Tea at Trianon: The Problem with Time Travel

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

The Problem with Time Travel

From author Steve McEllistrem:

One theory for time travel involves wormholes, which might allow for a shortcut from one point in space to another and from one point in time to another, yet many scientists who study this subject believe it isn’t possible. Another theory is that cosmic strings might contain enough mass that they could warp space-time around them, allowing for movement from one point in time to another. Again, we have no evidence that it’s possible, only a theory. The only way we know of for traveling through time is to move at close to the speed of light. Time slows down when we do that, so if we could get inside a spaceship and travel at nearly the speed of light, much more time would elapse outside the ship than in it and we could see the future. The problem is, we couldn’t get back to the past (our former present).

However, most time travel stories, even those that involve traveling to the future, generally include either a return to the present or (traveling backwards in time) or describe traveling to the past to change some event that will then change the future (the present in the story). If such stories are well done, well written, they can be enjoyable, but it’s difficult to avoid the trap of temporal contradiction (or temporal paradox) and it’s essentially impossible to explain how time travel would work in a way that satisfies me. The best example of the paradox is probably going back in time and somehow killing your grandparents or parents so that you are not born. How then can you exist to travel back in time and kill them? As a result, time travel stories fit much more securely in the fantasy genre than in science fiction. And it takes an awfully good fantasy to appeal to me. Dune was one such story, The Lord of the Rings another. (Read more.)