Travel to the Past and Travel to the Future - Essay Example

__________ ID: ______ Roll __________ Time Travel The question about time is what past, present and future are and how they differ from each other. The differences seem striking and profound. In the past is everything we have seen and done; in the future everything that has not yet happened or been done, none of which we can yet see; and in the present lie all our experiences, thoughts and actions. We plan for the future because we might affect it, while we know the past is out of reach. This is why it makes sense to think what to do tomorrow, but not what to have done yesterday: the time to think of that was the day before, when what is now yesterday was still future. And having thought what to do, we can only do it now: while the time for action is future we can only await it, and once it is past it is too late. When it comes to time travel, the perception of difference somewhat diminishes, according to various scientists theories presented in various ways we conclude that most of them agree with the notion that in order to travel back in time one has to travel faster than the speed of light. Only in such condition one can travel in time. Along with the speed of light, there are other three factors that are considered for a person in order to travel. Those factors or four elements on which time travel is based are considered at the very core of science fiction, which are: Antigravity; Faster-than-light (FTL) travel; Invisibility; and Time travel to the past. Foote has his own unique perception according to which traveling whether it be the future or the past is reasonable to justify and can be universally accepted by the judgment that a person is always involved in traveling all the time, every minute and at every second and particularly in his sleep because as we sleep our consciousness takes a several hour-long leap into the future. It is no wonder that this scenario has a respectable, if dateable, past in the literature of science and fiction. But nothing, nothing except dream and memory, stands in relation to travel to the past as sleep does to travel to the future. Travel to the past takes all customary notions of cause and effect, as Foote believes in the laws of thermodynamics. (Foote, 1991, p. 9) which suggests, "heat is a form of energy that is in motion". Let us examine this quotation what Foote has said. Heat is a form of energy and so is the man. A living energy in the form of meat and flesh. A man if moves in motion obviously generates and radiates energy and if a man travels faster than the speed of a light it is for sure that he would wake up in an environment which is quite old and ancient for him. Faster than light travel No doubt Foote has related human capabilities with those of the speed of light. Here is the theory presented by Foote based upon FTL travel first: it is true that the physicists of the tribe have devised a mathematical fiction called the tachyon, which, if it exists, must travel faster than light. Greatly simplified, the logic runs like this: in the universe we observe, we postulate the existence of tardyons, particles which must travel more slowly than light, and luminons, which always travel at precisely the speed of light. The more energy one puts behind a tardyon, the faster it travels and the heavier it gets; but as one approaches the speed of light, vast increases in energy are required to accomplish minuscule increases in speed. Only an infinite amount of energy which is not available to us in this universe will suffice to bring a tardyon to the speed of light". (Foote, 1991, p. 9) There is indeed an asymmetry in respect of past and future in the way in which we describe events when we are considering them as standing in causal relations to one another; Macbeath explains this as it reflects an objective asymmetry in nature and thinks that this asymmetry would reveal itself to us even if we were not agents but mere observers. It is indeed true, that our concept of cause is bound up with our concept of intentional action: if an event is properly said to cause the occurrence of a subsequent or simultaneous event, it necessarily follows that, if we can find any way of bringing about the former event, then it must make sense to speak of bringing it about in order that the subsequent event should occur. (Macbeath, 1993) The existence of tardyons and luminons are moving with the help of the principle of symmetry which involves, certain unprovable assumptions about the nature of the universe according to which the existence of tachyons in time travel fully participate as particles which would always travel faster than the speed of light, and which would require ever increasing amounts of energy to bring them down closer to the speed of light, so an infinite amount of energy is needed to make them travel slower than the speed of light. (Foote, 1991, p. 10) In my opinion this is the reason as to why a person or an abject cannot travel easily in the past, however he can if he really possess that amount of light within. The science fiction takes advantage of these facts and opportunities provided to them by the physics laws and include 'tachyon-based FTL drives' to appear in the literature, the same facts are discussed and included in the science fiction movies. Despite so much involvement in science fiction movies, given the difficulties involved, FTL drives seem, to be a long way from the hard core of science fiction. Travel to the Past As we know that past events are not all equally past, nor are future events all equally future. Eighteenth-century events were present before nineteenth-century ones. The time order of the world's events is that in which they become present, thus forming what McTaggart (1908) called the 'A series'. As we shall see, the difference matters, we shall call the sequence the 'A-time