Thanks to one of life's happy coincidences, the age old theme of time travel has come up again and again for me recently - in a book (Time Traveller’s Wife), a play (A Disappearing Number) and a podcast (BBC's In Our Time on Gödel). Since the dawn of the scientific age, time travel has grown in use as a device in works of fiction, such as Dickens' Christmas Carol and H.G.Wells' Time Machine, and also many of my favourite films as a child – Back to the Future, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Terminator, even comedies like Groundhog Day and one of my recent favourites, Donnie Darko. But is it more than a fictional device?
Stephen Hawking still believes it is impossible within our own region of spacetime, arguing that nobody has met a tourist from the future, but other respected scientists and writers hint that time itself is no more than a fictional device of our consciousness:
"People like us who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
Einstein
“I see Past, Present and Future, existing all at once / Before me”
William Blake
Not being more than an occasional theatregoer myself, I was reminded of what a powerful experience going to see a play can be by watching “A Disappearing Number” recently at the Barbican. You don't have to be a numbers nerd like me to appreciate how it shines a light on the poetry of mathematics, and the beautiful and complex "science of patterns”. Another wonderful element of the play was Nitin Sawhney’s score, which has a mathematical rhythm and precision that somehow invests the dry and abstract subject of mathematics with real passion.
Although time travel is not an explicit theme in the play, it does hint heavily at the interconnected of things across time and space, focusing on two stories that interweave, one based on fact (Ramanujan and GH Hardy 100 years ago) and the other fiction (maths lecturer Ruth and futures trader Al). The two stories converge and have parallels, with shared themes of love and elements of comedy. Both Rs are seduced by the dangerous beauty of mathematics, an obsession which redeems them but is also responsible for their demise. One poignant and dramatic use of a numerical series in the play was the following, which starts with one but never become two: 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8, etc < 2, evoking for me an idea that however hard we try, or however close we get, we will always be "1.something", in other words alone in this universe. I won't talk about the Time Traveller's Wife, apart from to say it's one of the most heartbreaking love stories I've read, and uses the theme of time travel to devastating effect. But I will quickly mention Gödel, a strange but brilliant mathematician and the "best logician since Aristotle", who became a close friend of Einstein. Gödel discovered that time travel is consistent with the laws of physics, by using Einstein’s theory of relativity to show the existence of spatial loops that permit time travel. His reasoning is dismissed by philosophers as nothing more than elaborate logic or metaphysics, however Einstein shared his belief in the unreality of time, and that's good enough to make me remain open-minded about time travel too.
Stephen Hawking still believes it is impossible within our own region of spacetime, arguing that nobody has met a tourist from the future, but other respected scientists and writers hint that time itself is no more than a fictional device of our consciousness:
"People like us who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
Einstein
“I see Past, Present and Future, existing all at once / Before me”
William Blake
Not being more than an occasional theatregoer myself, I was reminded of what a powerful experience going to see a play can be by watching “A Disappearing Number” recently at the Barbican. You don't have to be a numbers nerd like me to appreciate how it shines a light on the poetry of mathematics, and the beautiful and complex "science of patterns”. Another wonderful element of the play was Nitin Sawhney’s score, which has a mathematical rhythm and precision that somehow invests the dry and abstract subject of mathematics with real passion.
Although time travel is not an explicit theme in the play, it does hint heavily at the interconnected of things across time and space, focusing on two stories that interweave, one based on fact (Ramanujan and GH Hardy 100 years ago) and the other fiction (maths lecturer Ruth and futures trader Al). The two stories converge and have parallels, with shared themes of love and elements of comedy. Both Rs are seduced by the dangerous beauty of mathematics, an obsession which redeems them but is also responsible for their demise. One poignant and dramatic use of a numerical series in the play was the following, which starts with one but never become two: 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8, etc < 2, evoking for me an idea that however hard we try, or however close we get, we will always be "1.something", in other words alone in this universe. I won't talk about the Time Traveller's Wife, apart from to say it's one of the most heartbreaking love stories I've read, and uses the theme of time travel to devastating effect. But I will quickly mention Gödel, a strange but brilliant mathematician and the "best logician since Aristotle", who became a close friend of Einstein. Gödel discovered that time travel is consistent with the laws of physics, by using Einstein’s theory of relativity to show the existence of spatial loops that permit time travel. His reasoning is dismissed by philosophers as nothing more than elaborate logic or metaphysics, however Einstein shared his belief in the unreality of time, and that's good enough to make me remain open-minded about time travel too.
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