Review of Joyce Carol Oates's Hazards of Time Travel

472 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) BOOKS IN REVIEW Time Machines: Science or Fiction? Damien Broderick. The Time Machine Hypothesis: Extreme Science Meets Science Fiction. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019. xiii+243 pp. €23,91 pbk, €18,18 ebk. Time-travel fiction is perennially one of the most popular sf subgenres, offering audiences the excitement of endless possibilities and seemingly plausible science that perhaps is close to realization in the real world. The relationship between science and fiction in time-travel narratives remains muddled, however, due to the highly technical and speculative nature of time machines. Sf writers often get as much of the science wrong as they get right, but even physicists ardently debate how time machines might work or if they are even possible. In The Time Machine Hypothesis: Extreme Science Meets Science Fiction, Damien Broderick examines the relationship between science and some of the most celebrated time-travel sf. This is an enlightening look at some of the hard science behind time-travel hypotheses as well as a comprehensive catalogue of some of the most salient works of time-travel sf, arranged chronologically. Despite some truly interesting sections about theoretical science and explications of beloved time-travel stories, the overall organization of the book is disjointed, and the stories selected for discussion are somewhat random and do not build upon each other the way one might expect of a chronological overview of a particular subgenre. The work is divided into three major sections. The first, “Spacetime Time,” recounts scientific theory related to time travel. It contains four chapters that look at subjects such as black holes, tachyons, quantum theory, and other relevant phenomena related to the possibility of time travel. The second section, “Time Machine Time,” constitutes the main section of the volume and contains chapters divided roughly by decade. The final section, “A Thought Experiment Is Not a Theory,” contains a single chapter that discusses supposed instances of contact between twentieth- and twenty-first-century humans, and of alien or human time-travelers from the future, including a lengthy look at the 1917 “Miracle of the Sun” incident in Fátima, Portugal. The volume concludes with an entertaining time-travel short story by Broderick that serves as an appendix. Part 1 serves as the basis for the volume by explaining the complicated science behind time travel. Broderick cogently reviews the findings of Albert Einstein, Richard Phillips Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and other notable scientists whose work at least supports the possibility of time travel, however unlikely it may be. As Broderick writes, “I present the Time Machine Hypothesis here as entertainment, as speculation, an exercise in following both current science and science fiction into the realm of the (barely) possible. If valid, though, it implies that future civilizations will one day master time travel” (14). While this first section is informative, the fiction that Broderick later discusses barely comes into consideration, and long passages of text throughout these opening chapters make no reference to sf at all. 473 BOOKS IN REVIEW When Broderick does turn his attention to fiction in Part 2, he leaves out a lot of the science that he discussed in Part 1. As a result, the two sections are too independent of each other to establish cohesion. It is difficult not to compare this work to Paul J. Nahin’s similar book, Time Machine Tales: The Science Fiction Adventures and Philosophical Puzzles of Time Travel, published by Springer in 2017, which deftly combines literary analysis with science. In Part 2, Broderick offers a comprehensive survey of time-travel sf. This section takes a compelling look at the many different paradoxes, sub-subgenres, recurring motifs, and plotlines that make time-travel narratives so vibrant. The first chapter of this section focuses largely on the 1940s, though it does discuss a few other works going back to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Each subsequent chapter focuses on a single decade from the 1950s through the 2010s and each decade has its own theme. For each work examined, Broderick offers a synopsis of the plot followed by some brief analysis. This section makes up the bulk of the volume and Broderick skillfully comments...

Out of Time: Time-Travel Tropes Write (through) Climate Change

Impacts of telecommuting on time use and travel: A case study of a neighborhood telecommuting center in Stockholm

About the possibility of time traveling based on several specialized works, including those of Nicholas J. J. Smith ("Time Travel"), William Grey (”Troubles with Time Travel”), Ulrich Meyer (”Explaining causal loops”), Simon Keller and Michael Nelson (”Presentists should believe in time-travel”), Frank Arntzenius and Tim Maudlin ("Time Travel and Modern Physics"), and David Lewis (“The Paradoxes of Time Travel”). The article begins with an Introduction in which I make a short presentation of the time travel, and continues with a History of the concept of time travel, main physical aspects of time travel, including backward time travel in the past in general relativity and quantum physics, and time travel in the future, then a presentation of the Grandfather paradox that is approached in almost all specialized works, followed by a section dedicated to the Philosophy of time travel, and a section in which I analyze Causal loops for time travel. I finish my work with Conclusions, in which I sustain my personal opinions on the time travel, and the Bibliography on which the work is based.

