When Science Fiction and the Science of Time Synchronize

Time is the most common noun in the English language... but what is time?

Source: Guy P. Harrison

Looking for some psychological stimulation to exercise your mind and spice up your day? Try devoting some time to thinking about time. Few people peek down into this particular rabbit hole but we all should, given its prominence in our lives.

What is time? What, exactly, are clocks measuring? Does time even exist outside of our minds? Is time a flowing river we swim in, or an impenetrable fog that imprisons us? Maybe our idea of time is nothing more than a shortcut, a convenient cheat word that evolutionarily young and limited primate brains use to make some sense of change. Perhaps time is a trivial sideshow, the mere plaything of gravity, mass, and motion. Or maybe it is the key to everything.

Time is the most frequently used noun in the English language, an odd fact considering we still don’t have a satisfactory definition of it. And now, awkward contradictions between our common daily experiences and scientific revelations from the quantum realm may be telling us that time is just too complex and too weird for us to grasp anytime soon. Maybe the idea of time in our minds can never be reconciled with the reality of time in our cosmos. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

While working on my latest book, Damn You, Entropy!, 1,001 of the Greatest Science Fiction Quotes, I was surprised to discover that real-world-relevant quotes about time were as plentiful as those about space, robots, aliens, and other obvious sci-fi topics. The following samples were buried inside works of fiction but offer plenty of inspiration to think more deeply about the reality of time.

“Time,” he said, “is what keeps everything from happening at once.” This pithy quote from Ray Cummings’ 1919 novel The Girl in the Golden Atom is often misattributed to physicists Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. It suggests that Time may have some active role in structuring the universe. But maybe not, as one of Blake Crouch’s characters declares in Recursion, his 2019 novel: “Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

James Blish’s 1958 novel, A Case of Conscience, presents the idea that Time is only icing on an imaginary cake: “I expect that in the long run, when we get right down to the fundamental stuff of the universe, we’ll find that there’s nothing there at all—just nothings moving no-place through no-time.” And David Harris Ebenbach’s 2021 novel How to Mars contains this blunt conversation starter: “Time is. Any sense of unidirectionality is a human illusion.” And no one ever said time can’t be funny, a cosmic loophole Eric Idle was happy to exploit in his 1999 novel The Road to Mars: “Space and time are not at all the same thing, as anyone who has sat between a fat man and a bore can attest.”

Whatever time is, many science fiction writers have worked hard to describe our troubled relationship with it. Robert Charles Wilson gave this philosophical perspective in his 2005 novel Spin: “There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It’s hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.” S. D. Unwin, a physicist who also writes science fiction novels, included this humbling line in One Second per Second: “If there is any kind of cosmic plan, it’s one in which time is chaos, and people, civilizations and realities its playthings.”

For centuries, science fiction writers have had a lot to say about the reality of Time.

Source: Rowman and Littlefield/Prometheus Books

Robert V. S. Redick’s short story “Vanishing Point” reveals time as a trick: “Glass is an illusion, says the man of science. A trick played on our poor sense of time. We think it’s a solid, but in fact it’s in motion, constantly flowing, the very windows in a cathedral will one day stand empty, their glazing puddled on the floor.”

Writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga gave the following weighty words to Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard: “Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives, but I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because they’ll never come again.” And these tough lines come from David Brin’s novel Brightness Reef: “The universe is hard. Its laws are unforgiving. Even the successful and glorious are punished by the grinding executioner called Time.” The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter, perfectly capture the intimidating nature of Time: “The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.”

No discussion about science fiction and the science of time should neglect mentioning time travel, of course. H.G. Wells and his immensely popular 1895 novel The Time Machine left us with the enduring question of whether it is possible to move backward and forward in time at will. Once viewed as pure fantasy, elite scientists take it very seriously today. Wells might have something to do with that given a short line in his story that has lingered to challenge and torment physicists across generations: “‘Why not?’ said the Time Traveler.”