The Time Traveler
As everyone knows, it has been a little more than a century and a quarter since the Time Traveler told amongst others the Editor of a newspaper that he had returned from the future, and since then nothing much has come of it. Many prefer to throw scare-quotes around his name to make clear that to affirm his temporal voyage is as simple-minded as to deny the Moon landing. The agreed upon theory is that the “Time Traveler” was a genius gone mad who told a moralizing fable about classism and then performed a magician’s disappearing act to substantiate his story.
Less well-known but still agreed upon is that a certain man purchased the missing Time Traveler’s home. And furthermore, this man, who by all means was a regular gentleman before the disappearance, that night became a stringent recluse. Windows stayed shut, blinds stayed drawn, and there were only rumors of people ever entering the fortress-like manor. The recluse was not seen again until his death and funeral.
Decades later the manor was foreclosed and abandoned, before being torn down without a single complaint from the preservationists. And so too, after all this time, was the recluse’s name forgotten by larger society.
His identity is known only by me and a few compatriots, and we would like to keep it that way. All that needs knowing is that he was a very prudent man, and that after the Time Traveler’s disappearance, our founder meticulously gathered, organized, and sifted through every written note left by the Time Traveler. And not only that, but he dedicated the rest of his life and his meagre resources to finding the right men to figure out how the Time Traveler did it. And yes, the Time Traveler did indeed embark on a temporal voyage. And no, he did not “disappear” like a magician but instead was tragically lost in time—though perhaps it would be more apt to say it was the nihilism that got him.
Today
You are reading this public statement now because we have finally proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that time travel is possible. We have proved it by constructing and testing our very own time machine. The work of generations of brilliant minds has come to fruition. But, because of minutiae heretofore only known to our organization, we have decided that “time travel” is a misnomer. Our accomplishment is more properly understood as the rediscovery of time jumping. The confusion present here is actually in great part due to the Time Traveler himself.
In his lecture on time, he was attempting the difficult task of not explaining how his time machine worked, but merely what the purpose of his machine even was. His strategy was to explain time as a fourth dimension, so that just as we can build planes to fly us around in the three spatial dimensions, we can too build a machine that allows us to move freely within time. The only caveat he added to this analogy was that we are only conscious of time in one direction, whereas that is of course not true for any of the spatial dimensions.
This disanalogous analogy has plagued our philosophies ever since. For our purposes today, the comparison quite straightforwardly comes apart when one considers how, because of Einstein’s General Relativity, time naturally slows when we travel at faster speeds—time freezing for objects that travel at the speed-of-light. This means that under the Time Traveler’s notion of time travel, merely picking up your pace would be only different by degree to his time machine, but that sells his genius quite short indeed.
What the Time Traveler’s machine and ours do is categorically distinct from mere acceleration. For one, our machines allow temporal movement in both directions. And because of this, the old conception of time travel leads to many contradictions like the (grand)father’s paradox. Of course, by the very essence of contradictions, they dissolve upon further analysis. The difference is that when you approach the speed-of-light, you are still in our reality as we know it. You have not broken the laws of physics as they are generally understood. But for the only two time machines heretofore known to exist, they are not so constrained. They jump from reality and into another. We have seen other worlds.
It becomes here quite incredible to understand how the Time Traveler could have such a basic misconception and yet was able to create a functioning time machine—but such is the mystery of true genius. That being said, this misconception of his was not harmless. When he saw the future, he saw it as his future. He thought he had made an augur machine. So he fell to a pessimistic nihilism and disappeared on a presumably suicidal journey through time.
Instead, he should have returned with good hope that he had learned of one possible future, and that it was now in humanity’s power to change it as we deemed fit. Where the Time Traveler thought he destroyed free-will, we have realized we can empower it. And so, in a prudence inspired by our founder’s, we have time jumped somewhere far into the future and only there. When you awake, your eyes flutter open so as to become acclimated to the new light. We have returned with tidings of what is to come if we do not change our ways. Heed these words.
To be continued…