Mon, 8/18
Location:
SH 1430
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Week 3: Time and Space Travel
Discussion Topics on Time Travel, General:
* Time traveling is good for, among other things, escaping a difficult present situation, escaping death or dying, learning from past or future times, and attempting to change the present or future time.
* The time traveler must confront tensions among past, future and present selves
* The time traveler must exist in at least two different times at once; his or her present-time self exists on some level despite his or her occupying past or future time/space locations. Thus the present time becomes crucially important, despite (or because of) the time traveller's attempt to escape it.
* The mind-body split (or lack thereof) gets tested...
Important Side-Note on the Mind/Body Split:
* Rene Descartes famously postulated the cogito, "I think, therefore I am," in 1637's Discourse on Method. This catalyzed the Western philosophical tradition of separating the mind from the body and giving the mind ontological precendence. See Alfred Weber's excellent summary of Descartes' writing for more.
* There are many ways to deny the mind/body split on philosophical, physiological, political grounds. Most crucial to this class is examining the ways that technology and science are associated with the mind and are also associated with ways to escape the problems of the body.
* The mind is often associated with masculinity and the body with femininity; similarly, time is often associated with masculinity and space with femininity (see Mother Earth and Father Time, Chronos and Gaia of Greek myth, etc.)
* With particular respect to time travel, the time traveler can split the mind from the body permanently by escaping a time-location in which the body is failing.
Oulipo, The Workshop for Potential Literature, was founded in 1960 by Francois Le Lionnais and Ramond Queneau. Italo Calvino is a prominent member and "t zero" is an example of Oulipo's use of mathematical structures to create literature.
Time and Scientific Theories: Newtonian Mechanics, Entropy, and Chaos Theory
* Newtonian mechanics offers a model of time that is essentially controlable. Time goes forward and backward, and items in motion can have reliable locations no matter the time.
* In thermodynamics, physical laws describing energy, time has only one direction. This assumption derives from the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, which states that the entropy of any closed system always increases. This rule famously leads to theories such as the "heat death of the universe," in which the energy of the universe, considered a closed system, eventually disapates and the universe stills permanently. This process is irreversible; these kinds of changes in a system's energy cannot be reversed.
* In mathematical nonlinear dynamics, known more commonly as chaos theory, the concept of unidirectional time is compounded exponentially. Start with the idea of the Butterfly Effect, which describes how in a chaotic system, very small changes in initial conditions (what we may call "causes") lead to extremely large differences in results (or "effects"). Lorenz made initial steps in 1961 with his experiments in predicting weather systems, which resulted in the Lorenz Attractor," a set of equations showing chaotic systems as having patterns that are somewhat predictable but never repeat themselves. That is, chaotic systems involve recursion -- think feedback loops-- but every recursion happens differently. And tiny changes going into the feedback loop result in huge changes at the end.
Check out Manus Donahue III's basic, not overly technical, complete introduction to chaos theory, the lorenz attractor and fractals. Andrew Ho wrote a less technical, very informative introduction as well.
* Important historial context of chaos theory includes computer technology. Research into chaotic and complex sytems could not happen without the burly computational power of computers. Think about chaos theory, then, as another post-WWII phenomenon.
Applications of these theories to our texts:
* Think about the kind of time at work in the different time travel texts. When is time one-directional? When is it two-directional? What stories feature some kind of feedback loop? If we think of human history as a chaotic system, and going back in time as an act of recursion in the system, to chaotic principles apply?
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