Josh McNeely
Amanda Hoppe
English 136
12/10/2017
Open versus closed loop time travel
Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”, uses intricate writing style to describe its subject matter in an elegant way. In this novelette, Fuwaad ibn Abbas, a merchant in ancient Baghdad is brought before the Caliph, the chief Muslim civil and religious ruler, with a story of time travel brought on by the Egyptian Alchemist Basharaat. Basharaat’s shop is filled with numerous strange, mechanical and artistic oddities crafted by the shop owner. The strangest item is located in the back, the “Gate of Years”, a circular doorway made of black metal, which when entered takes you to the past or future depending on which side of the Gate you enter.
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Despite choosing to use a closed loop time travel system, Chiang contradicts Ronald Mallett’s theories that two intense beams of light pointed at each other would slowly start to rotate, pulling in time itself with it, but you cannot go backwards in time farther than the first time machine. Warren Ellis explains “The theory has been tested and found valid. One would step into the loop and walk in time, exiting the loop at the desired point on the calendar. Re-entering the loop and walking back to return to your own time. But you could not walk back in time further than the point at which the time machine was switched on” (Ellis, 04/15/2007). Instead, Chiang’s characters are unable to change the past, but able to observe it and try to change it, resulting in each of them realizing a bigger picture because of their …show more content…
In an open loop time travel system the time traveler can change the future by influencing the past. In “Back to the Future”, after traveling back in time 30 years, Marty Mcfly attempts to save his father's life from an oncoming car. Little does he know the car wasn't destined to kill his father, but cause his mother and father to meet. Now Marty’s mother is infatuated with Marty and he must figure out how to reverse this, and get back to the future with no plutonium left. This is a perfect example of open looped time travel because Marty was able to change the past in ways that influenced the future. We see this when Marty starts to fade out of existence because his mother no longer knows his father. If we were dealing with a closed loop system, Marty pushing his father out of the way of the car would probably have been the thing causing his father and mother to meet in the first place.
I think that by choosing a closed loop system in which you can't change what is to come, Chiang is following Buddhist beliefs of fate and destiny. Perhaps he is trying to get his readers to realize that we can't change the past, as Marty almost did, but instead learn from it. Many people dwell on negatives that have previously occurred, but instead we can realize our mistakes and move on to live our lives with the knowledge gained from
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was an intriguing and exciting book about a Time Traveller and his journey’s through time. In this book, the Traveller explained to a group of men who were discussing the nature of time that time was the fourth dimension; just like the three dimensions of space: length, width and height. The Traveller argued that since time was a dimension, then it stood to reason that people should be able to move along the time continuum, into the past or the future. Most of the men do not seem to believe the Traveller or his theory, but agreed that they would like to travel in time, and talked about what they would do if they could. To illustrate his point, the Time Traveller went and got a model of his time machine from his laboratory to demonstrate and later returned to detail the places, things and people he had seen in his travels with his working Time Machine. Throughout the story, the Time Traveller faced setbacks and challenges, but the book outlined how he persevered and pointed to the future mankind faced.
By going back and forth between the time frames, the first being in the present and the second being in 800,000, H.G. Wells lets the reader know that the time traveller has made it back from the future by providing passages that prove he made it home, to the present, alive. However, during the time span of the novel, the time traveller from the future did not know that he was able to escape the future. This changes the point of view throughout the story, even though the main character doesn’t change. Because of the changes in the time frame, the time traveller in the present and the time traveller in the future can be considered different people. “Selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course the (dynamite sticks) were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence. I really believe that, had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the Time Machine, all together into nonexistence.” In this excerpt, the time traveller is speaking of his own adventure after coming back from the future. However, he makes it sound as if he were in the future. By putting interjections into the story, he changes up the storyline
Within “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges manifests new ideas of time, questions the standard understanding of a novel as well as contemplates the concept of fate. Time, one of Borges’s favorite topics, is easily manipulated. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges attempts to make a visual model of an abstract idea. Adding to this, the title in itself is a metaphor to aid readers in imagining Ts’ui Pen’s idea of time - infinitely veering (Borges 126-127). Borges works Ts’ui Pen’s notion of time into a rather unique book that not only discusses the idea of time, but does it in a way that causes confusion and chaos among its readers. This textual labyrinth forks in time rather than space, creating infinite futures with completely different outcomes (Borges 125). Through these infinitely different futures, Borges brings up his ideas of fate. By actions and thoughts, it is made obvious that the protagonist is a firm believer in fate, saying “the future is as irrevocable as the past” (Borges 121). All the seemingly unrelated events in his life - Captain Madden, his arrival at Dr. Albert’s house, and the novel itself - all appear to come together for a single purpose, for Yu Tsun to signal where the artillery park was located. This combination of themes had rarely been written about before, leaving Borges as the creator of new
The two books by Markus Zusak and Paulo Coelho tells the stories of two characters, Liesel Meminger and Santiago, each in their own respective stories. In The Alchemist, Santiago’s story is a much lighter tale with an overall optimistic and adventurous air. He journeys from Spain all the way to Egypt and back before his adventure ends. Zusak’s The Book Thief, sharply contrasts Coelho’s story with the much darker and dangerous world of Nazi Germany.
