A Different Perspective on Time: Old Ideas, New Theories

One of the most exciting things throughout this journey of making A Brief History of Time Travel is not just learning about new ideas, but also finding just how interconnected ideas can be - across disciplines, culture and eras.

Jumping off of my last post on time travel in the Mahabharata, I wanted to share with you some interesting parallels between Vedic beliefs and quantum mechanics, and how ancient religion and modern theories in science seem to have complementary views on the perception of time and space. 


We had the amazing opportunity to interview Dr. Satyanarayana Dasa, an expert in Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy. He explains that time is merely an illusion; and that we can only measure time by the changes in matter, like watching budding flowers bloom or finding wrinkles on your skin: "Suppose, beginning now, nothing changes. Would you differentiate between past, present, and future? We believe that time is moving. Time is not moving- it is the matter which transforms it.”


Dr. Satyanarayana Dasa, Still from A Brief History of Time Travel

The ancient Hindu scriptures view the world as Maya, best described as an illusion or unreality. Time and space are mental structures, and how we look at the world is actually a projection of the mind. So the world is what we choose to observe.

Does quantum mechanics view time and space in a similar manner? 


Where quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of extremely small objects like subatomic particles, it's not possible to observe "the system" without changing the system. What does that mean? 
 


The Shrödinger's Cat paradox is a modern, whimsical way to explain the world of quantum mechanics.

In the thought experiment created by Erwin Shrödinger, Nobel prize winning physicist and grandfather of quantum mechanics, a cat is placed in a steel box along with a Geiger counter, some poison, a hammer, and radioactive material. When the radioactive material decays, the Geiger detects it and triggers the hammer to release the poison, which then kills the cat.

Since radioactive decay is a random process, there is no way to predict when it will happen. The observer doesn't know whether the cat is alive or dead until the box is opened. The cat would, as Schrödinger put it, be "living and dead ... in equal parts" until it is observed.

 "The world extended in space and time is but our representation"- What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger

Schrödinger's idea that the "observer" must be considered as a part of the system being observed seems pretty consistent to the Vedas teachings. Interestingly enough, Schrödinger studied Vedic scriptures throughout this life and so perhaps it should not be that surprising to find parallels between the ancient teaching and his modern postulates. One can find similarities even in the most unexpected places.

Time Travel Mythology: Mahabharata

The mythology of time travel is extensive and far reaching. While the idea of an actual "time machine" wasn't conceived until the late 1800's, you can find legends and stories that features a hero traveling to the past or future in a magical, fantastical way. I thought I would share with you one of those stories that we’ll be touching upon in the documentary.

Mahabharata, 400BC

One of the very first time travel stories that have been recorded in history appears in the Hindu epic, Mahabharata– speculated to be written as early as 400BC. The story follows a king, his daughter, and their search for a perfect suitor.

Revati was the only daughter of King Kakudmi, a powerful monarch who ruled Kusasthali, a prosperous and advanced kingdom under the sea. Thinking no one could prove to be good enough to marry his beautiful daughter, Kakudmi took Revati with him to Brahmaloka, the home of Brahma, to ask the god's advice about finding a suitable husband for her.

Brahma

Brahma was listening to a musical performance when they arrived, and so they waited patiently until the performance was finished. Finally, King Kakudmi humbly bowed and made his request:

“O Brahmâ! To whom shall I betroth this daughter? I have come to you to ask on this point I have searched for many princes and seen also a good many of them and none of them is to my liking and so my mind is not at rest.”

Brahma laughed at the foolishness of the King.

“O King! The princes that you thought would become the bridegroom of your daughter, all died; their sons and grandsons and their friends even have all passed away.”

Different Planes of Existence

Time, Brahma goes on to explain, runs differently on different planes of existence. During the time they had waited in Brahmaloka to see him, 27 chatur-yugas, had passed on Earth. Everything that Kakudmi had and owned, his friends and family, his sons and wife, his armies and treasures, had vanished with the time that had passed. The King and his daughter were overcome with astonishment and grief for everything they had lost, but Brahma comforted them, and recommended a worthy husband currently on earth: Balarama, the twin brother of Krishna.

