Time Traveller example essay topic

Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1895, H.G. Wells classic story The Time Machine was first published in book form. As befits the subject matter, that was the minus tenth anniversary of the first publication, in 1905, of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. It was Einstein, as every schoolchild knows, who first described time as "the fourth dimension" - and every schoolchild is wrong. It was actually Wells who wrote, in The Time Machine, that "there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space, except that our consciousness moves along it".

Since the time of Wells and Einstein, there has been a continuing literary fascination with time travel, and especially with the paradoxes that seem to confront any genuine time traveller (something that Wells neglected to investigate). The classic example is the so- called "granny paradox", where a time traveller inadvertently causes the death of his granny when she was a small girl, so that the traveller's mother, and therefore the traveller himself, were never born. In which case, he did not go back in time to kill granny... and so on. A less gruesome example was entertainingly provided by the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his story By his bootstraps (available in several Heinlein anthologies). The protagonist in the story stumbles on a time travel device brought back to the present by a visitor from the far future.

He steals it and sets up home in a deserted stretch of time, constantly worrying about being found by the old man he stole the time machine from - until one day, many years later, he realises that he is now the old man, and carefully arranges for his younger self to "find" and "steal" the time machine. Such a narcissist i view of time travel is taken to its logical extreme in David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself (Random House, 1973). Few of the writers of Dr Who have had the imagination actually to use his time machine in this kind of way. It would, after all, make for rather dull viewing if every time the Doctor had been confronted by a disaster he popped into the TARDIS, went back in time and warned his earlier self to steer clear of the looming trouble. But the implications were thoroughly explored for a wide audience in the Back to the Future trilogy, ramming home the point that time travel runs completely counter to common sense. Obviously, time travel must be impossible.

Only, common sense is about as reliable a guide to science as the well known "fact" that Einstein came up with the idea of time as the fourth dimension is to history. Sticking with Einstein's own theories, it is hardly common sense that objects get both heavier and shorter the faster they move, or that moving clocks run slow. Yet all of these predictions of relativity theory have been born out many times in experiments, to an impressive number of decimal places. And when you look closely at the general theory of relativity, the best theory of time and space we have, it turns out that there is nothing in it to forbid time travel. The theory implies that time travel may be very difficult, to be sure; but not impossible.