his two selfs from meeting, in fact goes to great lengths to never visit the same time and space more than once. Several cases of his travels have never-the-less caused this to happen, and with unhappy results, usually.

• Time Streams: Are their parallel timestreams? If we make a decision to go one direction, is there a parallel dimension that forks from that point, taking us also in the direction that "might have been"? Sliders takes this concept to the extreme, there being an infinite number of timestreams to choose from, just slide to the next to find out how things could REALLY be fouled up. Of course, this show never gives you the subtleties of "should I chew gum in class or not", as our heroes pick up on the differences in their new world quite quickly. I perceive many alternates that branch off only in the minute differences possible, thus they could get "back home" without ever knowing it is not the timestream they left. And oh by the way, is time moving on as they trip from parallel universe to parallel universe, is time moving faster for them or their home dimension? Will they arrive home to find their families have mourned and moved on? Hmm.

• Time Lords: Is there a race who can exist outside time, and thus find themselves responsible for policing time travel? The Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey is populated by such a race of beings, and they even have a great barrier erected by that most famous timelord Rassilon (sp?), a means to keep others from screwing with the Lords of Time so they can go about their business without coercion. This leaves us to ponder the good and evil timelords (The Doctor: a sometimes bumbling but both his hearts are in the right place, and The Master: an evil timelord of horrible repute).

• Time Travel Technology: So how does one travel in time. Well, Einstein says go near the speed of light and you'll age slower that the rest, such that after a long near speed of light journey, you will return to find your generation is long gone. That's like time travel. But that's not the fine fun the Doctor and companions have. No, in the case of the Doctor we use a T.A.R.D.I.S., an acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space (or something close to that...a good Dr. Who fan will correct us for sure), happens to take on (kind of permanently for most of the series) the shape of a blue police box found in the U.K. But on the inside, it has rooms and rooms. Two (if not more ) flight control decks, and even a place where one can rest from the effects of time travel (since the timelords and companions can at time be quite sensitive to these effects). The Doctor's blue box spins out of sync with the spin of nuclear particles at a velocity near the speed of light, and thus removes itself from time and space, only to appear when the Doctor has arrived at his new destination, at which time the TARDIS reappears as it once again gets in sync.

  H.G. Wells' machine in The Time Machine spun a nevarious disk behind the rider, and somehow pushed his passenger through time.

  Another classic (we forgot it on our first edition of this page...so sorry fans of ...) is the DeLorean time machine (and we suppose the train in III) of Back to the Future. This is an interesting approach, mixed with techno babble (flux capacitor) which when combined with a particular speed suddenly drives the DeLorean into what we can only guess is light speed (leaving twin trails of flame on the road where the tires used to be) and off into the time stream (forward or back depending upon a setting on the special addition to the DeLorean time machine). Fun bit this, and we loved the license plate (OUTATIME) or something akin to that.

  This film also explores our next topic quite well, with Marty making the rounds of paradox and such as he alters the past and the future several times.

  Pre-Ordained Events/Pre-Ordained Paradox

  Another excellent form of time travel and which was produced by nuclear physics was that seen in Quantum Leap, a great science fiction drama series on television that combined "aura replacement" with travel through time. Dr. Sam Beckett built a cool machine which made use of a "quantum accelerator", however, while in the chamber, he was sort of transported back into time, and assumed the persona of person in that older time stream. Talk about paradoxes...however Beckett begins to figure out his travels are for a purpose...to right some wrong or slightly change some aspect of the lives around the subject he "leaps" into. Another excellent aspect of this series is the sidekick, who, by using the huge computer in Dr. Beckett's lab, is able to project a holographic image of himself into the timestream with Dr. Beckett.

  So rather than Beckett's paradox and fixups being totally pre-ordained, they are guided by the sidekick, and are required to be fulfilled before he can move on to the next good deed.

  Along a similar line was a recent Star Trek Voyager episode where Janeway and crew are sucked back into 1996 through a time rift created by a 29th century time traveller from StarFleet. Moreover, it appears that they are part of a "pre-ordained" time event that has already occurred, and therefore they must tread carefully to take the right steps to prevent the event from carrying out to its pre-ordained conclusion...that is, they must make sure another time-traveller's ship does not go forward in time and cause a cataclismic explosion which will destroy the terran solar system.

  Another Star Trek show, Deep Space Nine also played with time travel recently, with a show that took us back to the time documented by the classic Star Trek original series episode, "Trouble with Tribbles". Again, a pre-ordained history is already spread out before the crew of the Defiant, their job is to simply make it so. This means protecting Kirk from a fellow time traveller intent on killing the Captain and thus having a profound effect on the Klingon history so severely impacted by an alive and fully functional James T. Kirk.

  On the transportation note, Janeway's Voyager is swept through a "temporal anomaly" while Captain Cisco's Defiant is blown back by the mysterious forces of a chrono orb, a Bajoraan relic. Oddly enough we never see Cisco's crew use the orb to return to their own time, and while this nostaligic and humorous episode leads along the time continium, it leaves lots of unanswered questions.

  Other Time Machines/Mechanisms

  Time Cop used a huge magnetic field and a rocket powered sled to make the transistion in time and space, again perhaps using Einsteins mathematics to simulate the closeness to the speed of light.

  Sliders uses a special warp field (the physics of which he can't take all the credit for). The Time Tunnel started out as a device to peer back in time, but then a freak overload caused it to be able to project folks as well. Technology unkown, but quite impressive. Star Trek uses the slingshot effect for most of its time travel...a ship goes well beyond the speed of light already, warping space and moving vast differences without time dilution. So I guess the Star Trek universe postulates that Einstein was right, only it is Warp 100 or some such. Maybe gravity and near speed of light, in just the right mixture, are what are necessary, since usually the time travel is a slingshot effect near a Sun or other giant body. The only exception is the "Guardian", (Guardian of Forever the original Star Trek TV series). In this episode, a special alien artifact is found which can not only project the past, it allows Bones, and then later Spock and Kirk back to the pre World-War II days.

  We have also been reminded (thanks to RodIII@aol.com) of a fun film which has a unique time travel mechanism. The film was Time Bandits released in 1981 and written and directed by Terry Gilliam. The film features Sean Connery and John Cleese just to name a few. The story centers around a group of dwarves who have stolen a magical map of the Universe from God, and find that it shows holes in the fabric of reality. Soon they are using the holes as portals in time, taking a visit to see Robin Hood (Cleese), Napolean (Ian Holm), and King Arthur (Connery). The idea of time portals is also found in another British selection, this time from a children's tale on BBC, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. The story here is about children who go through the back of their wardrobe closet and find themselves in the land of Aslan, a medevial time of magic and mystery.

Well, that should pretty well initialize this discussion. Let us know what you think...

From The Encylopedia of Science Fiction 1, here is a list of novels that make for good reading on the Time Travel topic.

1 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Copyright 1993, John CLute and Peter Nicholls, updated and copyrighted in 1995 by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, printed by St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10010, ISBN 0-312-13486-X

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