Is Time Travel Impossible?

A character in C. S. Lewis's posthumously published novel fragment THE DARK TOWER asserts it is. (Granted, one faction within Lewis scholarship maintains THE DARK TOWER wasn't actually written by him, but I don't find that claim convincing. Anyway, the issue doesn't affect the point of the story.) He argues that physical travel to the past or future can't be done for a basic, irrefutable reason: A corporeal trip into a different time necessarily carries all the atoms in one's own body into that other time. But in the past, all those particles existed in other entities in the physical world, whether inanimate objects, living creatures, liquids, gasses, whatever. In the future, those same particles will again be distributed through the environment. The only way you could materialize in a different moment would be if duplicates of each of your atoms, molecules, etc. existed in the same place at the same time. According to the laws of physics as we know them, that's impossible. Therefore, physical time travel is forever, irrevocably ruled out, unless we invoke magic rather than science.

That story is the only place where I've encountered this argument, which strikes me as highly convincing. On this hypothesis, other temporal "locations" could be only viewed, never visited. Accordingly, Lewis's character has invented a device for viewing other times, although it turns out the true situation is more complicated than he believed.

While I've come across other stories of observing rather than traveling to some non-present time, I don't remember any that offer a theoretical grounding for the impossibility of temporal travel in the flesh. It's not unusual in time-travel fiction, however, for a traveler to be unable to exist in the same location more than once in the same moment. In Dean Koontz's LIGHTNING, a traveler can't visit a place/time where he already is/was. He's automatically shunted away from that point. In Connie Willis's series about time-traveling historians from a near-future Oxford University, the same prohibition applies, but it's not clear whether the simultaneous existence of two of the same person is outright impossible or would produce a catastrophic result if it accidentally happened. In such works as the Harry Potter series, THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, and Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," on the other hand, any number of you can be in the same point in space/time at once.

To me, the former rule seems more plausible, because it makes the issue of the same material object being in two places at once less obvious, although I've enjoyed lots of fiction in the second category. One possible way to get around the problem raised in Lewis's DARK TOWER: Instead of a corporeal leap into a different time, travelers might project their consciousness and build temporary bodies in the other time by "borrowing" stray particles from the surrounding air, water, and earth. When the traveler released the borrowed matter to return to his or her point of origin, the particles would dissipate harmlessly into the environment. Another method of bypassing the problem shows up in the new QUANTUM LEAP series: The leaper's consciousness occupies the body of a person in the past, presumably suppressing the host's personality in a sort of temporary, benign possession. (The time-shift operated differently in the original series, while this version does leave unanswered the question of where the leaper's body is while his immaterial consciousness travels to multiple past eras.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Time Travel as a Curse

If you've read Audrey Niffenegger's THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, you know it's a highly unusual approach to time travel. In fact, I haven't come across any other science-fiction or fantasy novel quite like it. Henry, the traveler, bounces through time uncontrollably and at random. Most often, he lands in moments related to his own life, but not always. Visiting points in the past and future in no particular order, he arrives at each destination disoriented, nauseated, and naked, for he doesn't take anything along on the temporal jaunts. Even tooth fillings, since they aren't technically part of his body, don't stay with him. He has multiple encounters with his wife, Clare, in the past (from his viewpoint on his timeline, after they're married) when she's between the ages of six and eighteen. On one visit, he tells her which dates he will appear on, and she writes them down. Later, when the two of them meet earlier in his timeline (for him at that age, the first time), she gives him the written list, which thereby becomes the source of his knowledge of their predicted meetings. So how does this list exist? As Clare says, it's a mysterious "Mobius" loop. Similarly, Henry appears to his younger self when child-Henry makes his first time leap, into a museum. Adult-Henry knows he'll need to teach child-Henry the rules of time travel because he remembers a friendly stranger doing that for him when he experienced his first leap.

HBO is airing a new series based on the book, starting last weekend. Judging from the first episode, it's going to follow the novel closely. The book's chapters have helpful headings that state the year and how old each character is on his or her timeline in that encounter. The TV program, likewise, has captions at the beginning of each scene to indicate the ages of Henry and Clare at that point. Otherwise, viewers could get hopelessly lost.

