The Man with a Time Machine

The time machine exists.

Yes, that is hard to believe. The science fiction writers are largely to blame: they decided how the machine was supposed to look and how it was supposed to work — a chair, levers, dates blinking on a counter, or even a DeLorean. Which is exactly why everyone who goes looking for a time machine goes looking for a chair with levers. Hard to blame them. The human mind finds the very concept of ”time” catastrophically difficult to grasp. Time.

Close your eyes for a minute and keep reading with them closed. Feel the full depth and inevitability of this phenomenon.

That’s the whole catch: time is one of the few things we are stuck inside of with no way out, and which no one has ever seen. We have no organ for time. There are eyes for light, skin for warmth, a cochlea in the ear for sound. For time — nothing. All we have is memory of what no longer is, and expectation of what is not yet. Out of these two ”nots” the brain glues together the thing we call a life.

Test it on yourself. What is ”soon”? How far is it from ”a long time”? To a child, a ten-hour flight is an entire life, it has to be lived through, you could manage to grow old inside it. To an adult, the same flight is an annoying pause between two smoke breaks. This is plain arithmetic: at five years old, one year is a fifth of your whole life, an enormous slab of existence; at fifty, it is one fiftieth — a thin slice.

The French philosopher Paul Janet noticed this back in 1877: time does not flow evenly, it accelerates as you live. Right now it is moving faster for you than it ever has before. Tomorrow it will move faster still. And so on, always.

The only honest word in this whole madness is ”now.” And even that one blurs under close inspection. The psychologist William James, the first to examine ”now” under a magnifying glass, wrote in 1890:

”…the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.” Even ”now” is not a point. We sit astride something that has its own width, and no one can say where it begins and where it ends.

Then physics delivered a blow that still staggers today. In March 1955, a month before his own death, Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to the family of his late friend Michele Besso: ”People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

This is the author of relativity writing, to the family of a friend who has just died — that ”earlier” and ”later” do not mean what we think they mean. A dying physicist consoling the grieving not with faith. With equations.

And the equations are on his side. In 1967 the physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt derived an equation that claims to describe the quantum state of the entire universe at once. They wrote the equation down. They looked at it. And they found the thing physics prefers to mention in a whisper: there is no time variable in it. In the master equation of the universe — if it is correct — time takes no part. Science does not like this subject; like you a minute ago, it can’t manage to read with its eyes closed.

This book is written about a man who learned to operate time, and about what he is building. His name is the key spoiler of this book’s plot: Come-from-Beyond. The one who came from beyond.