Time

Perhaps time really is as simple as we used to think. The wise ones tell us that all we have is this moment; this moment is all there is.

Maybe time is a bubble. This moment (moment meaning: the smallest possible increment of time, so vastly small that our limited minds cannot encompass it) replaced the one before, and is replaced by the next. There is no extant past in which my grandmother still prunes her garden; our lost ones are truly lost.

I imagine a kettle on the boil, but there is just one bubble at a time. It bursts as the next rises to the surface. There is no past time to travel to. It's gone. All that is left is its consequences.

Each bubble creates infinite possible futures. The next bubble creates its own infinite possible futures; some are the same as the last, some are not. With each new bubble, an infinite number of possible futures vanishes, and others take their place. It might be, theoretically, possible to travel to the future, to some possible future, and even to arrive there.

But, unless our time traveler is very lucky, she may land in a possible future that then becomes impossible. It vanishes around her. It suddenly disappears (and she along with it) or perhaps it fades, slowly, in and out, as possibilities change with each new moment of time. Our imagined time traveler would have to be impossibly lucky to land in a future that endures.

This (this metaphysical nonsense) is what happens when one watches too much Doctor Who and Torchwood, which is -- don't you think? -- becoming very sexy, and very dark. Are these inextricably entwined?

No doubt a physicist or mathematician could easily disprove my amateur theory.

Still, I like it.

Comments

[Cathy]

Now that's interesting theory on time. Speaking of sci-fi shows with time traveling in it. You can't bet the Star Trek ones.