I've never encountered another story that portrays time travel as a disability rather than a superpower (although TV Tropes mentions a few). Henry has no way of knowing whether he'll bounce back to his point of origin within minutes or remain stranded for days or more. He has to steal to survive. He frequently gets beaten up, in addition to the hazards of bad weather and the risk of landing in the middle of a street or railroad track. Small wonder that, at the age of twenty, the first occasion in his timeline when he meets Clare, he's a bit of a self-centered jerk. It takes her love, reinforced by her knowledge of the man he will become, to transform him. One of the saddest features of the novel consists of the multiple miscarriages Clare suffers because her unborn babies inherit Henry's mutant gene and spontaneously time-leap out of her womb. Another inevitable source of sorrow for Henry is knowing when he'll die and keeping that information a secret from her.

Unlike some fictional chrononauts, Henry has no problem being in the same time slot more than once. He can and often does meet other versions of himself. In Dean Koontz's LIGHTING, the Germans who come forward from World War II into the present can't jump into a moment where they already exist, a restriction that plays a critical part in the novel's climax. Connie Willis's Oxford-based time travelers (in DOOMSDAY BOOK, TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG, etc.) have the same limitation. Whatever force controls the space-time continuum won't allow them to overlap themselves, just as it prevents them from getting too close to any critical historical events they might alter. For Henry, on the other hand, there's no worry about altering the past. Whatever he does in any moment he travels to is simply what he has already done. As in Robert Heinlein's THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, whose protagonist also has the ability to have two of himself in the same spatio-temporal location, anything you "change" in another time period doesn't really change the outcome but causes it to happen the way it was/is supposed to all along. While THE DOOR INTO SUMMER ends happily, with the narrator using a time machine to bring about the optimal conclusion, Heinlein's "All You Zombies—", in which every major character is the same person, whose life endlessly loops upon itself, concludes with a cry of existential despair.

The more one thinks about it, the more this aspect of Henry's time travel seems like a reason for despair. If his life is locked into a preset pattern dependent on events he has already experienced, whether in the past or in the future, what happens to free will? Yet Niffenegger manages to conclude the story on a note of love and fulfillment rather than futility.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Viable Villains

I've just finished reading Dean Koontz's latest fantasy thriller, QUICKSILVER, which I like better than a lot of his recent novels. For many years, almost every book he's written has featured the same kind of villain (or a secret cabal of them)—a sociopath with delusions of grandeur, an evil genius, at least a genius in his own eyes, dismissing the rest of the human species as inferiors who, if not deserving of extermination, exist only to serve the few elite supermen. QUICKSILVER does include one of those annoyingly unrelatable, often flat-out unbelievable characters, but he appears only briefly. The other human antagonists work for a covert federal agency; their motives make sense in context, to carry out their orders and suppress the danger they believe the hero represents. The principal villains, invaders from another universe, have no humanly relatable personalities or goals, but that inhumanity is appropriate to them. They're almost Lovecraftian in their alienness.

Aside from such utterly alien creatures, however, the typical sapient antagonist (as opposed to an animal or a force of nature) should have some relatable traits in the form of motives we can comprehend even if we condemn the methods of pursuing those aims. Even many readers' favorite "pure sociopath," predatory genius Dr. Hannibal Lecter, has desires other than his cannibalistic cravings, goals we can sympathize with. He wants freedom, along with the comforts and luxuries denied him in his windowless, high-security cell, as anybody in that plight would.

Frankenstein's creature wants kindness and companionship; only rejection turns him bitter, vengeful, and violent. Count Dracula wants to leave his worn-out homeland for a new country of boundless opportunity. Dr. Jekyll begins with the noble goal of splitting the evil dimension of humanity from the good and thereby controlling the former. The Phantom of the Opera wants the admiration and devotion of a young woman. In more recent fiction, Michael in THE GODFATHER doesn't start out as a bad guy; indeed, he has deliberately tried to dissociate himself from that part of his background. He devolves into a villain when his determination to protect his family gradually entangles him in his father's criminal empire. According to an often cited principle, every villain is the hero of his or her own story.

