Time Travel: Fact or Fiction
Jump into your time machine and travel with me to spacetimes where humans have yet to venture (tho' thinking about it consumes much of our mental energy)
“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” ~Albert Einstein
When I give book talks in schools about my Edge of Yesterday time travel adventure series for teens, I am often asked by teachers (especially skeptical science teachers!) if time travel is real.
I am a science writer, as well as a fiction writer, so I try to keep it real.
Citing Einstein, I note that, if all time is happening in the present, traveling out of time is not even a thing. Which usually begs the question about the “science” part of science fiction.
In response, I like to summon old Albert again. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Based on current levels of knowledge, time travel falls squarely into the realm of science fiction. As our understanding of the cosmos, quantum physics and time itself evolves, we—those who traffic in evidence-based data, adjust. In science, the process of discovery is not fixed; our knowledge is always evolving as is our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
So we have to go beyond what the physical evidence shows to add our human need to make meaning out of our experience. Making our way in a world, as Einstein speculates, where all time and space is happening at once, is beyond the capacity of our human minds to process.
So we organize experience through our five senses, through memory and make sense of it using this very human gift of the imagination. As a result, each of us lives in a subjective world of our own making. And it is up to us to make meaning out of it.
Our stories say a lot about us
I’ve always told storis. All my life, my mother would admonish me, “Robin, what an imagination you have!”
Since earliest childhood, I have been pretending about impossible things: why can’t I fly? I do in my dreams! I’m going to be a mermaid when I grow up; one who swims up waterfalls.
And last, but not least: I wish I could go back in time!
I’ve often wondered if I wasn’t born in the wrong time and place. I’m especially drawn to French history. And the American Revolution. And the Roaring Twenties.
Books became my way in—and out—of time.
I dove into historical fiction. In elementary school, I found Johnny Tremain, a 14-year-old boy who lived in pre-Revolutionary Boston, who becomes a member of the Boston Tea Party. Like Johnny, I would definitely have found myself front-and-center in the fight for America’s freedom from a monarchical madman.
My appetite for history grew with my reading sophistication. I memorized vast portions of Gone with the Wind. Not that I sided with the South or slavery—not by any stretch. But I so identified with the pluck and gumption of Scarlett O’Hara.
And science fiction. In college, I found the Canopus in Argos series by Doris Lessing. I got lost in her creations of other worlds and other times—alternate realities.
What is real?
Maria Popova observes, “Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning.”1 As the world evolves, as information expands, as technology and science jumps ahead at light-speed, we humans are the interpreters, the meaning-makers.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
~Albert Einstein
So we come back to the question: is time travel real?
From quantum science, we are learning that tiny particles, like the neutrino, can travel backwards. Experiments at CERN have verified that the Higgs boson travels faster than light. time is not an arrow. It doesn’t flow in only one direction. The question of “time’s arrow” moving from past-to-future is under debate.
From earliest prehistory, pictographs, hieroglyphs, myths and stories have conceptualized time’s passage in a multitude of ways.
So why shouldn’t we?
In fact, it seems we have pathways in our brains designed to do just that.
How often have you found yourself tunneling down the rabbit hole of memory? Or in moments of anticipation of some experience, flashing forward to the future?
Pieces of us, pieces of our minds, are always time traveling. Imagining ourselves getting the book deal. Ruminating over a lost love. Winning the lottery. Revisiting our childhoods. Envisioning our future.
As a science writer, I was honored to interview the neuroscientist Dr. Marcus Raichle, a pioneer in decoding the brain’s default mode network (DMN), after he won the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for an article for the Dana Foundation. The DMN corrals many brain channels from different parts of the brain in processes that are most evident when we are unfocused, daydreaming, resting to synthesize and coordinate information.
Seeing how active the brain is when we are supposedly at rest, Dr. Raichle has dubbed the brain a "prediction machine" revisiting the past or anticipating what might happen next. According to the researcher, we have an internal mental processing system inside our skulls. It draws on an outline of information, pulling from a low-resolution sensory download, that coordinates and communicates across brain networks to revisit what it's likely to see in the future.
As Dr. Raichle says, the brain is intrinsically organized in space and time to revisit the past and anticipate the future.
In this sense, we are all time travelers, even if our mental tunneling means, for most of us, we remain only armchair Dr. Who’s, with nary a Tardis in sight.
STEM + arts + research + ambition fuels innovation
Writing Edge of Yesterday, the first adventure in my YA time-travel book series, brought the brain’s power to imagine into focus for me.2 The series follows a young STEMinista, Charley Morton, living the GenZ life. But Charley has supersized ambitons.
Visiting the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to see a special exhibition of the Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook on the flight of birds, Charley suspects she has stumbled on the Maestro’s drawings for a time machine.
In fifteenth-century Florence, Leonardo would not have had the science or technology to build it.
Charley believes she does.
Her discovery fires her imagination. Her singular obsession to build a model time machine, à la Leonardo, for the school science fair unleashes middle school drama, destroying a friendship, derailing a budding romance, and launching her on the adventure of a lifetime.
There are consequences for achieving the impossible. But Charley is a dreamer with a passion for doing the impossible. Her message is universal:
What we dream, we can create; what we create, we can become.
As of now, irl, we know of no workable mechanism to make time travel a reality. eWill there ever be?
We can dream.
Playing with time
At the Edge of Yesterday, imagination becomes our portal to past-present-future using tried-and-true technology: storytelling As long as humans have gathered around the communal campfire, stories have been the way to transmit culture and learning, envision what's ahead, and review what is past.
Our personal stories are subjective3, based on a patchwork of past experiences that helps us predict what might happen in the future. A story that may or may not bear out, but one that can definitely shape our expectations, how we decide, and how we interpret events.
But since these stories are ones running only inside our heads, we also have the power to override them. In building awareness of how the past shapes, we might also decide to make different decisions by not letting fear, anger or hatred hijack our ability to make better choices in the present. And to see the future differently.
It is this kind of "seeing things differently" that guided Leonardo da Vinci in his time, and guides the inventors, artists and scientists today to see new possibilities. And to leave a creative legacy that endures in ours.
In “seeing ahead,” stories are a kind of rehearsal space to imagine what we might do in a certain situation, or preview solutions to problems. Remembering, we may learn from situations we’ve already confronted, for better or worse—a way to get a do-over.
I’d love to hear in comments:
Are you a time traveler—even of the armchair variety? What pieces of the past capture your imagination?
What stories from the past may you keep reviewing? Do these serve as good memories, or do they keep you stuck?
In what ways, if any, have you tried to revise and release the past to create a more meaningful future?
The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning. The Marginalian, by Maria Popova https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/09/11/great-blue-heron/
For sci-fi fans, GenZ readers or their adjacents, learn more about the Edge of Yesterday series here: https://edgeofyesterdaybooks.com
Objective storytelling—information we get through news or social media also shapes our view of past-present-future, but that’s a topic for another post
I do so love time travel fiction. It's my go-to when I read for pleasure to escape.
I sometimes imagine time-traveling to 18th century France. Then I remember what the period's medical and dental practices were like and the thought goes away. Still, it's fun to think about meeting people of that time that I've been reading about for most of my life.