Video-based person re-identification aims to match pedestrians with the consecutive video sequences. While a rich line of work focuses solely on extracting the motion features from pedestrian videos, we show in this paper that the temporal coherence plays a more critical role. To distill the temporal coherence part of video representation from frame representations, we propose a simple yet effective Adversarial Feature Augmentation (AFA) method, which highlights the temporal coherence features by introducing adversarial augmented temporal motion noise. Specifically, we disentangle the video representation into the temporal coherence and motion parts and randomly change the scale of the temporal motion features as the adversarial noise. The proposed AFA method is a general lightweight component that can be readily incorporated into various methods with negligible cost. We conduct extensive experiments on three challenging datasets including MARS, iLIDS-VID, and DukeMTMC-VideoReID, and the experimental results verify our argument and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.KeywordsVideo-based person re-identificationTemporal coherenceFeature augmentationAdversarial learning

This paper presents a critical examination of claims advanced by several philosophers to the effect that ‘time travel’ represents a physical possibility and that the interpretation of certain actually observed phenomena in terms of ‘time travel’ is both legitimate and advantageous. It is argued that (a) no convincing motivation for the introduction of the time travel hypothesis has been presented; (b) no coherent and interesting sense of ‘going backward in time’ has been supplied which makes ‘time travel’ compatible with Special Relativity; (c) even the conceptual possibility of ‘time travel’ is an unsettled and somewhat nebulous question.

Time travel is of interest in several academic research fields that overlap and communicate with one another to varying degrees. Primarily, of course, time travel comprises a literary subgenre of science fiction literature and popular film. As a motif or plot type, it is also a frequent element in romance fiction, nongeneric speculative literature, postmodern literature, and experimental cinema. As such, time travel is potentially a focus for practitioners in many branches of criticism and theory, including genre studies, cultural studies, critical theory, film theory, psychoanalytic criticism, and, especially, narrative theory and narratology. Nevertheless, literary and cultural theory on the topic of time travel has been surprisingly sparse, and only a handful of dedicated studies are available at either book or article length. By contrast, in research areas outside literature and popular culture, time travel has received something closer to its due. In analytic philosophy, time travel is a familiar topic of inquiry or debate, usually serving as a thought experiment for logicians and philosophers of language or history, and as a test case for constructing meaningful or consistent claims about objects and events (See the Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy article “Time Travel”). For physicists, time travel has played a similar role as a test for postulates of relativity and quantum mechanics, but it has also sporadically arisen as a real physical possibility within current theory, albeit a possibility that might require as-yet undiscovered theories or exotic materials. In particular, recent multiverse cosmologies and quantum computing models sometimes include time travel or multiple worlds as essential components or entailments. Finally, in historiographical theory, counterfactuals and possible-worlds models have been productive tools for theorizing historical events, creating a potentially rich area of overlap with literary and narrative theory.

Quantum erasure experiments push the boundary between the quantum and classical worlds by letting delayed events influence the state of previously recorded and potentially widely distributed classical information. The only significant restriction to such unsettling violations of forward-only causality is that the distribution of forward-dependent information cannot cross out of the light cone boundaries of the event in the past, a feature that ensures no violations of causality — no rewriting of anyone else's recorded histories — can occur. The erasure interpretation of this conundrum requires rewriting of information recorded and distributed in the past, which would itself be a violation of causality. The quantum predestination interpretation removes the causal rewriting issue. However, quantum predestination requires detailed coordination of inputs from outside of the forward-dependent event's light cone, thus massively violating the same limit that prevents causality violations in such events. Yet another approach is to invoke the Schrödinger's cat variant of quantum erasure in which arbitrarily complex classical events within the light cone become quantum dependent upon the future event. As with all Schrödinger's cat interpretations of quantum mechanics, this variant of quantum erasure violates causality by discarding local classical histories such as the information-rich state of the cat's body. The most straightforward interpretation of erasure experiments is to follow the lead of the equations themselves, which transform on paper as if their components are independent of ordinary space and time limits, up to the limits imposed on them by the speed of light. Interpreting the light cone of each quantum system as an atemporal, aspatial unit in which classical time and space have no meaning results in a multi-scale, matter-dependent definition of spacetime in which every light cone is a singular quantum entity. In such a universe, both time and space are defined not as pre-existing, mass-independent continuums but as the consensus of vast numbers of constantly interacting and mutually limiting quantum-entity light cones.

