Time Flies Like an Arrow;
Fruit Flies Like a Banana

by Mary W. Matthews

Once in a great while, I enjoy a time-travel story, like “Groundhog Day.” But I think most time-travel stories are the progeny of lazy writers who would rather meet a deadline and get paid handsomely than think about whether their premise is even slightly plausible.

Some time-travel stories feature protagonists who go back in time and talk to their younger selves — there’s a car commercial on the air right now with that plot line. But if in, say, five years, I am going to go back in time and talk to my 10-year-old self, why do I not already remember it? Why don’t I remember encountering a ravishingly beautiful grownup (because she looked so much like me) who talked mysteriously about the future? — to paraphrase the TV commercial, “Buy Intel. Bet on the Bucs to win the 2003 Superbowl. Never trust any man who says he only wants to fly ‘straight,’ he doesn’t need to learn how to take off or land.”

Most time-travel scenarios involve paradox. For example, suppose you’re in the market for a certain kind of car. You missed reading the classifieds one morning, and by the time you get around to them, the used car of your dreams has been sold to someone else. You kick yourself, and then you invent a time machine. You go back in time (managing to avoid the whole “matter suddenly appearing inside other matter and exploding” phenomenon) and succeed in buying your dream car. At the moment you ought to be inventing your time machine, you are driving down the road in your dream car. So the time machine never gets invented. So the going-back-in-time thing never happened. So you missed reading the classifieds one morning, and the loop starts again. Forever.

The problems of plausibility and paradox are not limited to time-travel within one’s own lifetime, however. If at some future date a time traveler travels back into our past, then that trip has already happened. It’s history. If time travel were possible, Lee Harvey Oswald was a time-traveler sent to stop Kennedy from turning all of Washington, D.C. into the Lincoln Bedroom. The Great Fire of London was caused by a time tourist’s cigarette butt. Sure, I believe that.

And suppose you could travel backward in time, ten seconds or years or epochs. How would you get back “home” to your own timeline? You’re changing history by the mere fact of existing where you had not existed “before” — breathing air that wasn’t breathed in your timeline, putting your microbes into the past’s air, killing an insect that ought to have nurtured a bird, causing the bird to fly elsewhere, causing St. Francis to reconsider his affection for wildlife, causing much of medieval history to change, causing the Protestant Reformation to fail, causing the papacy to become a hereditary world dictatorship. Or maybe one of those microbes you breathed out was a SARS bug, which the people of the past would have far less resistance to than we do today, and you start a plague that kills off most of the world.

“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; for the want of a horse the rider was lost; for the want of a rider the battle was lost; for the want of a battle the war was lost, and all for the want of a horse-shoe nail.” You swatted an insect and now you can’t go home again, because “home” isn’t there any more. It doesn’t need to be as dramatic a change as a plague; it could be as minor as kicking a horse-shoe nail down a storm drain. The “future” has still been changed and your home timeline no longer exists.

Moreover, because you changed the “future,” you changed your own memories within that “future.” In 1948, William Tenn wrote a science fiction story called “The Brooklyn Project” that is arguably one of the three most famous time-travel stories in history. Scientists have invented a time machine that oscillates between the present and the primordial like a pendulum. On the first swing of the pendulum, an insect dies and the reporters, who had been sitting on upholstered chairs, are now on hard chairs. “See, nothing has changed!” Another swing of the pendulum, and they’re on benches and using pencils instead of pens. After the final swing of the pendulum, the reporters are all purple-tentacled monsters in tanks.

“See,” cried the thing that had been the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations. “See, no matter how subtly! Those who billow were wrong: we haven’t changed.” He extended fifteen purple blobs triumphantly. “Nothing has changed!”

Remember “Mr. Destiny,” the movie where Michael Caine grants Jim Belushi’s wish to change that one moment that had defined his life forever, when as a young athlete he bobbled the big game? Most of the movie is a conventional morality play about how the grass may look greener on the other side, but we should be happy with what we’ve got. But if time travel were possible, when Belushi’s life-defining moment changed, not only did the course of his life change, but all his memories should have changed too. Why spend one’s every waking hour obsessing about a bobble that never happened? The movie skated very lightly indeed over the fact that the Belushi who had inhabited the new and improved timeline before the unimproved Belushi arrived was both selfish and corrupt, either a criminal or self-absorbed to the point of oblivion. When history changed, why didn’t Belushi instantly change in character, from obsessed by self-recrimination and regret to self-satisfied and corrupt? (Because then the morality play couldn’t have had a happy ending, and downer movies don’t make zillions in profits. Duh.)

We all assume that time is like a string of pearls, and that the world around us is relatively static, like a stage set. People imagine that they can travel back and forth along time as if time were the Mississippi and they were going from New Orleans to St. Louis to Memphis to St. Paul. But time is NOT a dimension in the same sense that length, width, and breadth are dimensions. Scientists have proven that there are something like 14 or 27 physical dimensions that are imperceptible to us. All physical dimensions are embedded in time, just as a skadillion dimensionless points are embedded in a line.

Moreover, everything in the Universe is in a constant flux, even if we can’t perceive it — a rock only looks immobile until you get down to the madly whizzing electrons in its atoms.  If time were the Mississippi, not only is the “river” moving, but so are its banks and the cities on those banks.  Life is a dizzying onrushing of billions of processes all happening all at once, cell division, electrons whizzing, neutrinos pouring through your body by the billions every second, cells being born or going cancerous — and all this is just on the cellular level. The Universe is not a static stage set upon which we move, but an unimaginably intricate concatenation of processes, from the subatomic to the galactic and beyond, in which we exist like a drop of water in a river.

When people explain chaos theory, they usually use the image of a butterfly in Europe or the U.S. that beats its wings and thereby causes a typhoon on the Pacific Rim. Everything is interconnected; everything is interrelated; your breakfast is six steps away from Kevin Bacon’s dinner. You flap your jaw, and somewhere on the other side of the world, a tycoon gets richer.

William Butler Yeats wrote, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Although you think of yourself as discrete, you are a pearl only metaphorically. You are as inextricably interconnected with the Universe, and with time, as a wave is part of the flow of the ocean or the dance is to the dancer.

So, when you daydream about time travel, send not to ask for whom the butterfly beats her wings. She flits for thee.