Travel to the Past and Closed Time-Like Curves

 

My prior post but one dealt with time travel to the future. This one will consider ways to travel in time not restricted to strictly future-ward possibilities – ways with some scientific credentials and ways with supported only by the science of fiction.

Travel to the Future

 

The usual way

We should feel some awe at our ability to travel in time, but we tend to take travel to the future for granted because we do it so well.

The Many World Metaphysics of "The Man in the High Castle"

The Amazon series in which the Axis powers won the Second World War is based on the premise that things might have turned out with North America split between a Greater Nazi Reich in the east and the Japanese Pacific States, a largely lawless Rocky Mountain area separating the two. It is not too hard for us to imagine at least one war outcome different from this. 

The metaphysics of the series has it that both these possible worlds are actual, as are others, and that information transfer and human travel among them are possible. The political and human consequences of interacting worlds fuel much of the drama of the series. I am going to put aside world politics, fascism, terrorism, life, death and the longings of the human soul to focus, instead, on what I am sure got the audience clicking into episode after episode: the metaphysics of plural worlds.

Two (or More) Moving Spotlights of Time

There is something special about this moment: that it is now.  We talk about the “flow” of time, are tempted to say “the now moves” and may find appealing the analogy of a spotlight sweeping across a series of pictures. I am not, here and now, going to defend the, philosophically controversial, moving spotlight theory. What I am going to do is to show that we could have evidence, not decisive evidence but pretty good evidence, that there were two or more spotlight nows moving along the timeline, and perhaps moving at different speeds, or even in different directions.