As Richard mentions in comments, another famous example of temporal reversal is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unmoored in time, and finds himself experiencing wildly disconnected moments of his life in an unpredictable order. At one point he becomes unstuck in time and watches a movie played backwards. The movie shows the firebombing of Dresden, which Pilgrim had witnessed in person.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
In the Afterword to Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis credits a “famous paragraph” by Vonnegut in inspiring his work; it is generally thought that this is the paragraph, although others have suggested something from Mother Night.
Besides incompatible arrows of time, Slaughterhouse-Five explains the temporal viewpoint of the intelligent beings on the planet Tralfamadore, who can see all of time at a single glance:
The Tralfamadorans can look at all different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
The Tralfamadorans are “eternalists,” who buy into the block time view of the universe — that the past, present, and future are equally real. They are so convincing, indeed, that Slaughterhouse-Five is quoted by Scholarpedia as an illustration of the concept.
Next up: Merlin, and the day he rented Memento.
Now, you know perfectly well that Memento plays tricks with chronology, but all of its arrows are perfectly aligned.
Edgar Allen Poe is attributed with describing space and “duration” as one and the same, the precursor of four dimensional spacetime. It is interesting that writers, who must develop series of events into a coherent narrative whole, should be the ones best at presenting the concept of time as an actual dimension. We instinctively treat time as a dimension. It’s called narrative, or history.
How events should be so connected, for the transitions to be seamless, yet so distinct they don’t just all blur together, or that we see the future approaching and the past receding, is another question.
Speaking of inconsistent chronologies, a seasonal application has been added to gmail:
http://www.gmail.com
One of my most favourite SF stories is that of “The Time Lapsed Man” by Eric Brown, wherein the protagonist becomes temporally disconnected not from time itself (if that makes sense), but from his own senses. It’s quite a mild condition at first, but as more and more senses become time-lagged and by ever increasing lengths of time it progresses rapidly… to a sad ending.
Since the arrow of time is still pointing in the right direction in this story I’m not sure if it qualifies.
Zwirko,
Here is a link to a story about the exact opposite effect;
http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/jill_bolte_tayl.php#more
It is about a neuroscientist’s experience with a stroke on the left side of her brain, which disrupted the linear, analytic functions, while leaving her very aware of the immediacy of her situation.
Sort of a real life Flowers for Algernon, but going the opposite direction.
I’m surprised I didn’t immediately think of my favorite example of reversed time fiction, Himself in Anachron by Cordwainer Smith. It, a leftover from Paul Linebarger’s notebooks, was supposed to be in Last Dangerous Visions (which has time progression problems of its own), but didn’t appear until 1993. Rather than merely experiencing time backward, the protagonist really lives backward (and very, very slowly).
Another great Vonnegut is Timequake, in which a period of time (I believe ten years) is repeated. Everybody is aware they are re-living the decade, but they can’t change anything. When normal time kicks in again, many people are so accustomed to the spectator role that total chaos ensues. Worth a read!
You should be able to ‘get’ this short story of mine even if you cannot read German. See http://www.savory.de/tempus.htm
It’s about the moment when time’s arrow reverses direction.
Modern physics supports various “science” fiction ideas: worm holes, time travel, quantum superposition of planet sized objects, multiple universes, cosmological strings, vacuum decay, event horizons, etc.
These crazy ideas would be a heck of a lot easier to swallow if they (a) had any direct observational support, or (b) were derived from theories that unified all the forces.
When you see crap come out of an incomplete theory, it’s a sign that your theory is crap. It’s not a sign that the world is a strange place. It’s a sign that there are many many different theories that are compatible with observations and you just happened to randomly choose one that is very likely wrong.
I imagine Groundhog Day will be coming up soon, in which the arrow of time is split into a multitude of arrowlets, all of which travel in parallel.
How about a meandering arrow of time. One of my favorites is Alfred Besters, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed”.
From Wikipedia; “is an ingenious twist on the standard time-paradox story. A man discovers how to travel through time, and arrogantly decides to alter the present by journeying into the past and murdering prominent historical figures. He returns to the present, only to discover that nothing has changed … except that it has, but in an unexpected way.”
I hope all this presages another post on the arrow of time…..I’d particularly like to hear SC tell us about whether inflation really solves the Problems [flatness, horizon, etc].
I always thought Vonnegut was one of the best science fiction writers of time, between Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Galapagos alone. I hear though that he personally always hated being called a science fiction writer, as that’s what English departments liked to do to marginalize his impressive work (as sci-fi is not “respectable” of course).
Another fictional character who seems to naturally experience the eternalist perspective on time, seeing his entire worldline “all at once”, is “Dr. Manhattan” from Alan Moores’ famous revisionist superhero comic Watchmen.
I would recommend Sirens of Titan.
You can’t go backwards in time because: (1) The past doesn’t actually exist. It’s just a memory. (2) There’s no such thing as an “arrow of time.” (3) In order for time to “reverse direction,” it would have to have an original direction of motion to begin with, which it doesn’t. (4) Time doesn’t “move.” Only objects move. It may take a certain measure of time for an object to move a certain measure through space, but nothing “moves through time.”
p.s. I discovered Vonnegut when I was a pre-teen back in the 60’s. He’s my favorite author and I was so thrilled when they made Slaughterhouse Five into a movie. I was telling my friends “We gotta see this movie,” but then my friends were greatly disapointed because they were expecting the sequel to the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Schlachthausen fünf,…Schlachthausen fünf,…Schlachthausen fünf,…
Mike,
That just doesn’t compute according to modern physics. All of time is supposed to be just one big metadimension, so trying to argue time is a consequence of motion rather than the basis for it will only get you ignored. It’s easier to ignore logic then admit systemic failure. Just ask Bush.
I still say that the past does not exist in any way other than a memory. Perhaps modern physics entertains a harmony of illusion, if it seems otherwise. Physics has been wrong before. Time can still be the basis for motion, but in order go to the past, there would have to be some place to go, and there just isn’t.
Whether your an eternalist or a presentist, you still have have the problem of explaining what “now” is. It can only be defined relative your own consciousness – there is no other standard. So what happens to time when you die?
Would the universe exist if there was no living thing to perceive it? There can’t be a “now” because everything we perceive has already happened 3/4 of a second before we perceived it. Even the present is just a memory, and therefore does not actually exist in physical reality.
Mike,
The future doesn’t exist either. Reality is just motion, which is energy in space. Since energy is conserved, the past is erased as the present is deciding among future potentials. This means the series of events that is time actually goes from future potential to past circumstance. The energy really just stays as what is present. I’ve been making the argument that as a measure of motion, time has more in common with temperature, than space(which I do feel represents something more fundamental, as the void, the context to the content of energy). Some of this is laid out in the second comment to the “Incompatible Arrows I”post. Modern physics is obsessed with information, which is time as dimension. If time is simply a consequence of motion, than information is constantly being created and destroyed and the analytic mind doesn’t like to consider that aspect, because it puts massive constraints on what we can know. The mind prefers comfortable illusions over harsh realities.
Even the present is just a memory, and therefore does not actually exist in physical reality
Careful.. getting dangerously close to idealism here 😉
Jeff, Mike,
However you subjectively measure it, there is only what there is. Yes, we register events after they happen, just as we see the light from distant stars eons after it’s emitted. The present doesn’t exist as a point, because it would be meaningless to describe a measurement of motion as a point. That would be like a temperature of absolute zero; The complete absence of motion. Although most motion is at the speed of light and our brains process information as frames/thoughts, otherwise it would all blur together, so we do think as a series of points.