Time and Time Again
Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn
Library Theatre Manchester, 1997
Alan Ayckbourn
The classic paradox of time travel is usually expressed thus: what if you went back in time and ended up killing your own grandfather? Wouldn’t that mean you never got born in the first place in order to travel back un time to kill your own grandfather in the second place? And if you didn’t, or weren’t, then who did? Or was? Or something.
Communicating Doors makes great comic mileage out of the potential confusion arising from this issue, where several characters have a vested interest in changing the past as radically as possible. Similarly films like Back to the Future and its sequels (or should that be prequels?) cheerfully make hay of the notion, pretending that by the end of episode three, despite any number of grandfathers having been metaphorically slaughtered, everything has turned out all right in the end. The darker Terminator films also involve visitors from the future, but they are concerned with nothing less than the survival if the human race, while in TV series like Doctor Who, Star Trek, Quantum Leap and Crime Traveller the past is frequently plundered for maximum entertainment potential. (Did you know, for instance, that the real reason the crew of the Mary Celeste jumped overboard was because they were frightened by Daleks?)
It's comforting to think that time can be so easily manipulated and that with a bit of luck we might even be able to have an effect retrospectively on events. But how close is this attractive notion to becoming a reality? And how desirable would it actually prove?
Some people are convinced that so-called paranormal events are proof positive that this kind of thing is going on all the time. One theory states that there are an infinite number of parallel space-time continuums all going on simultaneously, and occasionally one can jump from one into another. This is where ghosts come from. A function of sub-atomic activity (the pundits say), revenants from the past are particularly frequent visitors to buildings or surroundings which have a heavy concentration of sandstone, or rock with a high quartz content. Old buildings, often made of these materials, can trap the image of a moment from the past, and the disturbance of renovation can unlock these spirits, as if the energy field were being stirred up, and spectral images are subsequently given off in a kind of psychic chemical reaction. This category of PSI (Paranormal Sensory Information) covers everything from people sensing the sights and sounds of an ancient battle fought on a particular spot to the kind of force which makes animals and birds avoid the sites of Nazi death camps from the Second World War. Like so much else in the field of the paranormal, such phenomena have yet to be given a satisfactory scientific explanation.
Always assuming, of course, that there is one, because while seeing yesterday’s ghosts in the here and now may be spooky enough, spookier still is the apparent act of physically travelling back to a concrete past. One famous story involves two school mistresses from England who, on a visit to Versailles at the turn of the century, found themselves rubbing shoulders with character dressed like the contemporaries of Marie Antoinette. Other tales involve people briefly finding themselves inside buildings which were demolished years before, travellers getting lost and asking directions in a village which was no longer there, or others staying at hotels with a quaint feel, only to find once they’d left that no such establishment has existed for years. Yet in none of these time-slip stories has any hard physical evidence come down to us to prove the story to be genuine.
Whether any such evidence may have come down to others less willing to publicise the fact is another question. Things like ESP, thought transference and time travel have such enormous strategic implications that is is no wonder the military spend so much of their time vigorously denying they have made any progress along these lines, but then they would, wouldn’t they? Take the so-called Philadelphia Experiment. In the late 1930s, the US navy set up a project called Rainbow to explore the possibility of achieving radar invisibility. By 1941 it is supposed to have worked the trick of actual optical invisibility when an unmanned warship was made to disappear through the use of quantum energy. Shortly afterwards, the USS Eldridge, a manned ship, was used as a guinea pig. It was said to have been sent through the barrier of space and time, returning with some of the crew on fire due to misalignment of their atomic structure, others insane through the trauma, and yet others half-melted into the fabric of the ship through some catastrophic intermingling of their respective atoms. Crew member Al Bielek claims to have jumped ship and landed in New York in 1983, having been transported forty years into the future and hundreds of miles through space in an instant.
But one of the knottiest problems currently vexing scientists is whether or not there can be such a thing as an instantaneous physical reaction. Of course, each one of us can already see back into the past simply by looking up on a cloudless night. Those pinpoints of light started their journey to our eyes many many light years ago, and if a star were to explode at the moment we happened to be looking at it, we wouldn’t get to know about it for several millennia. Light is the fastest thing in the universe, yet even travelling at 186,282.397 miles per second, it still takes time to get anywhere.
Einstein based his specific theory of relativity on this simple truth, and also opened the door to the prospect of time going at different speeds depending on where you were in the universe. Take one simple example. I get on a space ship at noon and travel at enormous speed away from the earth. Before I left I synchronised watches with someone back home, and after half an hour I check the earth-bound watch through a telescope. But that watch doesn’t say 12:30; it says 12:15, because the light of earth’s 12:30 hasn’t reached me yet. So I continue travelling for another five years at which point I return home to discover that a whole ten years have passed on earth. According to the earth dweller, time for me has slowed down, whereas from my point of view it is time on earth which has speeded up and I have effectively travelled into the future. Who’s right?
