Time Travel’s Past

Gabrielle Birchak/ June 21, 2022/ Ancient History, Modern History

Our love and fas­ci­na­tion for time trav­el are preva­lent in all we see in films and tele­vi­sion. And it is a most beau­ti­ful con­cept that allows us to sus­pend dis­be­lief and allow hope to enter our hearts that we could trav­el to a time that would fix our lives or the lives of the world. Time trav­el sto­ries empow­er us with insight into how we could cor­rect all the wrongs that hap­pened in the past. Then there are those sto­ries that take us into the future so that we can see either the impend­ing doom of the uni­verse or the life that could be if we just fol­lowed through on the right deci­sions. Then there are those time trav­el sto­ries that have us caught in a loop, like Ground­hogs Day with Bill Mur­ray, where we learn the most crit­i­cal advice, which is, don’t dri­ve angry.

One of our first known sto­ries about time trav­el can be found in an ancient San­skrit poem writ­ten around 400 BCE. The poem is a sto­ry about a king named Rai­va­ta Kakud­mi, who lived mil­lions of years ago. King Kakud­mi want­ed to find a suit­able hus­band for his beau­ti­ful and tal­ent­ed daugh­ter Revati.[1] And so, in this sto­ry, the King and his daugh­ter trav­eled to vis­it the god of cre­ation, Brah­ma. But because they were vis­it­ing a god, they exist­ed on a dif­fer­ent plane, unlike the real world. In this plane of exis­tence, the King and his daugh­ter had to wait to talk to Brah­ma. This is because Brah­ma first want­ed to lis­ten to a 20-minute song.

It is only until the 20-minute song is fin­ished that King Kakud­mi asks how he can find a suit­or for his daugh­ter. Brah­ma replies that, unfor­tu­nate­ly, time runs dif­fer­ent­ly on dif­fer­ent plan­ets. As a result, in the 20 min­utes that they lis­tened to the song, about 116 mil­lion years had passed. As a result, every­one that the King and his daugh­ter knew had long since passed away. And as a result, he could not find a per­fect suit­or for Revati in the King’s nat­ur­al world. But it just so hap­pened that Balara­ma, the broth­er of the deity Krish­na, hap­pened to be sin­gle. So, the King’s daugh­ter Revati mar­ried Balar­ma. We could say it was a match made in heav­en, but because we are dis­cussing Hin­duism, it was more like a match made in time, space, and causal­i­ty. Kind of like Tin­der for the gods.

But what is won­der­ful about sto­ries of time trav­el is that it touch­es on con­cepts that apply to sci­ence. Thus, Brah­ma was not com­plete­ly wrong when he said that time runs dif­fer­ent­ly on dif­fer­ent plan­ets. In the case of the King, his daugh­ter, and Brah­ma, time was rel­a­tive, and it passed at a dif­fer­ent rate depend­ing on where they exist­ed. This is sim­i­lar to a the­o­ry that Ein­stein had, which is referred to as time dilation.

Oth­er ancient sto­ries about time trav­el uti­lize the sleep­ing theme, where­in peo­ple fall asleep and wake up in a dif­fer­ent time. Such is the case of the sto­ry about sev­en sleep­ers. It is a mar­tyr­dom sto­ry trans­lat­ed and used in var­i­ous lan­guages and reli­gious tra­di­tions. One of the first is the Sev­en Sleep­ers of Eph­esus. In this sto­ry, sev­en young men were on the verge of being per­se­cut­ed because they were Chris­t­ian. So, they hid in a cave and even­tu­al­ly fell asleep. Once they woke up, it was 300 years lat­er, dur­ing the reign of Emper­or Theo­do­sius II, when when Chris­tian­i­ty was the offi­cial faith of the Empire.[2]

Thus, the focal point of time trav­el sto­ries writ­ten before the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry was steeped in mythol­o­gy and reli­gion. How­ev­er, time trav­el sto­ries after the Enlight­en­ment includ­ed polit­i­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal state­ments. Addi­tion­al­ly, though these sto­ries are con­sid­ered sci­ence fic­tion, there was still no tech­nol­o­gy used for time travel.