Introduction: The Culture of Travel (tabi no bunka) and Japanese Tourism Sylvie Guichard-Anguis Part 1: Travelling History in the Present 1. The Past and the Other in the Present: Kokunai Kokusaika Kanko- Domestic International Tourism Nelson Graburn 2. The Heroic Edo-ic: Travelling the History Highway in Today's Tokugawa Japan Millie Creighton 3. Japanese Inns (Ryokan) as Producers of Japanese Identity Sylvie Guichard-Anguis Part 2: Travel in Tradition, Time and Fantasy 4. Meanings of Tradition in Contemporary Japanese Domestic Tourism Markus Oedewald 5. Fantasy Travel in Time and Space: A New Japanese Phenomenon? Joy Hendry Part 3: Travelling the Familiar Overseas 6. Japanese Tourists in Korea: Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters Okpyo Moon 7. The Japanese Encounter with the South: Japanese Tourists in Palau Shinji Yamashita 8. The Search For The Real Thing - Japanese Tourism to Britain Bronwen Surman 9. All Roads Lead to Home: Japanese Culinary Tourism in Italy Merry I. White

Introduction: The Culture of Travel (tabi no bunka) and Japanese Tourism Sylvie Guichard-Anguis Part 1: Travelling History in the Present 1. The Past and the Other in the Present: Kokunai Kokusaika Kanko- Domestic International Tourism Nelson Graburn 2. The Heroic Edo-ic: Travelling the History Highway in Today's Tokugawa Japan Millie Creighton 3. Japanese Inns (Ryokan) as Producers of Japanese Identity Sylvie Guichard-Anguis Part 2: Travel in Tradition, Time and Fantasy 4. Meanings of Tradition in Contemporary Japanese Domestic Tourism Markus Oedewald 5. Fantasy Travel in Time and Space: A New Japanese Phenomenon? Joy Hendry Part 3: Travelling the Familiar Overseas 6. Japanese Tourists in Korea: Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters Okpyo Moon 7. The Japanese Encounter with the South: Japanese Tourists in Palau Shinji Yamashita 8. The Search For The Real Thing - Japanese Tourism to Britain Bronwen Surman 9. All Roads Lead to Home: Japanese Culinary Tourism in Italy Merry I. White

Some say that presentism precludes time travel into the past since it implies that the past does not exist, but this is a bad argument. Presentism says that only currently existing entities exist, and that the only properties and relations those entities instantiate are those that they currently instantiate. This does in a sense imply that the past does not exist. But if that precluded time travel into the past, it would also preclude the one-second-per-second “time travel” into the future that is ordinary persistence, for presentism accords the future the same ontological status as the past. Instead of quantifying over past and future objects and events, presentists speak a tensed language, regimented with primitive sentential tense operators. For a presentist, a persisting person is one who did exist, and who will exist. Regimented, these claims become: it was the case that she exists, and it will be the case that she exists. The presentist may then apply the same strategy to time travel proper. Suppose Katy travels back to the time of the dinosaurs. The presentist can say that it was the case two hundred million years ago that Katy exists. This claim, which consists of a present-tense statement “Katy exists” embedded within the past tense operator it was the case two hundred million years ago that, is exactly the sort of statement about time that a presentist is free to accept. This has all been made clear by Simon Keller and Michael Nelson (2001). In addition to rebutting the bad argument against the consistency of presentism and time travel, Keller and Nelson argue positively in favor of consistency by showing how to translate David Lewis’s (1976) account of time travel into the presentist’s tensed language. The appearance of con ict between presentism and time travel, they argue, is due only to the fact that most defenders of time travel (for example Lewis) have tended to phrase their defenses in nonpresentist terms. As much as I applaud their rebuttal of the bad argument, I wish to sound a note of caution. There is one — important! — bit of Lewis’s defense that may not survive translation into presentist terms. In fact, other “A-theories” of time, and even some “B-theories”, produce the con ict as well. Let us set aside presentism for the moment, and examine Lewis’s nonpresentist account of time travel. As Lewis says, time travel involves a “discrep-

