Paul J. Nahin

Time Machine

Tales

The Science Fiction

Adventures and

Philosophical Puzzles

of Time Travel

Science and Fiction

Editorial Board

Mark Alpert

Philip Ball

Gregory Benford

Michael Brotherton

Victor Callaghan

Amnon H. Eden

Nick Kanas

Geoffrey Landis

Rudi Rucker

Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Rüdiger Vaas

Ulrich Walter

Stephen Webb

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11657

Science and Fiction – A Springer Series

This collection of entertaining and thought-provoking books will appeal equally to

science buffs, scientists and science-ﬁction fans. It was born out of the recognition

that scientiﬁc discovery and the creation of plausible ﬁctional scenarios are often

two sides of the same coin. Each relies on an understanding of the way the world

works, coupled with the imaginative ability to invent new or alternative explana-

tions - and even other worlds. Authored by practicing scientists as well as writers of

hard science ﬁction, these books explore and exploit the borderlands betwee n

accepted science and its ﬁctional counterpart. Uncovering mutual inﬂuences, pro-

moting fruitful interaction, narrating and analyzing ﬁctional scenarios, together

they serve as a reaction vessel for inspired new ideas in science, technology, and

beyond.

Whether ﬁction, fact, or forever undecidable: the Springer Series “Sci ence and

Fiction” intends to go where no one has gone before!

Its largely non-technical books take several different approaches. Journey with

their authors as they

• Indulge in science speculation – describing intriguing, plausible yet unproven

ideas;

• Exploit science ﬁction for educational purposes and as a means of promoting

critical thinking;

• Explore the interplay of science and science ﬁction – throughout the history of

the genre and looking ahead;

• Delve into related topics including, but not limited to: science as a creative

process, the limits of science, interplay of literature and knowledge;

• Tell ﬁctional short stories built around well-deﬁned scientiﬁc ideas, with a

supplement summarizing the science underlying the plot.

Readers can look forward to a broad range of topics, as intriguing as they are

important. Here just a few by way of illustration:

• Time travel, superluminal travel, wormholes, teleportation

• Extraterrestrial intelligence and alien civilizations

• Artiﬁcial intelligence, planetary brains, the universe as a computer, simulated

worlds

• Non-anthropocentric viewpoints

• Synthetic biology, genetic engineering, developing nanotechnologies

• Eco/infrastructure/meteorite-impact disaster scenarios

• Future scenarios, transhumanism, posthumanism, intelligence explosion

• Virtual worlds, cyberspace dramas

• Consciousness and mind manipulation

Paul J. Nahin

Time Machine Tales

The Science Fiction Adventures

and Philosophical Puzzles of Time Travel

Paul J. Nahin

Department of Electrical Engineering

University of New Hampshire

Durham, NH, USA

ISSN 2197-1188 ISSN 2197-1196 (electronic)

Science and Fiction

ISBN 978-3-319-48862-2 ISBN 978-3-319-48864-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48864-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957723

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of

the material is concerned, speciﬁcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,

recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microﬁlms or in any other physical way, and transmission

or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or

dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this

publication does not imply, even in the absence of a speciﬁc statement, that such names are exempt

from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this

book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the

authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained

herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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Also By Paul J. Nahin

Oliver Heaviside (1988, 2002), Johns Hopkins

Time Machines (1993, 1999), Springer

The Science of Radio (1996, 2001), Springer

An Imaginary Tale (1998, 2007, 2010), Princeton

Duelling Idiots (2000, 2002), Princeton

When Least Is Best (2004, 2007), Princeton

Dr. Euler’s Fabulous Formula (2006, 2011), Princeton

Chases and Escapes (2007, 2012), Princeton

Digital Dice (2008, 2013), Princeton

Mrs. Perkins’s Electric Quilt (2009), Princeton

Time Travel (1997, 2011), Johns Hopkins

Number-Crunching (2011), Princeton

The Logician and the Engineer (2013), Princeton

Will You Be Alive Ten Years From Now? (2014), Princeton

Holy Sci-Fi! (2014), Springer

Inside Interesting Integrals (2015), Springer

In Praise of Simple Physics (2016), Princeton

Frontispiece: The Pioneers of Time Travel

The scientiﬁc pioneers were Albert Einstein (1879–1 955) and Kurt G

€

odel (1906–

1978), good personal friends who are shown here in 1954 at the Institute for

Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in a photo taken by Richard Arens. It

was Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity (theory of gravity) that G

€

odel used

as the basis for his 1949 paper that was the ﬁrst to show that the general theory does

not forbid time travel into the past.

