| VOLUME 2 |
| September, 1927 NO. 6 |
THE
MAGAZINE
OF
SCIENTIFICTION
HUGO GERNSBACK, F.R.S., Editor
DR. T. O'CONOR SLOANE, M. A., Ph.D.; Associate Editor
Editorial and General Offices---53 Park Place, New York, N. Y.
Extravagant Fiction Today |
Cold Fact Tomorrow |
THE MYSTERY OF TIME
By HUGO GERNSBACK, F.R.S.
CANADIAN correspondent, Mr. C. G. Portsmouth, of Vancouver, takes us to task about "The Lost Continent." Says he:
"I am a constant reader of your magazine, and am taking the liberty of writing you in regard to the story, 'The Lost Continent,' in your July issue. Your foreword states that this tale contains the best science of all the prize-winning stories submitted.
"Now, in a scientifiction story, I quite understand, and appreciate, that wealth of imagination, such as inventions, new powers, discoveries of new chemical, physical and psychic laws, and their adaptations, is wholly creditable to the authors, because, indeed, as you state, 'extravagant fiction today—cold fact tomorrow.'
"Now, to come to my point it is not, however, good science to cause a scientific impossibility, a logical impossibility, a direct contradiction, to appear in a story. And this is just what I beg to show has been perpetrated in this story, 'The Lost Continent.'
"Here goes: The people in this yarn have been carried back in time fourteen thousand years, and are beholding the lost continent it was then, 'a thriving and populous country'.
They see the inhabitants of those early days, moving about and in general living their lives again as they once did. Very good, all's well, but now enters the scientific impossibility. Those inhabitants look up and take notice of the ship and its cargo of time-travelers!
"May I quote 'The only sign of emotion of the group on the cliff was shown by a. . man who. . gazed in our direction with a look of admiration on his face'. Again and again on page 344 and 345 of this story it is stated that the lost people of Atlantis observed those who had come back in time to them from our present to their of Atlantis as present, and this, Mr. Editor, is a scientific and logical impossibility.
"It is scientifically possible for 1926 to go back in time and observe the doings, etc., of 14,000 years ago (theoretically, I mean, of course), but it was not theoretically possible for that race of 14,000 years ago to sense in any way those who watched them from, shall we say, 1926 A. D.?
"At the risk of being over precise, let me put the case in a concrete form. Take the 'tall, kingly-looking man' who gazed at and in various ways sensed the presence of those who observed him from the ship. Call him A for short. Now A lived his life, thousands of years ago, and died. All right, now let us pass on in time 14,000 years. Now, back we come in time to where A is again living his life. Lo and behold, this time A sees before he dies a strange phenomenon in his sky! He sees the shipload of people observing him. And yet these people are necessarily observing him during his one and only lifetime, wherein he certainly did not, could not, have observed them.
"The same case applies to all the other people of Atlantis. They necessarily all lived and died thousands of years ago, and yet when their time is brought back again they are made to observe and act in a manner they could not even theoretically have done.
"May I suggest, Mr. Editor, that a truly scientific handling of the moment in time when our travelers looked down on Atlantis would have been to have the inhabitants of Atlantis totally unaware of the explorers' presence in their midst? The writer of the tale had a chance there of propounding an interesting bit of science by having some of the people on the ship asking how it was that none of the throngs of Atlantis below seemed to notice them in any way, and then having it explained to them, as far as the people of Atlantis were concerned, the ship, the sphere and the explorers in time simply did not exist could not exist, because these people had already lived through this moment of time once when there was no ship, no sphere, and no travelers-in-time, and were now simply reliving that same moment of time again."
Offhand, the logic contained in Mr. Portsmouth's letter seems perfect, but is it? Many things that sound perfectly illogical today may be perfectly logical tomorrow, in the light of more and better knowledge. If you had told some one, 75 years ago, that a black iron disc inside of a telephone receiver could faithfully reproduce practically every known sound, and, indeed, reproduce a whole orchestra at one time, you would have been laughed at. How can the self-same diaphragm reproduce twenty different instruments all at the same time? Logic, at that time, would have dictated that it was impossible. Yet we know from our everyday experience that it is now quite commonplace.
Likewise, when we delve into the mystery of time, we should be most careful, because we are venturing on an uncharted sea, of which but little is known. An interesting sidelight on Mr. Portsmouth's contention is answered in the article, "Explorations in the World of Dreams," by H. G. Wells, published in the New York Times Magazine of July 10th, 1927, from which we quote the following:
"The point of interest is that our mind can be considered as existing in the past and in the future, as extending, so to speak, both ways beyond what we consider to be the actual moment.
"I hope that does not strike the reader as too crazy a proposition. Most of us have given very little thought to what we mean by the actual moment. What do we mean by 'now?' How much time is it? Behind 'now' stretches the past, ahead is the future, but is it itself an infinitesimal instant? Do we merely exist as a flash, as a series of flashes, so to speak, of no duration at all, between a past gone by and a future still to come, or does 'now' bulge into both past and future?
"This will be a novel and amusing question to most people and a profoundly irritating one to certain types. They will be so accustomed to speak of past and future as though they were in actual contact at the present, that the assertion will be astonishing and difficult, and yet as they think it over, it will acquire an insinuating and troublesome plausibility, that 'now'."
Here is a profound thinker who seriously argues a point that seems, offhand, to be impossible. It may not be so.
Furthermore, if we contemplate a nova in the skies, that is, a star that suddenly flares up in the heavens, our astronomers quickly tell us that this event took place perhaps four or five thousand years ago. A recent star burst out into flame while Rome was being built, yet we only lately saw the effect of it. The reason is that it took several thousand years for the light to reach the earth.
On the other hand, according to Einstein, time, which is a dimension, curves back on itself, and will come back after a certain cycle. If this is true, the situation as described in the story under discussion, "The Lost Continent," would not be quite so impossible.
If you think of time as a ribbon which will come back to its starting point, you can readily see that you will reach a point where two events, although at widely different dates, will run past each other in time.
I do however agree with Mr. Portsmouth, that the inhabitants of Atlantis would probably not have seen the later travelers in time.
Mr. Hugo Gernsback speaks every Tuesday at 9 P. M. from WRNY on various scientific and radio subjects.
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