How Drew Glass was conceived twenty five years before she
was born
First published in "Time" in 2001
... and reprinted in 1999.
If time travel exists, where are the time travellers?
It all begins with a story. The heroine in this novella tries to time travel through
a black hole but as every self respecting time traveller knows, you canít go into
a black hole and come out somewhere else, because unfortunately matter as we know
it, can't survive the gravitational crush. So instead, our heroine took a wormhole,
"invented" to get around this inconvenient fact by a physicist called John
Wheeler. A wormhole is a place where two different points in time rustle their petticoats
together flirtatiously in a less destructive mutual crush. My Mum is the heroine
of this story. Soon (cosmically speaking) after John invented these two headed no-peds,
she entered one created by my Dad. Wormholes were the first serious theoretical attempt
to explain the empirical fact of my conception out of time.
Hawking. when asked about my Mums body turning up somewhere else in space before
it had set off said that "a physicist working on the possibility of travel into
the past has to be careful not to be labelled a crank, or accused of wasting public
money on science-fiction fantasy. Nevertheless, it is an important question"
... Hardly the theoretical insight you're looking for I imagine?
Let me try and help you: Time is something, which at a fundamental level, we think
we understand, but actually we don't. In the same way that gravity generally exists
as a fixed item, we also happen to know these days, that if we move a few hundred
miles up, it doesn't operate the same way at all. Time is the same deal. In fact,
the faster you move the slower time passes. An experiment in 1971 proved Einstein
right on that point. The tricky bit is breaking the light barrier but I'll come to
that.
The thing about these wormholes is that they can be moved about at will if you are
sufficiently techie to know how to do it. Because Wormholes warp time, you could
noodle through one halfway to infinity and back and arrive in your back yard in time
to see yourself setting off. Travelling at close to the speed of light causes time
to slow down anyway, but add the wormhole warp and you are time travelling. I could
at this point tell you about how to bubble wrap wormholes inside themselves, but
we don't discover that theory for a few more years, so I'd better not, or we might
go the way of the now extinct great bum-bum bird and disappear in a puff of improbability
up our own fundamentals.
In the late 20th century wormholes were thought to be billions of times smaller than
atoms, i.e. far too small to be useful, but then try looking at anything whizzing
away from you faster than the time barrier and it'll seem infinitely small.
In fact a wormhole is mind boggingly large - easily big enough for several episodes
of different time-zoned star trek adventures to be broadcast simultaneously. When
20th century physicists still thought wormholes were tiny, they decided that magic
would probably be the best way to get through them, so consulted several wizards
and other assorted freaks, who in turn invented a concept called "negative energy"
- infinitely more theoretical than a wormhole. Of course to create enough of this
stuff to open a wormhole would require sufficient energy to destroy several universes,
so governments the cold war being what it was in the eighties, were naturally delighted
to fund such research.
Lamoreaux made a squidge of negative energy by squeezing energy out of a vacuum -
obvious really and proof in principle that small amounts of negative energy do exist
in the real world. With negative energy real in practice and wormholes real in theory,
it wasn't long before my Dad was able to figure out what they'd done wrong, invent
an actual gargantuan wormhole and collect my Mum from the seventies, the first place
he accidentally visited, and take her forward in time (a whole other can of worms)
for a romantic interlude in 1999, leading to my conception and eventual birth in
1974. A sometime paradox, not dissimilar in impact to those that would have boggled
our descendants, the magic of metal thingies that float, moving pictures in boxes
that plug into the wall using fire that has no flame, that runs through a piece of
shiny string called plastic, or even more wacky metal thingies that seem lighter
than air because they fly.
Somewhere towards the end of the 20th century, a number of serious minded people,
beginning to realize that since I was here and I shouldn't be, and that all this
theoretical physics wasn't as barking mad as, say nuclear fission in a cup of tea,
they began to suffer testicular pains thinking about time paradoxes. The clutch and
spasm goes something like this: What if someone went back in time and killed someone
who was supposed to later conceive the killer etc. - causality would get screwed
instead of the victim's mother. In order to alleviate the sweat inducing pain, they
reasoned instead that all these events must be in self-consistency with each
other and that if time travel ever does become possible, other laws of physics would
stop a traveller from changing the past. Unfortunately that's about as logical as
thinking nuclear warheads could blow us all up so they're probably harmless. The
universe is a mess not majestic clockwork, it's fragile as flowers, so don't mess
around with time travel or you might discover a whole new way to feel existentially
meaningless. Causality is both as robust in general and as delicate and intricate
in particular, as the rest of nature. By the mid 21st century, people in the mid
22nd century are having to spend trillions putting right the mess. Trust me on this.
Keep time tidy - it'll be a big environmental issue in the future, when even proper
politicians start wearing brown trousers over environmental expediencies.
Lab' experiments in the last decade of the 20th century demonstrated that a single
photon can tunnel across a tunnel barrier at 1.7 times the speed of light. In the
future this " quantum tunnelling" works on both the macro and micro level.
However claiming to send Mozart faster than light brought Gunter Nimtz, quite a wise
chap, close to being called a crackpot. Gunter said in his best accent ... "There's
the signal going to a far star which informations that you were born and 20 years
later tunnel the signal at your age of 20 years and this will arrive before the signal
comes to the star that you were born". "That's a load of Sandra's"
said Physics catching the apple falling on their head but missing the point by a
light year.
Hawking, taking the establishment route as usual,said in Apple's best Kermit soundalike
voice : "I think that if people from the future were going to show themselves
they would do so in a more obvious way. What would be the point of revealing themselves
only to cranks and weirdoes who wouldn't be believed." No no no Steven.
Why ruin causality, not to say a perfectly interesting archeological find, by hanging
with people who'd be believed? No way. Drug-crazed, acid popping, free-love, lunatics
like my Mum, who over-identifies with Seven of Nine onboard Star Trek Voyager when
calm enough to watch TV and half-believes she might be assimilated (again!) by creatures
like the Borg, posing as accountants if she doesn't keep her mind helium driven,
were much more useful to the aids-paranoid, students of TT (time travel).Who wants
to be believed when you already know? What's in it for the time traveller Professor?
In the future, one can change the futureís past and the less those in the past muddle
the puddle the better i.e. you don't dump in your old back yard any more than you'd
graffiti Saint Mark's Square.
Oh, and just to settle another crackpot theory - why we haven't met any time travellers
is not because they've gone to one of the many parallel universes? There are no parallel
universes - well maybe there are, but that's something for the future.
©Drew
Glass currently residing in
1998 and in England.
Photo of Drew Glass : David Knopfler October 1998