Balarama and his Wife Revati

What is really interesting though, is how similar their view of time was 2500 years ago to how physicists and astronomers conceptualize space-time today. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is relative to the observer’s frame of reference- it depends on the observer’s motion and strength of gravity. For instance, one could argue that time here on earth runs slower than in space because gravity slows the passage of time.


Hindu philosophy was familiar with the concept that time is relative and many passages on the Vedic scriptures continuously point out that the cosmic time of the gods is different than the time on earth.

One Chatur-Yuga is equivalent to 4,320,000 human years.

Were King Kakudmi and his daughter two unwitting time travelers? What they thought were just minutes in front god Brahma, millennia had taken place at home. When they came back, they did so to a vastly different place.

Today, we so often think of time as an arrow moving in one direction, with a beginning, middle and end. But I think it is interesting to look at different cultures and how they view time. Their perceptions help us look at time, and the idea of time travel, a little bit differently. 

Interviewing Dr. Ronald Mallett

Hello fellow time travel fans! I’m so sorry that I haven’t been updating lately, but I plan to remedy that. Right now we’re still plugging along with the editing, but I thought I would share with you some awesome news; earlier this month we had the chance to interview Professor Ronald Mallett, and it was so much fun!

Interviewing Dr. Ronald Mallett! 

For those of you who don’t know, Dr. Ronald Mallett is a theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut. He’s most renowned for his paper that he wrote back in the early 2000’s that proves that theoretically, time travel to the past can be possible. Now he’s raising the funds to apply this theory in an experiment and potentially build a time machine. 

Dr. Mallett explains his theory that circulating light beams could create a space-time loop. 

How might that work? In a nutshell, it has to do with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says that matter and energy can affect gravity. And in turn, gravity affects space+time. Because light is a form of energy, you could use a ring of light using lasers to send neutrons back in time. And to go even a step further, you could spin the neutrons clockwise or counterclockwise, and that could be used as a binary code to send messages to the past.

Gravity affects space+time, just like in Interstellar. 

The day we got to the University of Connecticut, I was so worried that everything would fall through because there was a weather alert that a massive snowstorm was brewing. They were canceling flights, shutting down roads, and there was even a curfew installed for the night! But we got to spend a few hours talking with Dr. Mallett just before the blizzard hit. 

Getting some exterior shots... so much snow! 

We got to chat about the importance of science fiction, video games, coming out of the “time travel” closet, about the importance of having inspirational teachers, and most importantly, what inspired Dr. Mallett's to study time travel: his father. 

If you’re interested learning more about Dr. Mallett’s work and life, you can visit his personal website, or check out his memoir here. 

Stay tuned!

Gisella

P.S. Members of the Time Travel Society, we have an exclusive clip from the interview just for you! Check out our Kickstarter update. 

3 Time Machine stories before H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine

H. G. Wells The Time Machine marked a turning point not only in science fiction, but the time travel genre; but he wasn’t the first one to come up with the idea of a “time machine”. We go into this more in depth in the documentary, but I thought I would share some time travel stories I found that featured time machinery pre- H.G. Wells.

1) El Anocronópete (1887)

Spanish science fiction fans, this is for you. Beating H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to print by 7 years, author Enrique Gaspard created an elaborate cast iron ship called, “El Anacronópete”. Using electricity, pneumatic tubes, and some strange fluid that prevents passengers to grow younger when they travel back in time, a haphazard group of characters travel from the World’s Fair in Paris 1878 to various moments in history like the Battle of Tetuán in Morocco, to Granada, Spain in 1440, and 3rd Century China. It’s a fantastical, adventurous story that, like The Time Machine, also uses time travel to explore social issues, albeit in a lighthearted comedic way.

Illustrations from El Anocronópete

Read the original version here: https://archive.org/details/elanacronpete00gaspgoog

Galileo's telescope, unfortunately not a Historioscope. 

2) L'Historioscope (1883)

Eugène Mouton, considered an early writer of science fiction, was a French writer of Creole descent. His short story, L’Historioscope, tells a story about a historian who meets a very eccentric old gentleman who has invented a means of actually seeing the past. In this case the time machine is sort of an electrical telescope in while a person can look back into history by tracking light waves from past events as they spread through the ether into space.