The literary pioneer of time travel was of course Herbert George Wells

(1866–1946), who is shown here as a college freshman cut-up around 1885. The

photograph was taken as a prank by an unknown friend while Wells was a student in

a biology course given by Thomas Huxley, at the Normal School of Science in

vii

South Kensington (a branch of the University of London). A far too thin and

impoverished Wells was then still a teenager, and The Time Machine lay a distant

10 years in the future.

Einstein/G

€

odel photograph courtesy of the American Institute of Physics Emilio

Segre

Visual Archives of the AIP Niels Bohr Library. Wells photograph courtesy of

the rare Books and Speci al Collections Department of the Library of the University

of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A Note on the Story Citations and Science Fiction History

“You will ﬁnd it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir.”

—advice given in 1847 to a young scholar by Martin Joseph

Routh, President of Magdalen College, Oxford

Most of the pulp science ﬁction stories I’ve cited in this book, in their original

form as ink on paper, have long since vanished from our region of spacetime and

exist today only (alas) on microﬁlm reels in scholarly vaults. I am especially

indebted to Texas A & M, the Claremont Colleges, the California State Universities

at Northridge and Fullerton, Mount Holyoke Coll ege, the New York City Public

viii Frontispiece: The Pioneers of Time Travel

Library, and the University of Delaware, for giving me access via Inter-Library

Loan (through my home institution, the University of New Hampshire) to their

extensive archives of ancient science ﬁction magazines.

A number of the really good stories have been anthologized, however, and so are

still readily available today in book form. In esse ntially all cases, though, for

historical reasons, I’ve given the original publication information (magazine and

date). You can ﬁnd which of the stories cited are available in one or more anthology

reprints by going to an immensely useful, searchable database on the Web, at:

http://www.isfdb.org, and I gratefully thank all those in the science ﬁction commu-

nity responsible for creating and maintaining that database.

The following two books by science ﬁction historian Sam Moskowitz (1920–

1997), who lived through what Isaac Asimov called the ‘Golden Age of [magazine]

Science Fiction,’ may be difﬁcult to ﬁnd today but, if you are interested in the early

history of magazine science ﬁction (beyond simply the subgenre of time travel), the

hunt for them will be well worth your time:

Science Fiction by Gaslight: a history and anthology of science ﬁction in the

popular magazines, 1891–1911 (World Publishing Company 1968);

Under the Moons of Mars: a history and anthology of “The Scientiﬁc Romance” in

the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1970).

Frontispiece: The Pioneers of Time Travel ix

Some First Words

Is time travel in principle (never mind the difﬁculties) a possibility? It has received some

thought in the past and deserves some more.

—David Park, in his 1980 book The Image of Eternity

He used to have quite a reputation, but the last couple of years he’s been working on time

... You know, time travel, that sort of rot. An A-1 crackpot.

—a character (discussing a colleague) disagrees with Park, in Mack Reynolds’ “Advice

from Tomorrow,” Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1953

In 1993 the ﬁrst edition of my book Time Machines was published by the Press of

the American Institute of Physics. In 1999, after Springer acquired AIP Press, the

second edition of that book appeared. So, is this the third edition? Well, yes and

no. It is because large chunks of the 1999 edition are still here, along with new

discussions of the advances by physicists and philosophers that have appeared in

the intervening 18 years. The prime example of that centers on the time travel

paradoxes. Those discussions contain mostly what is in the second edition, but they

have also been brought up to date with the latest thinking on the paradoxes, by

physicists and philosophers.

And yet this book is not quite the third edition because the emphasis is now on

the philosophical and on science ﬁction, rather than on physics as it was when

written for AIP Press. In that spirit there are, for example, no Tech Notes ﬁlled with

algebra, integrals, and differential equations, as there are in the ﬁrst and second

editions of Time Machines. That’ s because I wish to avoid having this book seem to

be simply a long physics treatise. I h ave, in fact, some sympathy with the following

views, expressed by two philosophers:

“There is one metaphor in the physicist’s account of space -time which one

would expect anyone to recogniz e as such, for metaphor is here strained far beyond

the breaking point, i.e., when it is said that time is ‘at right angles to each of the