Such is the case of the French sto­ry pub­lished by Louis-Sébastien Merci­er in 1771 called The Year 2440. In this utopi­an time trav­el sto­ry, a man who had engaged in a dis­cus­sion with a philoso­pher goes home and falls asleep. He wakes in Paris in the year 2440 and sees a city that evolved to live prac­ti­cal­ly and peace­ful­ly. In 2440, sci­ence is preva­lent in med­i­cine, reli­gion is irrad­i­cat­ed, and the mil­i­tary is no longer need­ed. France is a peace­ful coun­try led by a philoso­pher-king.[3] How­ev­er, this is still a sto­ry about tran­scend­ing time by sleeping.

It was not until the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the 1800s, that a mech­a­nism was used to trav­el through time. On May 19, 1838, Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen pub­lished a short sto­ry called The Galosh­es of For­tune. As you can tell by the title, the galosh­es are the tool that helps sev­er­al char­ac­ters trans­port to any place or time that they choose.

By the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, lit­er­a­ture and sto­ry­telling were influ­enced by the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion and all the inven­tions that went with it. Tools, clocks, and time machines all begin to serve as the pri­ma­ry tool for time trav­el. One of the first time trav­el sto­ries that came out of this era was The Clock That Went Back­ward, writ­ten by Edward Page Mitchell. The sto­ry is writ­ten through the voice of a nar­ra­tor who, along with his cousin Har­ry, vis­its his great Aunt Gertrude in Maine. In this sto­ry, his aunt owns a Dutch clock, which was stopped at fif­teen min­utes after three. One night, the boys found their aunt wind­ing the clock, which caused it to run back­ward. She said some­thing to the clock until it stopped, turned it back to 3:15, col­lapsed to the floor, and took her last breath. In her will, she bestowed the clock to Har­ry and her estate to the nar­ra­tor. It turns out that this clock was a time machine that allowed the two boys to trav­el to Lei­den, Hol­land dur­ing the siege of 1574 brought on by the Span­ish Gen­er­al Fran­cis­co de Valdez.

Many are apt to think that the first time trav­el sto­ry involv­ing a time machine was H.G. Wells’s short sto­ry “The Chron­ic Arg­onauts,” pub­lished in 1888, or his book The Time Machine, pub­lished in 1895.

How­ev­er, the very first work of lit­er­a­ture about a time machine was pub­lished by Enrique Gas­par in 1887 in his nov­el El anacronópete. In 1887 the phrase “El anacronópete” was a new term that meant “who flies against time.” This nov­el was ground­break­ing because it depict­ed the very first-time machine, the anacronópete, which was a cast-iron box about the size of a house.[4]

The anacronópete was pow­ered by elec­tric­i­ty that drove four large tubes, which pro­trud­ed from the top of the box. These four large tubes were pneu­mat­i­cal in design in that the air pres­sure around the tubes helped the huge anacronópete trav­el through time. In addi­tion to the pneu­mat­i­cal tubes, the elec­tric­i­ty in the box gen­er­at­ed Gar­cia flu­id. This Gar­cia flu­id helped the trav­el­ers stay young dur­ing their trav­els so that as they went back in time, they did not become more youthful.

This fan­tas­tic sto­ry is writ­ten in the for­mat of a zarzuela, which incor­po­rates lyrics, singing, opera, pop­u­lar songs, and dance. In this novel­la, the char­ac­ters trav­el to the Paris World’s Fair in 1878, to Raven­na in 690, to Grana­da in 1492, to Pom­peii in the year 79, and to Chi­na in 220.

