Monday, September 19, 2016

Timely

This post might be a ham-fisted segue from the weekend's post - the one wandering around the idea of history's rhyming habit through time. So...time travel. Could it ever be possible to travel backward through those rhyming centuries, decades, years, or even just months or weeks? Novelists and film makers like to think so, scientists are less confident.

An intriguing idea, presented by Stephen King in his novel 11/22/63, featured (HERE) in my recent post is fascinating. King proposed that:
The past is obdurate.
In his novel the past had "pushed back" against the time traveller's mission to change an event, it seemed that the traveller's task was continually being made especially difficult, near to impossible. He persevered, with the best possible of intentions, yet eventual consequences proved dire.

Should someone, sometime, somehow find a way to travel back in time with the intention of changing... something, the past could well "push back" to prevent change. It makes sense to me , but my husband objected to (what he terms) "personifying the past". I responded that it doesn't really entail "personifying" the past. It's treating the past, or man-made time, as a natural entity, something akin to a gale-force wind, or like gravity, or a tornado which, if one tried, rather foolishly, to change its track, would appear to push back, physically. Intention to change something already in our timeline or time cycle - even a minor thing - could disrupt future events out of all proportion to the change made. The so-called Butterfly Effect applies.

We accidentally watched a time-travel-related film on Amazon Prime a couple of evenings ago. I say "accidentally" because Amazon had categorised its genre simply as "drama/mystery" :
I'll Follow You Down. We enjoyed the movie well enough, though it was another of those low-budget affairs, its interesting storyline could have been much enhanced with more $$$$$$$ available for sets and effects.
IMDB's nutshell synopsis:
After the disappearance of a young scientist on a business trip, his son and wife struggle to cope, only to make a bizarre discovery years later - one that may bring him home.
Expanding on that a wee bit: the scientist had discovered he could travel into the past via a wormhole he'd found a way to create. He decided to travel from the present (2016) to 1946 with the sole purpose of meeting Albert Einstein, to tell him of his discovery. He did successfully travel through time to 1946, but found that Einstein was not at home; before he could try to locate him the time traveller was mugged and killed. He, of course, never returned to his wife and family. 12 years later his wife, who had not recovered from the shock of her husband's disappearance, committed suicide. Her father, also a scientist and her son - a scientific whizz-kid, after much effort and research, found out what had happened to the boy's time travelling father. They were determined to make things right by the son travelling back to 1946, using the reconstructed research of his father, in order to stop his Dad from doing anything at all, other than travelling back at once to the present.

The son travels back, finds his father before he attempts to meet Einstein...I'll not reveal the ending.

My initial reaction was: "that story is different from the idea of the past pushing back, as in 11/22/63." But then I realised that the past had, indeed, pushed back via the murder of the time-travelling scientist, before he had opportunity to meet with Einstein. Had he succeeded in meeting with Einstein, what would have ensued in years following that meeting, due to matters discussed between the two? The future could have been majorly affected. Though the ending of the I'll follow You Down seemed to turn out as desired by all, we are not enlightened about events during the years after 1946 - in the "new" version of the time cycle. Similar patterns to those already set and experienced in the original cycle after 1946 might again emerge, via different kinds of events - the mother might fall ill and die, the son might have gone on to discover a cure for cancer...etc. Someone should write a sequel!



It's Music Monday.....Time? Bottled?


9 comments:

JD said...

There is no such thing as time :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AuQPqJPSKE

Twilight said...

JD ~ Clever video - thanks for the link. Man has made time exist though, given it a name, guided by nature's rhythms, constructed it for convenience of our species. So there is such a thing, just as there are such things as spring, summer, autumn and winter - for most beings and plant-life on Earth. :-)

mike said...

Quantum physics is easily dismissed as futuristic and hypothetical, but QP has many current applications. Experimental QP indicate space, gravity, and time are not what they seem to us mortals living in a macroscopic world. We humans seem very intelligent, but that's self-assessed and may be comparing pebbles to mountains, with us gloating over the size of our pebbles. As with so many technological advances, we humans will solicit greed, power, and warfare first, then evaluate the errors we've induced. I suspect time travel is doable and happening right under our noses right now somehow, somewhere in nature, probably on the atomic level, as quantum physics would predict.

It may be that time travel is already occurring for us humans a couple of hundred years into our future, say 26th century, and our everyday lives ARE being altered by the aberrations of such travel. How would we know?

Twilight said...

mike ~ I like that idea. It's begging for a good film script! It could be why we're in the bizarro world we now inhabit too. ;-/

mike (again) said...

Have you watched any of the old episodes from the TV series, "Quantum Leap"? The reruns are on every night here on MeTV, as part of our local ABC programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Leap

Twilight said...

mike (again) ~ "Quantum Leap" - yes we watched the whole series on Netflix from pilot to it's rather sudden end, earlier this year. I'd seen some episodes on TV in England a long time ago too. Don't know if it's still on Netflix or whether it's now been "retired". It was an entertaining series, sometimes funny, sometimes dealing with serious issues.

mike (again) said...

You can travel back to late 1700s Cornwall next Sunday...PBS' "Poldark" has a two-hour season 2 premiere.

mike (again) said...

Scumbag, Amazon Chairman and CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns the WA Post:

"WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)"
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-first-paper-to-call-for-prosecution-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer/

Twilight said...

mike (again) ~ Thanks - I shall try to remember - if we miss it (Poldark) I trust it'll be added to the streaming progs - can't recall if Netflix or Amazon, in due course.


Groan - Jeff Bezos - such good company in its early days, then its owner turned into a scumbag just like the rest of the wealthy and powerful!

We're considering going to see "Snowden" the movie in Lawton this week - it'll never come to our local.