I have had a number of requests asking for my personal views on this subject considering that it is one, if not, a major theme which runs throughout my work, and whilst my opinion can be no more educational or objective than any others, I nevertheless will attempt to describe my point of view.
It is a subject which has obsessed me all my life. I can remember thinking about the nature of time when I was three. If I remember correctly, this had something to do with playing with a plastic toy in a tin bath at a speech correction centre to which my parents sent me. But the details escape me now!
I am a pragmatic soul, perhaps even more so nowadays as I get older but ever since I began to think seriously about the real nature of time and travelling through it, perhaps beginning in my teens, I came to the conclusion, and one that remains with me today, that time travelling is quite impossible.
But what is time travel? We do it continously don't we? We advance into the future one second at a time and although Einsteinian physics has put forward the theory, (now proved) that if we were to attain a speed close to the speed of light, we might age slower therefore giving the traveller the impression that she has travelled quicker into the future, for us mortals, that second by second law cannot be broken. To show how remarkable this is, the men who travelled to the moon and back, attaining a speed of 25,000 miles per hour, are believed to be about two millionth of a second younger than when they left earth! To slow down significantly, one must travel incredibly fast. Perhaps almost seven times distance around the equator in one second! Quite mind-blowing.
Travelling into the past must be acknowledged as absolutely impossible. I believe we can forget black holes and wormholes etc Why am I so certain? It has all to do with the Laws of Thermodynamics. Specifically, the second law which states that "energy systems have a tendency to increase their entropy" rather than decrease it. What does that mean? It means that entropy equals chaos and everything eventually will become chaotic.
The order that was the Tudor world has, over the last 500 years become so chaotic and has been changed into so many other systems that for us to revisit it, every single atom would have to be pulled from wherever it is today and recombined with wherever it was all that time ago. Think of that! What power, what system and what would have the knowledge to do that?
However, given that an immensely powerful being could do that, the first law of Thermodynamics, which declares that energy cannot be created or destroyed, would come into effect and that would mean that our current world (and of course all the people in it) would be gone...changed back into Tudor times. We have a lose, lose situation.
If one stands in a street in the city of London, high buildings predominate and it took a great deal of energy to create them. If, by some means, a person was able to travel back, perhaps, a hundred years, all those buildings would have (to his perception) vanished. So the question must be asked, and it is a very important question, where could all that energy have disappeared to?
Here we are dealing with a person-centered point of view. A view which is the only position to take. Think about it. Well, as energy cannot be created or destroyed, we are left with the same situation as I outlined above. All the energy would be someplace else and connected to a billion other things. I was born in September 1952 and therefore conceived about Christmas time 1951. Where was my little body then? Parts of it were of grasses yet to be eaten by a cow before it delivered its milk. Other bits were in the flesh of piglets perhaps hundreds of miles away. Yes, the bacon my mother would have for a breakfast. The air which was to make up part of me was perhaps thousands of miles away over the Atlantic at the time, perhaps breathed out by a fisherman. Ready for my mother to breath it back in one day. And I could go on but you see my point? For a person to go back in time and meet me as a child, every single part of me and what was once me would have to be reconstituted from trillions and trillions of atoms.
When I was in my youth, I read that if a person lives to be eighty years of age, then in her lifetime, she would have probably breathed in one molecule of air that Julius Caesar breathed out in his lifetime! We have to think hard in order to get our thoughts around that! What an impossibly complex and beautiful world we live in. And as much as I have no time for the person, this poem strikes a major chord with the impossibility of reversing times arrow.
Transformations
by
Thomas Hardy
Portions of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to green shoot.
These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!