The answer is, we both are. There can be no absolute concepts of space, time, speed and distance in a universe where everything is constantly in motion relative to everything else. At the start of this century, Einstein effectively overturned the physical laws by which we had been living quite happily since the age of Newton. Unfortunately, far from putting a tin lid on the whole shebang he ins fact opened a can of worms, the contents of which are continuing to crawl all over scientists’ homework to this day.
Taje sub-atomic matter. Up until around 1915, it had been assumed that matter was made up of tiny bits called atoms than which nothing could be smaller. But then a sub-atomic, or quantum world was discovered, and it was like stepping into a whole new realm where the physical rules by which man had lived for centuries simply no longer applied. For instance, certain fields of energy which have always existed in the universe – X-rays, electromagnetic forces, light – tend to behave in a manner for which there is no explanation in the language of conventional physics. One example is light itself – is it made up of waves or particles? Various experiments suggest that it can be either depending on how you conduct the experiment! If you test for waves, you will get waves; if particles, particles. It is as if the photons (or atoms of light) anticipate what the experimenter wants to see and react accordingly. No one has yet been able to explain this. Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shows that at the quantum level, you can never definitively predict what will happen, only establish a set of possibilities. When things are as small as this, there can be no such thing as objective observable reality because the very act of looking affects the results (eg, to see a quantum we have to hit it with at least one photon of light energy, but that impact affects the behaviour of the quantum. What we perceive is a distorted view of reality, a measure of our interference).
Basically, what we now know is that matter is made up of energy fields in a constant state of flux. Packets of energy are continually swapping from one state into another. By studying nuclear reactions, scientists have even postulated the existence of tachyons, theoretical sub-atomic particles which not only seem to exceed the speed of light, but also appear to travel backwards in time. Niels Bohr said “anyone who is not shocked by quantum physics has not understood it”, and Einstein was reluctant to accept the findings his work laid the foundations for because he disliked the idea of a God who played dice.
So where does this leave the concept of the time machine? Ever since HG Wells coined the term in the title of his story of that name in 1895, it has been an intriguing possibility redolent of man’s way of thinking. We want to travel around time, but preferably in the comfort of a tin box please, like a car or a carriage. Bit how exactly might it work?
A real time machine would probably have to create an enormously powerful energy field in a small space, in order to overcome the energy force dragging us forward through time. It is hypothesised that even such a machine could never take anyone further back in time than the moment it was created. It would also be dangerous to have it take off from the ground. The surface of the earth builds up over the centuries, through construction and geological action, so the safest place to launch the thing from would be the air or, better still space, where there is less likelihood of it rematerializing inside some solid object. Also, the faster it went, the heavier it would become so to overcome that, some kind of light or electromagnetic radiation would need to form part of the machine as, being non-material, they are not subject to the same forces. (That is, not as far as we are aware…)
But even assuming we ever built one of these things and got it off the ground, what would we do with it. The science writer Jenny Randles has a theory that the Titanic sank not so much as a result of hitting an iceberg, but because it was weighed down by the teeming hordes of time-travelling vultures who’s journeyed back to gawp at the disaster. By the same taken, UFOs might well not be aliens from outer space at all but simply sightseers from the future returning through a time warp. The variations in their appearance could be explained by the fact that they come from different periods in the future when the design of the time ship would be more or less advanced die to the standard laws of scientific progression and modification.
Certainly the reported scale, look and emotional responses of the ‘aliens’ they contain tends to suggest that they are humans from the future rather than creatures from outer space who are happy to perpetuate the myth of extraterrestrial life in order that the concept of rime travel doesn’t unduly alarm us. In previous centuries the undeniably weird was explained away as the work of gods, or witchcraft. In our space age the idea of alien visitors fits the bill as the most intriguing possible explanation. But for all these so-called visitations over the years, either from the future or from deep space, no visitor has ever left a single tangible shred of incontrovertible proof as to his or her or its origins.
Sceptics may scoff at the notion of time travel and insist it is likely to remain firmly in the realms of science fiction at least for the foreseeable future. But as the poet said, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. While it remains an idea, writers and filmmakers will continue to use time travel as an element of their plots, but if and when that dream ever becomes a reality, the chances are it will be sufficiently mind-blowing in itself to render any other gimmick redundant.
Watch this space… and time.