To me, more often than not, one-dimensional evil geniuses such as Koontz's recent antagonists feel no more believable than the supervillains in an old cartoon series whose purpose was "to destroy the universe for their own gain." They're sometimes fun to read about, but I can't in the least relate to their motivations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Timey-Wimey Tangles

I just finished watching a Netflix series (which I won't name because there are spoilers ahead) at the climax of which the hero learned the only way to avert apocalyptic disaster was for him to go back in time and refrain from a certain action he performed at the beginning of the series. Thereby, everything he'd done since then would never have happened. And of course nobody he'd come to care for over the course of the series would remember meeting him and participating in those adventures, because they never happened. The hero asks to be allowed to remember the now-nonexistent events, a petition the sorcerer performing the spell grants. The mage also grants a similar request from the hero's love interest. In the final scene, shortly after the hero has made the sacrifice of finding himself back at the start and choosing not to do what he did the first time around, the heroine joins him. They ride off into the sunset for a life of adventure together. Though the ending is bittersweet (everybody else has still forgotten the hero and his exploits among them), I liked it very much.

However—because we don't witness the conversation between the heroine and the sorcerer, we don't know whether she simply left her home and neighbors (with no explanation, since their memories have been reset) to meet the hero when she knew he'd show up or whether she, too, was magically sent back to the restart point. If the latter, now she is living in two places at the same time, in her home town and on the road with the hero.

Granted, that's not an uncommon situation in time-travel fiction. In the Harry Potter series, Harry and Hermione see their earlier selves when they revisit past events through the use of a time-turner. In THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, the hero often has duplicate selves in existence at the same moment. Heinlein frequently allows more than one of the same person to exist at the same time, e.g. in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, and the iconic short stories "By His Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies."

In strict science fiction terms, though, that phenomenon amounts to having matter (the atoms and molecules making up the character's body) created out of nothing. If two iterations of one person exist simultaneously, where does the material for the duplicate come from? Dean Koontz's novel LIGHTNING postulates that a traveler can never occupy a point in time where he already exists, a rule that not only respects the laws of physics but creates suspense at the climax, when the time traveler has a very tight window in which to save the heroine without bumping into his former self. (That's a fantastic SF romance, by the way, although it isn't marketed as such.)

In the recent season finale of THE LIBRARIANS, a time reset similar to the conclusion of that Netflix series saves the world from a colorless dystopia in which the Library, and therefore curiosity and imagination, don't exist. Since the dystopic timeline constitutes a self-contained alternate world, when it's wiped out by the reset there's no problem of people duplicating themselves. In the case of such works as THE LIBRARIANS, the Harry Potter novels, and the Netflix series, we can say it works because it's magic. In SF terms, the unfinished story "The Dark Tower," attributed to C. S. Lewis (some scholars have doubts about the authorship), carries the paradox to the logical conclusion by declaring that physical time travel is impossible, because in either the past or the future the atoms making up the traveler's body would be dispersed elsewhere throughout the environment. A character in the story invents a device for remotely viewing a different time period, though. The protagonist of a short story whose title and author I don't remember discovers that, while physical time travel is impossible, he can project his consciousness into the minds of other people in the past. He uses the technique to invade Hitler's mind—and, not surprisingly, incites the global tragedy he's trying to prevent. (TV Tropes calls this phenomenon "Hitler's Time Travel Exemption." Anything a time traveler does to try to thwart him will fail or even produce a worse outcome.)

In my opinion, allowing corporeal time travel makes for more interesting fictional scenarios, even if they have to be justified with, "It's magic."

Margaret L. Carter/p> Carter's Crypt

EBay and PayPal Profiting from Sale of "Resell Rights" to Dean Koontz, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Ludlum

EBay does not post the name and contact information of a copyright agent on their site.
http://www.ebay.com

Therefore, IMHO, EBay does not qualify for Safe Harbor under the DMCA, at least in Northern California, if it could be argued that Oppenheimer v. Allvoices, Inc is a precedent.