Thus, by the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, there was a large influx of time trav­el sto­ries involv­ing sleep­ing, clocks, time machines, and oth­er devices. The pro­tag­o­nist of many of these sto­ries cen­ters around a man. The first time trav­el sto­ry that cen­ters around women is Sultana’s Dream, pub­lished in 1905 by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hos­sain. Hail­ing from Ben­gal, Rokeya was a Mus­lim writer, fem­i­nist and social reformer.

Sultana’s Dream is about a fem­i­nist utopia called Lady­land, where women are in charge.[5] In Lady­land, they use tech­nol­o­gy pow­ered by elec­tric­i­ty and solar pow­er, which allows them to have labor-free farm­ing and fly­ing cars. The women in Lady­land also real­ized that men start­ed wars and crimes. As a result, they locked away the men and cre­at­ed a land void of corruption.

Rokeya authored the sto­ry when she was twen­ty-five years old. Her hus­band, Khan Bahadur Syed Sakhawat Hos­sain, was a deputy mag­is­trate who was often away on tour. While he was away, she would work on the sto­ry Sultana’s Dream. Every time he would return, she would read it to him to demon­strate her com­pe­tence with the Eng­lish lan­guage. Her hus­band was very impressed with her grasp of Eng­lish and her sto­ry and per­suad­ed her to sub­mit her sto­ry to The Indi­an Ladies Mag­a­zine. The mag­a­zine pub­lished Rokeya’s sto­ry in 1905, and in 1908 Rokeya pub­lished the sto­ry as a book.

The next fem­i­nist time-trav­el­ing sto­ry, which came out a year lat­er in 1909, was Beat­rice the Six­teenth, writ­ten by Irene Clyde. Clyde was an Eng­lish writer and trans­gen­der lawyer. Like Sultana’s Dream, no tech­nol­o­gy helps them trav­el through time. How­ev­er, this sto­ry was also ground­break­ing because it high­lights a world that is not defined by gen­der or sex. Beat­rice the Six­teenth is a sto­ry about a woman who trav­els back to before our cur­rent era, in BCE, and dis­cov­ers a lost world run by a monar­chy. This world con­sists of only two class­es of peo­ple: those who are free and those who are enslaved. In this world, every­body is a veg­e­tar­i­an, and rela­tion­ships are cen­tered on love and companionship.

Since the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, time trav­el has filled our imag­i­na­tions and has served to cre­ate incred­i­ble sto­ries for tele­vi­sion and film. The list is vast! And we all have our favorites. My favorites are all the Back to the Future movies, any­thing Star Trek because I am a die-hard Trekkie, and, believe it or not, the incred­i­bly sopho­moric and inap­pro­pri­ate Future Man pro­duced by Seth Rogen. I love that show!

But is time trav­el pos­si­ble? Not real­ly. At least as far as we know cur­rent­ly. The laws of rel­a­tiv­i­ty and the sec­ond law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics show that time trav­el is impos­si­ble. Peter Wat­son, in his arti­cle called “Can we time trav­el? A the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist pro­vides some answers” states, “that time trav­el can­not be pos­si­ble because if it was, we would already be doing it.”[6] Wat­son com­ments that all kinds of tech­ni­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal chal­lenges thwart the con­cept of cre­at­ing a work­ing time machine. He states that it is pos­si­ble to design time machines, but these time machines require neg­a­tive ener­gy and neg­a­tive mass, both of which do not exist with­in our universe.

Wat­son also address­es the time-trav­el­ing con­cept called the Tipler Cylin­der, cre­at­ed by math­e­mati­cian and physi­cist Frank Tipler. This Tipler Cylin­der (http://www.franktipler.com/tipler-rotating-cylinders.pdf) is a colos­sal cylin­der that spins on its lon­gi­tu­di­nal axis. When it rotates, it cat­alyzes a frame-drag­ging effect that warps space­time. When space­time is warped, objects near­by emit a light cone that tilts and points back­ward along the time axis, allow­ing a trav­el­er to go back­ward in time. But this is a hypo­thet­i­cal mech­a­nism, and this cylin­der requires more ener­gy than exists with­in the universe.