scale', or 'A-scale', reserving 'A-series' for the latter and therefore not restrict A-times to A-moments, but will include intervals of them, whose order, inclusions and overlaps will be entailed by those of the moments they contain. Last year precedes this year because every A-moment in it precedes every A-moment in this year; next week includes next Monday because every A-moment in next Monday is also in next week; and so on. Which A-times may we credit an event with at any given time It is natural to give events any A-time that spans them, as when we say that a wedding happened last week or last year. But shall also need to refer to the A-time of an event. With these caveats, we may define past, present and future as follows. First, the past is the interval of A-moments open all the way from the remotest past up to, but not including, the present moment. Then other A-times are past if and only if the past includes them. Thus yesterday is past, as are last week and the first moment of last year. And any event is past while and only while its A-time the shortest A-time that spans it is past. Similarly for the future. The future is the interval of A-moments open all the way to the remotest future and back to, but not including, the present moment. Other A-times, such as tomorrow, next week and the last moment of next year, are future because the future includes them; and any event is future while and only while its A-time is future. The present is different. It may seem that, to make past, present and future incompatible, we should confine it to the present moment. But then many events, which last some time, would never be present. This problem has prompted the doctrine of the so-called 'specious present', which lets the present encroach a little on the past and the future. But by how much a minute, a nanosecond and what then marks the present off from the non-present past and future These questions have no good answer; but then they need none, since what is specious is the idea of a specious present, not the present itself. (Mellor, 1998, p. 9-11) Often the Time travel has been related with dream's great fascinations, since dreams seem to make and resemble the past. Every dream is a reflection of the mind as it memorializes the past, present or the future. Dreams often remind us that everything we ever thought or saw is in the past, can be real and can lead us to believe we understand the past. When time is measured in seconds or fractions of seconds, the past seems almost infinite and so are the dreams. One can cover long distances in a single moment and sometimes the distances become compact When Wells published 'The Time Machine back in 1895', the idea of traveling back in the past was unbelievable and was considered only as a fiction, however with the coming of twentieth century everything became possible, but science fiction and fictional characters where on the one hand is trying to prove time travel, on the other are those complexities and drawbacks of time travel which possess no solution to them. Example as illustrated by Fleiger demonstrates time travel motifs that for example a father and a son are living together. When son travels in the past, he founds his father to be his grandson or somewhat close to the relation. This aspect is uncovered by Fleiger. Some of the major flaws that Ashley has discussed not necessarily produce the desired output, travel into the past could produce catastrophes as well. Someone could go back in time and kill anyone, his or her parents for example, thereby preventing himself or herself from ever being born. One can change the conditions and scenarios while traveling in the past. According to Nuttin, traveling in the past can also produce unchangeable scenarios and aftereffects like in traveling to the past, one can either appear at a particular point in space or a particular fix point in time. In principle, it is impossible to do both simultaneously at the same time. Time shifting when used in every fictional movie or story is used very carefully out of fear of disturbing history; only automatic cameras are sent back to study the past. Often it happens that one is lost and the other one, chosen not to be lost or destroyed not because he is a specialist or a genius but because he is lucky, is sent back to extract it. "The first, and, let's hope, the last" traveler to the past, he is uniquely isolated. Travel to the Future When traveling to the future is related to sleeping through the years or centuries, it has the obvious advantage to the sleeper of evading the toils of the present. It is the sort of thing, which depends, one would think, at least partly on the idea of progress. If the future were likely to be less attractive than the present, then the traveler would be better off staying put. It would appear that the notion of substantial change in the human condition, and that for the better has not been imagined for most of the history of the human race, except perhaps for the movement of the individual into Great Time. If any change did loom on the horizon, it was as likely as not a change for the worse in the form of plague, famine, or invading barbarians. The most common example is the movie "Final Destination" in which when the main character knows any incidence beforehand, he tries to escape out, and the same thing happens aftermath. Time traveling, according to Burroughsian, enable the people to get glimpses of the future and the past, and ultimately give them the power over their destiny, has been a popular topic of science, literature and movies for at least 100 years. The most common example is the fiction movie "Final Destination" whose main notion is the authority over the destiny. Physicists understand the theory of time travel into the future; there is no consensus on how time travel into the past would work. Albert Einstein showed in the