MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THE TIME MACHINE

Time doesn’t exist. Or – however – it is not what we believe it is.

 I’ve always  thought that the Time was merely an invention, a way to split our lives, but – reading The Time Machine - I started to work out other theories. We usually think  of Time as something made of an immutable past that – fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the situation – will never come back, of an incognizable and unpredictable future, and of an elusive present. We don’t automatically imagine two categories of Time: a “Natural” and an “Artificial” one. The first type is simply a series of changes in the state of matter; the latter is a type of Time marked by clocks, which werw created by human beings to facilitate (or complicate?) our daily life. I mean: if there were no clocks, no hourglasses, no stopwatches, no sundials or any other Time’s measuring instrument, the only way we would have to realize the passage of Time is to take note of the succession of light and darkness. Aging? To know how old a person is, we subtract his year of birth from the current year, but the unit of measurement we use is  our own invention: in nature there are no years, no month, no weeks, no days, no hours, no minutes, no seconds and so on; there are only the movements of the Earth: the Rotation and the Revolution.

  If we had not invented the clocks or the concept of the year we should just note that person’s aging through the cellular changes of his body. Every changing happens through gradual steps that guarantee the balance of our universe. The main feature of these steps is the irreversibility: a broken vase will never return intact; an old man will never come back younger… This is the reason why we feel lost when things happen to us that go beyond this Time’s unidirectional trajectory. I refer to phenomena such as, for example, precognitions, coincidences (or synchronicity), dreams, déjà-vu and so on. So, why we can move – more or less easily – in Space but not in Time? If we rely on the logical reasoning carefully described in The Time Machine, we can move in Time with our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions. How? With memories… For example: every time we are recalling an incident very vividly we go back to the instant of its occurrence. We jump back for a moment. Or: in the dream world it can happen to be – at the same time – children and adults; we can move faster than in reality; we can be in two places at the same time. Sometimes we can feel the sensation of having lived whole days, only to discover – to our surprise, upon awakening – that only a few minutes have passed; and vice versa, of course. Time: what is it? Someone calls it “The Fourth Dimension”, saying that is a further dimension of Space in addition to the three canons (lenght, width and depth). Others argue that, by combining Space and Time, a new dimension – called SPACE-TIME – has its origin. On this subject, physicists and mathematicians, differ widely. The studies carried out by famous scientists on space-time dimension have led me to consider another hypothesis and to elaborate another theory: could a time travel be just a shift to another universe? We often hear of multiverses, of parallel universes, of space-time gaps and so on: so far as we know, whenever we live a déjà-vu, it could be an intersection of two worlds.

Why was man able to invent machines that could fly, defying gravity, but he still could not create a machine that could travel through Time? Wells and many others have speculated what could happen if there really was a Time Machine: it would be possible to visit the future, to peek at appreview of the fate of humanity, to see its evolution and progress or its decay. Or we could satisfy our curiosity about historical figures, thanks to a leap into the past; we could observe, as simple spectators… In the 2002 remake, directed by Simon Wells and inspired by the eponymous novel by H. G. Wells and by the 1960 film The man who lived in the future, the traveler builds a Time Machine to return to the past and change the fate of his beloved. This fact triggers two questions:

1.        Would it be possible to change the past?

2.      Would it be ethical to do it?

The film tries to provide a plausible answer to both questions, but I don’t want to make spoiler! I’ll do, however, an argument: we said that the memories ar – for now – the only means we have to go back in Time, mentally. Memories greatly influence our present because we torment ourselves or, on the contrary, we bask in them, giving to the memory an enormous power. Sometimes we get sick, overwhelmed by regrets or remorse! So, I noticed that this thing can also apply to the future. Imagination, dreams and desires are equally able to influence our present. For example: if – when you was a child – [you]  wanted to be a lawyer, you chose schools that would teach you that profession, imagining and projecting yourself into a future where [you] would have made a law firm of your own and [you] would have made harangues in crowded courtrooms. Your choise of school (present) was determined by the imagination/the dream/the desire for a particular kind of future, by a goal [you] wanted to achieve. That present has become – day after day – past, and the results of that past (called “successes” and “failures”) have determined – in turn – your present, your current condition or situation. Therefore, are past, present and future in continuous evolution, in perpetual transformation and determine each other, as the dance of Shiva - in which everything is energy that constantly changes – suggests? Or always are – past, present and future  - as in some of our most intricate dreams, with us, all three at the same time, in every moment? It’s interesting to note – in this regard – the use that Wells makes of the prefix “TO-“ in words like “TODAY”, “TOMORROW” and “TONIGHT”, written, in fact, this way: “TO-DAY”, “TO-MORROW” and “TO-NIGHT”. The purpose could be to underline the passage from one type of Time to another, implying that past, present and future can’t coexist… Instead I like to think of being a whole of what I am, of what I have been and of what I will be and – why not? – even of what I am not, I have not been and I will not be. About narrative techniques: the sensations that the traveler feels inside the Machine while moving through Time are described very accurately. Stunning, above all, like upon a switchback; and it’s understandable because he travels while remaining seated: practically it’s the principle of car sickness!

If we really wanted to change something, maybe we could do it by changing our plans for the future. This method, of course, can be considered applicable only by those who don’t believe in a pre-established Destiny. It’s a delicate matter, I’m aware of it, because it can involve religious issues or even whole life philosophies. The hardest thing is to be able not to involve/disrupt the lives of other people. Every choice we make, in fact, will inevitably have repercussions on other people. With our  behavior we always influence someone, so ethical and moral questions are always lurking along with paradoxes and anachronisms. What would happen, in fact, if we could actually return PHYSICALLY (and not just mentally) in the past and be able to change some events that happened? Could we prevent our own birth (like in the film Back to the Future)? Probably not, otherwise we would risk incurring an obvious paradox: to prevent my birth – in fact – I would have to go back in Time and change the past, but – changing the past – I would not be in the present to go back to that past and change it! And if – instead – going to the future (or back to the past), we find someone or something that occupies our same physical space, what would happen? Would we disintegrate instantly? Or: if in the future you bacame aware of events about someone you love, would you reveal these facts? [Some of these issues are also dealt in various episodes of the television series entitled The Big Bang Theory].

“Horrible things happen to wizards who meddle with Time!” [Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban].

Many other perplexities began to crowd my mind after reading The Time Machine, including these: are there more futures at our disposal or, every time, we create a future based on our present choices? If so, would we also have many pasts that we could live but we did not live? Would the Time Machine know in which future to bring me?

Would happen to the desire, which has always existed in the human being, to erase death?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but make me feel alive, so, my advice to all of you, dear readers, is: never stop ask and ask  questions to yourselves!