What would it be like to be able to time travel to the past, meet your previous self, and override your previous actions in order to achieve a better outcome? While we cannot (yet?) achieve physical time travel, digital technologies now allow us to experience virtual time travel. We have developed a method for implementing time travel in highly immersive virtual reality (VR) and here we describe the underlying technology in the context of a scenario that involves a shooting event in a virtual gallery. Our method includes two layers of abstraction: i) a narrative layer that represents scenarios as a set of events and state transitions, and uses preconditions to enforce consistency, and ii) a VR layer that includes low level controllers for low level synchronization and animation. The narrative layer is designed to ensure that following time travel the events would unfold exactly as they did in the previous time around, except for the specific changes resulting from the actions of the time traveling participant. The VR layer controls the fine details, including recording and replaying motion capture data and audio, which allows the participants to experience their own previous selves as animated avatars. The system was used for a psychological experiment, and in this paper we focus on the technical method and on the lessons learned from implementing VR time travel.

Talk about time travel is puzzling even if it isn't obviously contradictory. Philosophers however are divided about whether time travel involves empirical paradox or some deeper metaphysical incoherence. It is suggested that time travel requires a Parmenidean four-dimensionalist metaphysical conception of the world in time. The possibility of time travel is addressed (mainly) from within a Parmenidean metaphysical framework, which is accepted by David Lewis in his defence of the coherence of time travel. It is argued that time travel raises formidable difficulties which are not satisfactorily resolved by Lewis's ingenious defence of time travel. Objections to time travel considered include: (1) travel to other times is impossible because there is nowhere (or “nowhen”) to go to; (2) the problem that upon setting out on a journey to the past a time machine will collide with itself; (3) time travel generates a mysterious temporal dualism between experiential time and physical time; (4) travel to the past permits reverse causation, raising the possibility of causal loops and attendant problems arising, for example, from the prospect of empirical contradiction and the possibility of someone being one of their ancestors.

We introduce a new method, based on immersive virtual reality (IVR), to give people the illusion of having traveled backwards through time to relive a sequence of events in which they can intervene and change history. The participant had played an important part in events with a tragic outcome—deaths of strangers—by having to choose between saving 5 people or 1. We consider whether the ability to go back through time, and intervene, to possibly avoid all deaths, has an impact on how the participant views such moral dilemmas, and also whether this experience leads to a re-evaluation of past unfortunate events in their own lives. We carried out an exploratory study where in the “Time Travel” condition 16 participants relived these events three times, seeing incarnations of their past selves carrying out the actions that they had previously carried out. In a “Repetition” condition another 16 participants replayed the same situation three times, without any notion of time travel. Our results suggest that those in the Time Travel condition did achieve an illusion of “time travel” provided that they also experienced an illusion of presence in the virtual environment, body ownership, and agency over the virtual body that substituted their own. Time travel produced an increase in guilt feelings about the events that had occurred, and an increase in support of utilitarian behavior as the solution to the moral dilemma. Time travel also produced an increase in implicit morality as judged by an implicit association test. The time travel illusion was associated with a reduction of regret associated with bad decisions in their own lives. The results show that when participants have a third action that they can take to solve the moral dilemma (that does not immediately involve choosing between the 1 and the 5) then they tend to take this option, even though it is useless in solving the dilemma, and actually results in the deaths of a greater number.

Is time travel just a confusing plot device deployed by science fiction authors and Hollywood filmmakers to amaze and amuse? Or might empirical data prompt a scientific hypothesis of time travel? Structured on a fascinating dialogue involving a distinguished physicist, Dr. Rufus, a physics graduate student and a computer scientist this book probes an experimentally supported hypothesis of backwards time travel – and in so doing addresses key metaphysical issues, such as causation, identity over time and free will. The setting is the Jefferson National Laboratory during a period of five days in 2010. Dr. Rufus’s experimental search for the psi-lepton and the resulting intractable data spurs the discussion on time travel. She and her two colleagues are pushed by their observations to address the grandfather paradox and other puzzles about backwards causation, with attention also given to causal loops, multi-dimensional time, and the prospect that only the present exists. Sensible solutions to the main puzzles emerge, ultimately advancing the case for time travel really being possible. 'A Time Travel Dialogue' addresses the possibility of time travel, approaching familiar paradoxes in a rigorous, engaging, and fun manner. It follows in the long philosophical tradition of using dialogue to present philosophical ideas and arguments, but is ground breaking in its use of the dialogue format to introduce readers to the metaphysics of time travel, and is also distinctive in its use of lab results to drive philosophical analysis. The discussion of data that might decide whether time is one-dimensional (one timeline) or multi-dimensional (branching time) is especially novel.