Quoting from a blog on Lexology:

"In the case of Oppenheimer v. Allvoices, Inc., the plaintiff, a professional photographer, alleged copyright infringement by the defendant. The defendant is an online service provider that publishes various audiovisual content.......... The United States District Court for the Northern District of California held that the defendant "may not invoke the safe harbor … with respect to infringing conduct that occurred prior to Allvoices designating a DMCA-related agent with the Copyright Office"

Sources:
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=9e287e9a-d490-41de-bc83-f7bfa20c95bb
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=a05489bf-ea30-4f66-bb22-1d2a2c9aa422

This might be interesting to Random House, given that Dean Koontz appears to have an address in California.

I am not posting this to encourage anyone to knowingly (which it would be, if you follow this link )
to try to buy "Resell Rights" to any living or recently deceased author's body of work. The point I want to make is how outrageously eBay turns a blind eye to the most obvious copyright infringement.

Perhaps I would hesitate to talk about turning a blind eye, except that I have a record of correspondence that I had with eBay CEO John Donohoe's office in which I pointed out multiple instances of copyright infringement, and suggested that, given that EBay can force would-be sellers to  provide every detail of the weight, package size, shipper they will use and much more before the seller can complete an auction listing, EBay could easily use the same metric to oblige sellers who claim they own the copyright and the right to sell resell rights to 55 Dean Koontz stories, and 29 short stories by Jeffrey Archer, and a bunch of works by Robert Ludlum.

I believe that EBay deliberately chooses not to even try to educate sellers about copyright. The quotes below show gob-smacking ignorance of copyright law. The fault is eBay's, IMHO, because they allow alleged falsehoods to be published and perpetuated.

Alleged falsehoods such as this:

This a PayPal only auction.  Upon Payment this eBook collection will be sent to you within 24 hours.
Attention eBay Staff:  I am an Authorized Reseller of this product and also the copyright holder or I have resale rights to this eBook or item.

Full Resell Rights are Granted by the copyright owners to sell these eBooks with Resell Rights or Master Resell Rights Granted! This ad complies with all eBay rules and regulations.

"I will send this item by postal mail. Sending this item by email or by any other digital delivery method is not allowed and violates eBay policy."

On the rare occasions that a copyright owner discovers an infringement, joins VeRO and submits a take down notice before the auction ends, buyers of the illegal items are not informed that they bought an illegal item, or that they actually did not acquire Resell Rights (or, they weren't a year or so ago.... and if they are now, this particular seller appears to be unaware that he does not own the rights he is offering to sell.)

Also, eBay posts "Have One To Sell"? "Sell Now". That implies that anyone who buys Dean Koontz's books, or Jeffrey Archer's books, or Robert Ludlum's books from this seller is welcome to relist using the same template, doesn't it?

If this listing truly complies with all eBay rules and regulations, IMHO, EBay's rules and regulations are woefully and deliberately inadequate and or inadequately communicated to users.

One seller boasts that he is not greedy. He readily claims that he has created multiple copies of the ebooks in different formats: "I have multi platform converted these ebooks so more people can read them on multiple readers"

It is easy not to be greedy when one sells "stuff" for which one did not pay!

I sincerely hope that someone raises the matter of EBay and how difficult it is to takedown this sort of thing at the USPTO multi-stakeholder forum on October 28th.

Rowena Cherry

A reminder that the USPTO and NTIA will host the fifth public meeting of the Multistakeholder Forum on improving the operation of the DMCA notice and takedown system. The meeting will be held on October 28, 2014 from 9:00am - 12:00pm in Berkeley, California at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall, Booth Auditorium, 215 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94720). The weblink to access the live webcast for this meeting is: http://new.livestream.com/uspto/multistakeholderOCT2014. The phone bridge information for remote participation is: 1-888-453-9955; Passcode – 6039037.

At the meeting, the Working Group will report on the substance and progress of its work to date. Attendees of this meeting will thereafter have an opportunity to respond and further discuss or identify matters for the Working Group to address.

For more information about the Multistakeholder Forum, please visit the Multistakeholder Tab at: https://www.signup4.net/public/ap.aspx?EID=THEG32E&OID=148. For an archive of documentation relating to past meetings of the Multistakeholder Forum please visit  http://www.uspto.gov/ip/global/copyrights/index.jsp.

To register for the meeting, please follow the instructions at:

https://www.signup4.net/public/ap.aspx?EID=THEG32E&OID=130