But hypothe­ses aside, some bril­liant physi­cists in the world do think that time trav­el is pos­si­ble and are attempt­ing to build a time trav­el mech­a­nism. Physi­cist Ronald Mal­lett, a mem­ber of the Amer­i­can Phys­i­cal Soci­ety and the Nation­al Soci­ety of Black Physi­cists, has been deter­mined to make a time machine ever since he was a lit­tle boy. When he was 10 years old, his father died from a heart attack. This dev­as­tat­ed him. When he was eleven years old, he was inspired by the book The Time Machine and was deter­mined to build a time machine. In 1973, he earned his Ph.D. in physics and received the Grad­u­ate Assis­tant Award for Excel­lence in Teach­ing. His career has been impres­sive, and he is now Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut. His con­cept cen­ters around Einstein’s gen­er­al the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty and the prop­er­ties of a ring laser. In a paper pub­lished in 2003 titled “The Grav­i­ta­tion­al Field of a Cir­cu­lat­ing Light Beam,” he argues that with suf­fi­cient ener­gies, a “cir­cu­lat­ing laser might pro­duce not just frame drag­ging but also closed time-like curves,” which could allow time trav­el into the past.[7]

Dr. Mal­lett cur­rent­ly heads up a pro­gram known as the Space-Time Twist­ing By Light Project, also known as the STL project (https://www.phys.uconn.edu/~mallett/main/funding.htm).

Though his work has been ana­lyzed by oth­er physi­cists who claim that there are prob­lems with his the­o­ries, Mallett’s opti­mism and deter­mi­na­tion are a tes­ta­ment to hon­or­ing the pow­er of our imagination.

So, all of this leads me to ask: if you could trav­el in time, to the future or the past, what time would be your favorite des­ti­na­tion? Who would you most like to meet? What loca­tion would be your favorite des­ti­na­tion, and what would be your favorite form of time trav­el? Would it be sleep­ing, or a TARDIS, or even a DeLore­an? (Per­son­al­ly, I’d take the DeLore­an to 1994 when I was in col­lege study­ing Physics. One of the hap­pi­est times of my life!) So, I would love to hear about where you would like to trav­el to, what era, who you would like to meet, and how you would like to get there!

Until next time carpe diem!

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[1] Mann, Adam. “Where Does the Con­cept of Time Trav­el Come From?” livescience.com, Novem­ber 2, 2019. https://www.livescience.com/time-travel-origins.html.

[2] Mason, Her­bert. “Under the Sign of ‘The Sev­en Sleep­ers.’” Notre Dame Eng­lish Jour­nal 15, no. 3 (1983): 1–5. http://www.jstor.org/stable.40063309

[3] Merci­er, Louis-Sébastien. Mem­oirs of the Year Two Thou­sand Five Hun­dred. Lon­don: Print­ed for G. Robin­son, in Pater-nos­ter-Row, 1772. http://archive.org/details/memoirsofyeartwo01merc.

[4] Gas­par, Enrique. El anacronópete. Daniel Corte­zo y C, 1887. http://archive.org/details/elanacronpete00gaspgoog.

[5] Rokeẏā, Bega­ma, Roushan Jahan, Han­na Papanek, and Bega­ma Rokeẏā. Sultana’s Dream and Selec­tions from The Seclud­ed Ones. New York: Fem­i­nist Press : Dis­trib­uted by the Tal­man Co., 1988. http://archive.org/details/sultanasdreamsel00roke.

[6] Wat­son, Peter. “Can We Time Trav­el? A The­o­ret­i­cal Physi­cist Pro­vides Some Answers.” Phys.Org, June 14, 2022. https://phys.org/news/2022–06-theoretical-physicist.html.

[7] Mal­lett, Ronald L. “The Grav­i­ta­tion­al Field of a Cir­cu­lat­ing Light Beam.” Foun­da­tions of Physics 33, no. 9 (Sep­tem­ber 1, 2003): 1307–14. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025689110828.