On Time

One of my favorite episodes of the TV series Lost is Season Five's "Whatever Happened, Happened," because it contains the following conversation between Hurley and Miles, who have found themselves thirty years in the past:

• Miles Straume: Any of us can die because this is our present.

  Hugo 'Hurley' Reyes: But you said Ben couldn't die because he still has to grow up and become the leader of the Others.

  Miles Straume: Because this is his past.

  Hugo 'Hurley' Reyes: When we first captured Ben and Sayid just tortured him, then why wouldn't he remember getting shot by that same guy when he was a kid.

  Miles Straume: Huh... I hadn't thought of that.

If you followed the intricacies of that particular show, you'll know just how exasperating that conversation must be for Miles, and how funny it is for the audience. The point is that no one ever quite knows how to handle the time paradox in science fiction. The basic theories are these:

• time is progressive and immutable -- we cannot change the past
• time is fluid and past events may be altered, elaborated on, or avoided
• time has its own "gravity" (for want of a better word) that pulls it towards a certain series of events, although there may be variations or substitutions in the details
• time is random (think of disk RAM) and all events are at any time perhaps simultaneous or folded in time to be near each other (like two edges of a sheet of paper folded over)
• all time and all possibilities exist and coexist in parallel streams or tributaries of time that may or may not overlap
  

The most famous paradox concerning time travel is the "grandfather" or grandmother paradox: what if you went to the past and by some means altered a sequence of events that led to you not being born? Would you immediately disappear? Would you be born elsewhere, to other parents, and be consequently much different (in terms of upbringing and genetic disposition)? Furthermore, if you did disappear, would that mean you would not have been able to go into the past in the first place, so whatever event you had triggered that had prevented you being born would not have happened, so you would have been born after all, and if you then went back in time. . .

Time travel is a tricky gig. It has fascinated me ever since I learned that Dr. Who was a Time Lord, sometime in 1963. The idea that a traveler could observe past or future events, and influence their outcome, was intriguing. Even more problematic, however, would be to observe events but not take part or influence them in any way. That possibility seems reasonable at first glance. But then, what if the act of observing or being observed changed someone's behavior? Light, traveling, is either detected to be a particle or a wave, depending on the moment of observation. What if time is a similar construct, and the very act of observation can influence events? In order to be completely safe, the traveler would have to exist outside of time, outside of the moment being observed, and therefore invisible to everyone present.

One aspect of time we can all agree on (except, of course, for Benjamin Button) is that we perceive it to flow in one direction only: we are born, we grow up, we die. The issue to understand in that sentence is that it depends on our perception. If we acknowledge that our lives follow a linear progression of perceived events, then it would not necessarily matter what year we were in: the moment we would be experiencing would be our "present moment of perception," and that's what Miles is saying in his conversation above with Hurley.

Hurley responds with the "grandfather paradox," however, saying that if someone else's travel to the past impinged upon our existence there, we would remember it--i.e. that there would be no "first run" of events when the time traveler was not there. Both views depend on our perception: the past is either already over and immutable (you would remember the time traveler from your past experience); or someone can go back and be in a past moment for the first time at a later date; an outside observer would notice that there was a change: that events already finished and over (Act I) were changed in another version of that timeline (Act II) -- like some kind of interminable play by Samuel Beckett.

This would suggest that there is no such thing as one time-line. It would suggest that time is constantly forking into myriad directions, and our perceptions of it constitute each individual stream of events as perceived by us and the people around us. Think of Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of the Forking Paths" for a moment, and you will have a clear understanding of how future events can branch out into multifarious possibilities, streaming and forking from a present point that is not fixed, but that is consequent to a previous forking or branching of possibilities in the past.

It would mean that each individual is responsible for the forking paths of his life (don't mention Frost, please), not only responsible for his own being, but also for streaming future events like light streaming through a prism but only following one perceived route in the possible spectrum available to him (we can only handle one perception of our surroundings and the present; we couldn't handle concurrent timelines in which events are seen to turn out in several different ways all at once).