TIME TRAVEL 217
CHANGING THE PAST
Time is one of the great mysteries of the universe. We are all swept up
in the river of time against our will. Around AD 400, Saint Augustine
wrote extensively about the paradoxical nature of time: "How can the
past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet?
As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity." If we take Saint Augustine's logic further, we see that time is not possible, since the past
is gone, the future does not exist, and the present exists only for an instant. (Saint Augustine then asked profound theological questions
about how time must influence God, questions that are relevant even
today. If God is omnipotent and all-powerful, he wrote, then is He
bound by the passing of time? In other words, does God, like the rest
of us mortals, have to rush because He is late for an appointment?
Saint Augustine eventually concluded that God is omnipotent and
hence cannot be constrained by time and would therefore have to exist "outside of time." Although the concept of being outside of time
seems absurd, it's one idea that is recurring in modern physics, as we
will see.)
Like Saint Augustine, all of us have at some time wondered about
the strange nature of time and how it differs from space. If we can
move forward and backward in space, why not in time? All of us have
also wondered what the future may hold for us, in the time beyond our
years. Humans have a finite lifetime, but we are intensely curious
about events that will happen long after we are gone.
Although our longing to travel in time is probably as ancient as humanity, apparently the very first written time travel story is Memoirs of
the Twentieth Century, written in 1733 by Samuel Madden, about an
angel from the year 1997 who journeys over 250 years into the past to
give documents to a British ambassador that describe the world of the
future.
There would be many more such stories. The 1838 short story
"Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism," written anonymously, is
about a person waiting for a coach who suddenly finds himself a thou-
CHANGING THE PAST
Time is one of the great mysteries of the universe. We are all swept up
in the river of time against our will. Around AD 400, Saint Augustine
wrote extensively about the paradoxical nature of time: "How can the
past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet?
As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity." If we take Saint Augustine's logic further, we see that time is not possible, since the past
is gone, the future does not exist, and the present exists only for an instant. (Saint Augustine then asked profound theological questions
about how time must influence God, questions that are relevant even
today. If God is omnipotent and all-powerful, he wrote, then is He
bound by the passing of time? In other words, does God, like the rest
of us mortals, have to rush because He is late for an appointment?
Saint Augustine eventually concluded that God is omnipotent and
hence cannot be constrained by time and would therefore have to exist "outside of time." Although the concept of being outside of time
seems absurd, it's one idea that is recurring in modern physics, as we
will see.)
Like Saint Augustine, all of us have at some time wondered about
the strange nature of time and how it differs from space. If we can
move forward and backward in space, why not in time? All of us have
also wondered what the future may hold for us, in the time beyond our
years. Humans have a finite lifetime, but we are intensely curious
about events that will happen long after we are gone.
Although our longing to travel in time is probably as ancient as humanity, apparently the very first written time travel story is Memoirs of
the Twentieth Century, written in 1733 by Samuel Madden, about an
angel from the year 1997 who journeys over 250 years into the past to
give documents to a British ambassador that describe the world of the
future.
There would be many more such stories. The 1838 short story
"Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism," written anonymously, is
about a person waiting for a coach who suddenly finds himself a thou-