Travelling through time is certainly easy to imagine. You step into the time machine; press a few buttons; and emerge out not just anywhere – but anywhen. However, in reality things aren’t quite as convenient as science fiction would suggest, as you will understand later on.
An essential requirement for the possibility of time travel is the presumption that future and past were somehow real. But according to one popular view only the present is real, and to suppose that the past or future are also real is to suppose that the past and the future are also present -- a contradiction. According to this sort of Heraclitean metaphysical conception, the future is genuinely open: there is no realm of determinate future fact, no denizens of the future to identify or talk about, though of course -- in the fullness of time -- there will be. Travel to the future on this view would be ruled out because there is simply nowhere to go.
...from the future has given us the secrets to do so? Is it because the future has not been acted out yet? Or has it been, and we are simply the past, seeing it as the present? Time travel has been a long debated subject. One such debate is, can it even be done? Many models of the big bang suggest that it can, while the theory of relativity says that it cannot be done.
Many science fiction shows, films, and novels today have been influenced by science fiction novels from the past. A few examples are Frequency,The Butterfly Effect, and A Sound of Thunder relating to A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. These films all express Bradbury’s idea of the butterfly effect and that time traveling can change the past, therefore changing the future. Although they share the same idea, they each have different outcomes.
... is only there to attempt to take him off track as the fear of suffering is worse than the action itself, which never happens when one pursues their dreams anyways. Therefore, the fear of the suffering in the future should be conquered as it is nothing but a burden to one’s life. Thus, the fear of the future must be conquered because people do not know if what they are afraid of will actually happen.
The author starts the narrative with the memories of her family house built in a traditional Arab style, where the nature is replaced by “geometric
Time travel is a theory that has been mentioned in movies for decades. In those movies, even the tiniest change can affect the future. Even though time travel movies are categorized as science fiction, the idea of changing one aspect of the past resulting in major repercussions in the future is possible. Take Steve Jobs as an example. He dropped out of Reed College and created the Macintosh computer. This inspired him to start his company, Apple, today almost all of the products we use are made by Apple -- but what if Steve Jobs had not dropped out? He probably would not have started Apple, and we would not have the devices we do today. In the book Thirteen Reasons Why, Hannah Baker’s life was changed by three details. Hannah’s change in self-identity,
Time travel has always been an ambitious dream in science fiction. Writers such as H.G Wells not only kept their readers mesmerized by great novels such as “The time machine” but also introduced the idea of time travel in the imagination of their readers. Today time travel is not regarded as strictly science fiction. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity permits a unique kind of time dilation that would ordinarily be called time travel. The theory states that, relative to a stationary observer, time appears to pass more slowly for fast-moving bodies. For example, a moving clock will appear to run slow; as a clock approaches the speed of light its hands will appear to nearly stop moving. So if one can move information from one point to another faster than light then according to special relativity, there will be an observer who sees this information transfer as allowing information to travel into the past.
We Like It, We Love It, We Want Some More of It: The Allure of Time Travel
The novel The Time Machine is told by an unknown narrator. The narrator attends the meetings of the time traveler, but he, along with the others, are unsure of whether to believe the time traveler. At the end of the story, the narrator is left wondering what happened to the time traveler and if time travel truly exists. An important character in the novel is the time traveler. He travels thousands of years into the future and meets a whole new race of creatures. The time traveler is bold and curious. He tries out his time travel machine on his own and risks his life. He explores the future of the world. Eventually, he makes it back from his first adventure and is able to tell his story. However, he goes back into the future and has not returned after several years.
The act of time travel assumes that we can travel time at a rate different when compared to the normal world. There are several theories on how one could travel through time physically even if the methods wouldn’t make a lot of sense logically. These methods range from altered movement in regular space to the abuse of certain cosmic phenomena which may or may not exist. In this paper I will argue that the physical possibility of time travel is sound and therefore possible even if only theoretically.