I wrote this article for the first issue of EKA Ajakiri, a magazine of the Estonian Academy of Arts, due to be published in September. I originally wrote it in Estonian, and this english translation is not mine, so beware of the various mistakes and poor syntax. I have no time at this moment to fix it myself.
Time has doubtless been one of the most bizarre and obscure phenomena for human beings throughout history. This strange notion cannot be seen or touched yet it is everywhere and its course is unchangeable.
But people are ingenious creatures and never sit idle when they face a puzzle. If they plunge into complicated situations they tend to use a pragmatic trick — they attempt to explain the incomprehensible with the help of things that are familiar, understandable and close to them. This was done for instance in the 17th and 18th century when the nature and behaviour of animals was explained by means of the laws of mechanics, and also after the 1960s when the functioning of the human brain was compared to a large and complex digital computer. Although both views are already abandoned, this kind of approach has not disappeared.
This method for explaining things is not characteristic only for the different branches of science — it has also become rooted in the human language and is, to a great extent, universal because it is directly caused by the way the human brain functions. Actually, we explain something with the help of some other thing — usually a physical experience — every day, with almost all our sentences. In order to understand abstract or complicated things we turn to some familiar domain and use its terms and expressions.
Perhaps this argument sounds a little bit strange, so it should be explained in greater detail. For instance, we cannot deny that our most important sense is probably sight. Unlike many other mammals, people are not mostly guided by smell sensations but by seeing. And as this sense is so important to us, we employ a number of metaphors in language that are related to seeing, even when we talk about things that have nothing to do with it. We say for example that “I am hazy about this” or that everything has to be seen in the “light of reason” and even that “it was made clear to me” — something is “clear” when everything can be seen well, for example when the sky or weather is clear or when the water in the sea is so clear that you can see the bottom.
Another example is the use of metaphors of space to understand the increase or decrease of numbers. We say that “prices go up” or that the “stock exchange fell”. Neither of these things can actually go up somewhere or fall down — prices and the stock exchange index are abstract phenomena. What is even more relevant to our subject is that we understand time also as something spatial or as moving through space. We say for instance that “time flies” or “goes by”, “the time has arrived to take action” or that “the deadline for submitting this article is rapidly approaching”. Once again — time does not fly or arrive — has anybody ever held time in their hands? Neither does a deadline get near someone in some direct, literal way, because a deadline is also an abstract notion and cannot approach anybody.
Thus we use our everyday experiences which we gain by being human beings right here on our planet, in order to understand abstract things. The amount of such metaphors is endless and so we can say that all human languages are to a great extent metaphorical and not literal or word for word.
But not being aware of this circumstance, people usually believe that when they talk about things, they talk about them in an exact and straightforward manner. And one of these time-related fields where there have been mixed up metaphors stemming from bodily experience and literal expressions is time travel. I would assert that in the cases of time travelling as they are usually treated in science fiction and often even in academic writings, the metaphors are used incorrectly. Or rather, that when talking about time travelling, people use metaphors that are not appropriate for describing or understanding this phenomenon.
It all starts with the travelling part. Travelling, or in other words simply all kinds of movement, is something that we all do every day and without this phenomenon human activity is inconceivable. What is even more important is that travelling happens in space. We learn already at high school that the universe consists of four dimensions — three spatial dimensions and one of time. Isn’t it natural to think that if we can move in space we can also do it in time?
Wherever we encounter the subject of time travel, we also meet metaphors related to space and moving in it. For example, let’s look at the idea of travelling back in time. When we say that it is possible to travel in time, then it should mean that all moments of time exist somewhere physically — otherwise our travels would have no destination. There has to be a “place” where all moments of time permanently and physically exist. This in turn implies that somewhere there is an incalculably huge hyper space — time’s space that is full of endless universes, each of which is physically one moment in time, and every object in the universe has stretched itself like spaghetti through this hyper space, in order to mark its chronological course.
Technically speaking, of course, we do not only move in space — we move in space and spend time for it. The question arises that if we travel into the past shouldn’t this movement itself also spend time? Science fiction authors want to persuade us that we move into the past, but at the same time, this movement should also take time, in other words — carry us towards the future. This creates a paradox — if we talk about travelling into the past then this journey should inevitably carry us towards the future instead…
In the everyday sense at least, there cannot be a physically existing past — because the mere idea of it presumes making time “space-like”. Our ideas of time travels are based on the use of unsuitable metaphors. If we disentangle these metaphors, we should assume instead that only the present can exist – an endlessly changing, flowing and dynamic present that moves towards the time arrow that is created by the principle of entropy. The future also cannot “exist” in any other way than merely through the possibilities and potentials of the changing universe. It is impossible to travel back in time because the past where we would like to travel does not exist anywhere physically.
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