Science fiction is often unfairly painted with a large brush stroke, especially by those who just can't get next to the concept.
To many--and Mr. Moose is proud to include himself in this group--time travel is the benchmark of science fiction. Ever since Wells turned on his machine and flung us into man’s far distant future, the idea and implications of leaving here to go there has given birth to many tales of possibilities as yet unthought. So many, in fact, that a person could spend years reading or watching stories whose basis is a trip through time.
There are two rules serving as the core limitations of many time travel-based yarns. The first is that the time traveler is not allowed to do anything in the past that could affect the future. This point was given life in a Ray Bradbury’s short story and eventually onscreen in A Sound of Thunder. Even through this adaptation is not necessarily the film you would use to convince a non sci-fi person to cross over to the dark side, the point is well presented that any change--even the most insignificant--has ramifications. This rule is entitled the "butterfly effect".
The second rule tells the time traveler that he can not meet his past self. Two of the same thing can not occupy the same time and space. The very fabric of the time space continuum would be ripped apart. This is referred to as "the paradox." The paradox has many different variations, but they all spell danger. For the traveler, the future and the universe.
But since you can’t spell "science fiction" without science, this discipline gets a great deal of scrutiny; a dissection of the sort that lays the patient open on the table and does more of an invasive exploratory then a delicate surgery. This examination tells us what is possible and what is not when traveling through time.
My recent exposure to the works of Dr. Ronald Mallett, professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, has forever unsettled this favorite topic of mine.
Dr. Mallett's career and passion began with two events: A personal loss, the death of his father from a heart attack at age 33 when Mallett was ten; and his reading of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
Young Ron dedicated himself to build a time machine in order to travel back to help his father prevent the heart attack.At the University, Dr. Mallett includes among his research studies: relativity, black holes and, of course, time travel. The one thing that has become clear to him is that travel to the past is a theoretical impossibility. A traveler could never go back any earlier in time then the invention of the time machine.
Even though the subject at hand is all conceptual, this was still a blow to science fiction as well as me personally. This science fact made implausible many of the stories that have shaped the modern sci-fi universe.
No longer can we play the "if you could go back" game, which includes some of these variations:
If you could go back to:
April 14, 1865
April 14, 1912
December 7, 1941
November 22, 1963
September 11, 2001
What would you do?
Dr. Mallett is still working on travel to the future and this still fascinates. But the future has always been what science fiction was about, what it predicted,what it helped create.
This change has made me understand that the true unknown of science fiction is the past. And now I am afraid it will remain unknown forever except in the mind of the writers, the writers of fiction.
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