This is actually pretty cool because NASA is building a “time machine” telescope with the ability to see 13.5 billion years ago… http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/nasa-builds-a-time-machine-telescope-100-times-as-powerful-as-the-hubble/ar-BBemBWW

You can read the short in this obscure, translated French anthology of short scifi stories: http://www.amazon.com/News-Moon-French-Science-Fiction-ebook/dp/B0066QDC7K

Astronomical Clock, Prague

3) The Clock That Went Backwards (1881)

Considered by many to be the first story published to feature a time machine (if you count a clock as a time machine!), The Clock That Went Backwards is a short story follows two cousins and a mysterious clock that takes them 300 years into the past. It wasn’t until after his death that U.S. writer Edward Mitchell was identified as the author. I tried looking into more information about Mitchell, but there seems to only be one book devoted to his work (nowhere online), and it stresses his importance to modern science fiction literature. He wrote some of the very first stories featuring:

• Faster-than-light travel ("The Tachypomp," 1874)
• Teleportation ("The Man Without a Body," 1877)
• Mind transfer ("Exchanging Their Souls," 1877)
• Cybernetics ("The Ablest Man in the World," 1879)
• Cryogenic preservation ("The Senator's Daughter," 1879)

You can read the story here: http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff9/tachypmp.htm#clock

I think it's fascinating to see how the time machine archetype was beginning to take shape. 

H.G. Wells and his contemporaries were writing these stories during the 2nd Industrial Revolution- where “machines” were synonymous with scientific progress and societal advancements such as the steam engine, the automobile and the type writer. The ability to create a machine to accomplish the fantastical now seemed possible, and to these writers, it encouraged the idea that perhaps we could create an apparatus that could even allow us to jump through time.

And today, this archetype has evolved into a hot tub, police box, telephone booth, a car... who knows what the next iconic image of a time machine will be?

Carl Sagan, Interstellar, and Stigmas

Happy belated birthday Carl Sagan!

I’m late posting this, but in case you didn’t know yesterday was Carl Sagan’s birthday! I just wanted to write a really quick post because I’m such a huge fan! I have the original Cosmos in mp3 audio, and I love listening to it. Carl isn’t just a scientist, he’s a poet. He has an almost magical way of putting words together about this earth that sound so beautiful and awe inspiring.

Back in 1999, Carl did an interview with NOVA where he talks about time travel:

“Time travel into the indefinite future is consistent with the laws of nature. It's only travel backwards in time that is the source of the debate and the tingling sensations that physicists and science-fiction readers delight in.”

It’s really interesting to me because I find that there has been a stigma (perhaps still is) in the scientific community when addressing the topic of time travel. Even the incredible Stephen Hawking was at some point afraid about talking about it:

"Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labeled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.” 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1270531/Stephen-Hawking-backs-possibility-time-travel-millions-years-future.html

It has only been until fairly recently that things have started to change. There are more and more physicists today, such as John Cramer and Ronald Mallet, who have come out seeking to raise funds to conduct time travel experiments. This is why I find it really impressive that over 15 years ago, Carl Sagan had the guts to talk about this idea in a very realistic, candid way- and I truly believe his work has helped change the direction of how we view time travel today.

Here are two snippets of the original interview…

Your inquiries about space travel for Contact sparked a whole new direction in research on time travel. How does that make you feel?
I find it marvelous, I mean literally marvelous, full of marvel, that this innocent inquiry in the context of writing a science-fiction novel has sparked a whole field of physics and dozens of scientific papers by some of the best physicists in the world. I'm so pleased to have played this catalytic role not just in fast spaceflight but in the idea of time travel.

How do you feel being responsible for bringing time travel perhaps a step closer?
I don't know that I've brought time travel a step closer. If anyone has it's Kip Thorne. But maybe the joint effort of all those involved in this debate has at least increased the respectability of serious consideration of the possibility of time travel. As a youngster who was fascinated by the possibility of time travel in the science-fiction novels of H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, and others, to be in any way involved in the possible actualization of time travel—well, it just brings goose bumps. Of course we're not really at that stage; we don't know that time travel is even possible, and if it is, we certainly haven't developed the time machine. But it's a stunning fact that we have now reached a stage in our understanding of nature where this is even a bare possibility.

You can read the whole interview Carl Sagan did with NOVA here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/Sagan-Time-Travel.html 

Carl Sagan mentions Kip Thorne, who was one of the very first people to come up with the idea of using wormholes as a method of time travel. He’s also helped developed to concept for Interstellar, which, I’m hoping to see later this weekend! Here's a really cool interview with Kip Thorne and the science behind Interstellar. It's totally worth taking a look at!




