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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with.
There is a story by Robert Heinlein called something like "By His Bootstraps", where somebody becomes his/her own father and mother, having been born with gonads of both sexes.
Bingley
Bingley
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entity that ceases to exist at the identical point at which it is created.
The very word cease would not exist without the notion of a time continuum... and an identical point in what?
People also all to glibly speak of "before the Big Bang".. When there is no time, there is no "before" nor "after".
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Logarithmic time? Further explanation
It means that in terms of my subjective experience, the age points 1 year, 2 years, 4, 8, 16, 32 years... appear roughly equally spaced, i.e. the intervals hold similar quantities of time-bound material. When I try to recount my life, I spend similar amounts of time for each of these intervals, even though they were lengthening in terms of calendar time..
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Even though I am not a huge fan of T.S. Eliot I loved this one work of his which I copied to hang on my wall in my young adulthood, either it is untitled or I don't recall it (and I could be a little off from the original):
If Time and Space as sages say
Are things that cannot be,
The sun which never feels decay
No greater is than we.
So why, love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that's lived a day
Has lived eternity.
--T.S. Eliot
>The Big Bang<...so what exploded?
>Time Travel<... While believing in the possibilities of extra-dimensional travel, I also find it difficult to believe that if indeed, time travel exists in some "future" society (and even with a sworn and heightened wisdom toward the non-tampering of history), that someone could resist going back to WWI and making sure that Adolph Hitler was killed in the trenches.
>I'll see your Dylan and Donne and Wordsworth and raise you a Eugene O'Neill -- from his play Long Day's Journey Into Night -- Edmund Tyrone's monologue in conversation with his father, James Tyrone (note: Edmund is sick with tuberculosis):
EDMUND
You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself--actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see--and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand let's the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!
He grins wryly
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!
TYRONE
Stares at him--impressed.
Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right.
Then protesting uneasily
But that's a morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death.
EDMUND
Sardonically
The makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do. I mean, if I live. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.
(c) 1955 by Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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>Sooo. …?
>Well, I stood for what seemed an infinite time upon the edge of the ridge panting and gazing off into the distance then slowly cast my view downwards. The tremendous drop left me breathless. The slope ran from below my feet, in a sheer drop to the sleepy valley below. It was then I realized, that such a four-minute moment represented one of the most sublime experiences a human can have. The perspective, the point of view, was strictly mine.
Huddled in the valley below, dotting the grassy floor were numerous sleepy farmhouses and cottages where fires were being stoked, and things slowly stirring. Previously, I had never dared ask why I was, or who I was, but that day brought me some resolve, or at least the knowledge not to need to ask. Fulfilment always comes in petite, bite-sized doses – occurring passim. Those who attempt to gain more than their share at any one time have no way to use or channel it; they merely feel the fleeting instant slip through their grasp. As such things continue, and, bit-by-bit, we learn the windings of the road.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Rhub. entity that ceases to exist at the identical point at which it is created.
wseiberThe very word cease would not exist without the notion of a time continuum... and an identical point in what?
which does, perhaps, demonstrate the paucity of the language we have at our command to describe what is, to us poor beasts, the indescribable.
W'ON - a wonderful passage - thank you for that
b-y - also very moving
The two of you have gone a long way to disproving my remarks, above, about the paucity of our language!
Jackie - Curses - you spotted my red herring straight away! It doesn't actually™ affect my baisc argument, though!
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addict
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addict
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btw, being partially of native american descent myself, i once read about an [N.A.] indian culture whose language included absolutely no provisions for the concept of past, present or future... anyone know something about this?
Wow, Caradea. Which nation do your ancestors come from?
I have no idea of which nation uses only one tense but it is quite similar to to the Japanese language. It has no tenses either. Einstein's Theory of Relativity must have been hell for them to translate!!!
It sounds plausible that there was a common belief that crossed the Pacific rim over the millenia and embedded itself into the many developing languages of the time.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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the Japanese language...has no tenses either
My memory of this is a little unclear, mostly because there's not too much for me to remember, but.
(And a little googling seems to have bolstered my paucitic memory) Japanese has more or less two tenses, past and non-past. Usage is not through changes made directly to the verb (and this can be a source of confusion for those of us who do change the form of words for grammatical purposes) but by use of particles. This technique is used for most grammatical functions in Japanese, including markers showing what we, with our dependency on the ancient Latin grammarians, would call case structure. The failure(sic) of a language to change the form of a verb to recognize past/present/future or perfection/imperfection does not necessarily imply that the speakers of that language have a sense of time radically different from (than, nor) ours. We could, for example, in English say "I go to the store yesterday/tomorrow" and get across the idea of past or future without changing the form of the verb to go. Such things are accomplished in other languages that do not feel the need to change the form of the verb in the process.
I suppose one could define tense as the alteration of the form of a word for the grammatical purpose of indicating relative time, but to extrapolate a lack of time sense in the speakers of a language from
the lack of tense in that language is, in my opinion, unwarranted.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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>The Big Bang<...so what exploded? one more <ahem> time... pure energy >Time Travel< There was a young lady of Wight
who travelled much faster than light.
She departed one day,
in a relative way,
and arrived on the previous night.it almost certainly isn't possible... no matter how far in the future it might be invented, someone will have finally traveled back and spilled the beans. unless the alternate histories theory is true....
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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alternate histories
Ooh! Multiverses! Way cool, tsuwm!
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