TIME TRAVEL QUOTES III
quotations about time travel
The trickier prospect with time travel, however, is going into the past. To work, the TARDIS needs to exist within a "closed timelike curve"--a loop in spacetime that keeps returning to the same point in space and time. Theoretical physicists have determined that such a curve is indeed a mathematical possibility, but unlikely to ever occur in reality. Tippett compared it to a snake obtaining admission to Harvard.
TRISTIN HOPPER
"Here's what time travel will look like once we invent it", National Post, May 4, 2017
While is it mathematically feasible, it is not yet possible to build a space-time machine because we need materials--which we call exotic matter--to bend space-time in these impossible ways.
BEN TIPPETT
"Scientists say time travel is possible and explain how in new study", The Independent, May 1, 2017
Man ... can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way.
H. G. WELLS
The Time Machine
Time travel is the basis of modern physics, and, for anyone that looks up at the night sky, an everyday experience. When we view the stars and planets, we see them, not as they are now, but as they were in the past. For the planets this time delay is only a few minutes, but for most of the stars in the night sky, thousands of years. For galaxies, faint smudges of light made up of very distant collections of stars, the delay can be millions or billions of years.
RICHARD BOWER
"Time travel MIGHT be possible through black holes and 'a cunning plan', experts claim", Daily Mail, May 23, 2017
I mean, HG Wells, who invented time travel, only sent his guy to the future, and he had -- there was some good news and bad news there. Nowadays, I think we're scared of what we're going to find.
JAMES GLEICK
"The Nation: Patrick Gower interviews James Gleick", Scoop, May 6, 2017
When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Time travel is one of humanity's aspirations and is one of the oldest tools in literature. In the Spanish language one can find the first traces of time travel in the fourteenth century with the well-known example XI from El conde Lucanor, but it was during the nineteenth century when novels, stories, and tales proliferated in which time travel constituted the essential element of the plot. To cite just a few of the better known instances, we can mention Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), Edgar Allan Poe's "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844), or Camille Flammarion's Lumen (1872). These works use varied methods to achieve time travel: dreams, hibernation, magic, hypnosis, drugs; and very often the protagonists happen upon time travel against their will, or they travel toward the future or the past without knowing that they have embarked on a temporal adventure.
RUDYARD J. ALCOCER
Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination: Re-reading History
The time when Christ was 33, so I could see if he really got up from the grave. Or maybe I'd go back to the time of Cleopatra, before Marc Antony got tight with her. I'd try to hit on her first.
MUHAMMAD ALI
in response to the question: What time would you like to go back to, if possible?, "The Ali Mystique", Newsweek, September 29, 1975
If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Still evolving, adapting, changing
Time is moving, let's embrace it
Past conditions, forward motion
Prohibition, the way it's open
Ancient wisdom, the tribe has spoken
Let the circle be unbroken
Eye of Horus, wake the Buddha
Mayan calendar -- see the future
Higher consciousness, revolution
Evolution, the better humans
God particles, spirit molecules
Science turned, so what? I guess y'all already knew
Hieroglyphics, ancient temples
Know our self, infinite potential
Boundless options beyond the doctrines
We are the universe, break your boxes
(Let's go)
DEAD PREZ
"Time Travel"
Why had he done it? Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
There have been mountains of nonsense written about traveling in time, just as previously there were about astronautics--you know, how some scientist, with the backing of a wealthy businessman, goes off in a corner and slaps together a rocket, which the two of them--and in the company of their lady friends, yet--then take to the far end of the Galaxy. Chronomotion, no less than Astronautics, is a colossal enterprise, requiring tremendous investments, expenditures, planning...
LEM STANISLAW
"The Twentieth Voyage of Ijon Tichy", The Star Diaries
It's a weird fact that the worst sceptics of time travel are science fiction writers who tell the stories.
JAMES GLEICK
"The Nation: Patrick Gower interviews James Gleick", Scoop, May 6, 2017
Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored.
CLIFFORD PICKOVER
Time: A Traveler's Guide
My colleagues and I recently showed that you can think of time travel, the process of going from the future into the past, as a kind of teleportation of information from now to back then. Moreover, we were actually able to use a simple quantum computer to demonstrate this effect. We could investigate what happens when you send a photon billionths of a second backwards in time.
SETH LLOYD
"A Quantum Leap in Computing", NOVA, July 21, 2011
It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy -- and that's a big "if" -- then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.
MICHIO KAKU
Scientific American, November 24, 2003
I was in the future yesterday
But it looked nothing like this
It was a lover I never kissed
I was in the future yesterday
But now I'm in the past
And it keeps taking me back
BLOUSE
"Time Travel"
Time travel is usually only possible in one direction: plodding ever-forward at the pace of a ticking second hand on a clock.
MARY BETH GRIGGS
"This is what New York City sounded like over 400 years ago", Popular Science, May 4, 2017
Today, we know that time travel need not be confined to myths, science fiction, Hollywood movies, or even speculation by theoretical physicists. Time travel is possible. For example, an object traveling at high speeds ages more slowly than a stationary object. This means that if you were to travel into outer space and return, moving close to light speed, you could travel thousands of years into the Earth's future.
CLIFFORD PICKOVER
Time: A Traveler's Guide
Time is not only at the root of everything we do but it is inescapably embedded into the core of who we are. So many of our actions are based on saving time, wishing we had more of it or attempting to adjust it in some capacity. For me, time often feels like an old VCR. I either want to rewind, fast forward or pause the tape.
JASON NATZKE
"The Art of Time Travel", The Good Men Project, May 4, 2017