I hope to be updating this blog more consistently from now on! The past couple of weeks after the Kickstarter campaign have been very busy as we organize footage, figure out logistics and get ready for the next phase of the documentary.

Thanks again, and as always, I would love to hear your thoughts!

Is Science Fiction Important?

Wanda and I just sent off a grant last week- besides being in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign, we are always looking for other outlets for funding! But in the world of documentary grant writing, there is a question that's almost always asked: Why your film is an important film to make? What is this urgent issue that needs to be discussed right now?

I’ve struggled with the idea of why this documentary is “important”- because let’s be honest- time travel (and science fiction while we’re at it) is a “fun” topic to think about. You can lump it in as “fancifiul” or not rigorous in thought compared to more pressing issues like global warming, political dilemmas etc.

But ultimately, science fiction has value because it promotes an interest in science. 

Stephen Shankland/CNET

I got to see Neil Degrasse Tyson talk in Seattle earlier this month. He brought up this valid point about how talking about science and science fiction can really help make science a cultural priority, which in turn, inspires us to make technological advancements.

Tyson believes that investing in science and education can strengthen a country; and the fact that the U.S. was one of the most prominent countries in the 20th century had a direct correlation to the scientific push that came during World War II. He believes that nowadays, the U.S. is hopelessly falling behind Europe, China, and other developing countries.

Of course there's a debate going on in the U.S. over what subjects should be taught the most, but teaching more science doesn't have to mean teaching less art or philosophy. The beauty of science fiction is that it touches on all these things.

I get that science and science fiction are two completely different things- but if you look at the advances in science and technology, they are often preceded by descriptions in works of science fiction books and movies. And we shouldn't forget that! 

It lets us reflect upon our history, it allows us to take a step back and examine cultural issues from today, and it makes us think about the future. So yes, maybe time travel isn't important, but science fiction and bringing up ideas in science fiction, is. I'm going to leave you with a sappy, inspirational quote now from my man Leonardo: 

If you haven't check it out yet, we're still in the middle of our Kickstarter campaign! You can check it out here. http://kck.st/1uUvoOk 

Your Weird Time-Traveling Boyfriend: A Series

Things I learn from films: virtually all time travelers are fellas, and most of them want to “make it right” with a woman, without telling her there was universe-altering involved because eh. DUDES STOP MAKING IT WORSE! LADIES STOP DATING THESE MEN!

- Gil Pender, Midnight in Paris

"I'm cheating on you with Ernest Hemingway. But only in this time period; tomorrow I'm cheating on you with Lea Seydoux. I'm a novelist but I can’t manage an explanation of time travel to anyone. BLOORGGG WHY CAN’T I ARTICULATE?"

- Sean Fentress, Source Code

"If you had seconds to live, you'd kiss me, right? I hope yes because I’m kissing you now. Not because we're about to die, even though we are. I'm NOT undermining your agency, the time loop is. Wait, we didn't die. Shit."

- Jack Starks, The Jacket

"Just gonna loiter here by this diner until you invite me to stay with you…don’t be scared, we actually know each other. It was a long time ago. Remember? We both knew there was a spark but you were a child. Then I died sometime in the future. What? I didn’t make things complicated, you did."

- Joe who won't tell you his last name, Looper

"This older me is coming for your son, which isn't abusive because he's not me, he's who I once was, shut up! Btw the loop being open doesn’t make this any less of a one-night stand. And it's cool that older me is Bruce Willis and I’m going to take credit for that."

- David Herdeg, The Philadelphia Experiment

"Cancel your plans, I just stole your car from the diner!" (Side note: what is with time traveling dudes and diners? You worked so hard to get here and now your first destination is Denny's? Stop coming here! You have nothing to gain.)

- James Cole, 12 Monkeys

"yeah i kno it was messed up when he took you hostage in your car

ill just knock u out and put u in the trunk so u don’t remember"

- Marty McFly, Back to the Future Part II

"Fine, you can get in the car...just stay in the car. The future isn’t for ladies’ eyes. Be mad if you want to be mad; Doc just roofied you anyway so why are we still talking about this?"

- Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: First Contact 

"You can’t have me."