Tag Archives: time travel

It’s common to think of time as though it were a medium one travels through in the same way one travels through space–as in, you can travel one meter through space, or you can travel one second through time. Popular science education reinforces this idea by telling us that time is just another dimension, like the three spatial dimensions of up/down, left/right, and front/back. Yet there seems to be a weird exception in that we can only travel through time in one direction at a constant speed, whereas we can travel through space in any direction and at any speed we like. What if that weren’t the case? What if time’s seeming constancy were simply a technical limitation that someday we could solve? What if we could travel in either direction through time, just as we can now travel through any direction in space? This is the “science fiction” conception of time travel, and although it’s an immensely fun idea that has enjoyed huge popularity for over a century, it rests on a false analogy: time “travel” is a complete misnomer. The seemingly one-way nature of time, and its interconnectedness with space, are foundational to our conception of what it means to “travel” somewhere at all–without them, the term becomes meaningless. Continue reading →