early part of the 20th century that gravitational force slows time, which means that time passes a little quicker at the top of a skyscraper than it does on the ground, but the difference is so small that we often ignore the facts that he intended to tell us and pay no attention to the slight time warp. Recovering the recent past is made difficult for historians by such institutionalized obstacles as the Official Secrets Act in England and other forms of classification of documents and records for up to fifty years after the event. Hidden political agendas, too, may skew perceptions of the historical past. For archaeologists and prehistorians there are additional difficulties imposed by the tyranny of what calls transformations in the archaeological record, by which a wide variety of natural and cultural factors intervene between the living cultural system and its residues on the one hand and the association of materials found in or on the ground on the other. The challenge for both prehistoric and historical archaeology, therefore, is to produce credible ideas of the past by controlling for factors of these kinds. (Richard, 1990) The final reason for the appeal of travel to the future rests not in the psychology of the reader but in the needs of the author. Up until the 1930s, most authors of science fiction felt the need to anchor the fantastic future in the familiar present: Verne began the 20,000-league voyage of Professor Aronnax in Nebraska in 1866. H. G. Wells started the incredible voyage of the inventor of The Time Machine in a Victorian drawing room, the futuristic invasion from Mars in a small English village. In 1917, Edgar Rice Burroughs found it appropriate to begin the Barsoom tales in the Arizona of 1865. In 1928, Philip Nowlan told the story of a Buck Rogers who, shortly after World War I, was entombed in a cave in good mythic fashion, only to revive in the year 2430. As late as 1937, Olaf Stapledon considered it necessary to anchor the cosmic vision of Star Maker in the dream of a narrator on an English hillside. (Foote, 1991) Future - Unpredictable but Inventible According to Nuttin, 1985 the content of past and future time perspectives are events, situations and projects that off and on occupy the individual's mind. These contents with their temporal sign (past or future) have an affectively positive or negative importance for the subject. It is because of their affective or motivational importance that the subject remembers or anticipates them from time to time. Neutral objects or objects without any importance are not integrated in an individual's time perspectives. The positive or negative characteristic (pleasant-unpleasant) of past, present, and future objects constitutes the affective attitude of an individual towards his personal past, present, and future. (Nuttin, 1985) Attitudes towards the past, the present, and the future can be characterized by other components than their affective aspect. For example, the subject may have the impression that he is able to control his future or that it escapes him completely; he may perceive the future as very near or as still very far away, as exciting or as boring, etc. These components also affect the individual's motivation. We refer to Nuttin et al. (1985) for a brief theoretical and methodological discussion of time attitudes and attitudes towards time in general. The Time Attitude Scale that Nuttin constructed to measure individual attitudes towards the personal past, present, and future. The scale is based on Osgood's semantic-differential rating technique. We use this technique, however, not to measure the semantic content of the concepts past, present, and future, but to investigate the subject's attitudes towards these temporal dimensions and their content. Based on preliminary studies and on their face validity, nineteen bipolar pairs of adjectives, such as 'pleasant-unpleasant', were selected. Some adjectives express an affective attitude, others refer to other aspects of a subject's motivational attitude towards the past, present or future. Each pair of adjectives corresponds to a 7-point scale ranging from very positive to very negative. For example, for the pair 'pleasant-unpleasant' the seven scale values are: very pleasant, pleasant, rather pleasant, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, rather unpleasant, unpleasant, very unpleasant. Subjects are asked to indicate on each scale how they spontaneously experience their personal past, present, and future. It is obvious that the present refers to the subject's present life period, and not only to the present moment in the strict sense. It is the period or situation experienced by the subject as his present condition. The 'present' includes the immediate future, as well as the recent past. It may be necessary, with regard to the purpose of a study or the situation of the subjects, to define the boundaries of the 'present life period'. (Nuttin, 1985, p. 92) Work Cited Foote Bud, 1991. "The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction": Greenwood Press: New York. Lens M. Willy & Nuttin B. Joseph, 1985. "Future Time Perspective and Motivation: Theory and Research Method": Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Leuven, Belgium. Fleiger Verlyn, 1997. "A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faerie": Kent State University Press. Place of Publication: Kent, OH. Ashley Mike, 2000. "The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950: Liverpool University Press. Place of Publication: Liverpool, England. Richard A. Gould, 1990. "Recovering the Past": University of New Mexico. Place of Publication: Albuquerque. Macbeath Murray & Robin Le Poidevin, 1993. "The Philosophy of Time": Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: Oxford. Mellor D. H. 1998. "Real Time II": Routledge. Place of Publication: London. Read More