Re: Scientific vs. Psychic Time Travel
Greetings, would-be fellow travelers:
OK. I'm new here, so by sticking my two cents into this fray I invite both bouquets and brickbats. I'd actually intended this piece for another part of the forum but for some reason I couldn't get it to post, and therefore, I have despaired, don't want to lose this writing, and so I'm trying to plop it in a vaguely appropriate place.
And I have to say, I don't take much stock in people anonymously showing up via the Internet and making wild claims of the anecdotal, experiential and biographical variety. It's entertainment gone wrong: movie scripts that didn't get made into movies; in my opinion.
Not that anybody asked, but I am a proponent of Finneyism. Jack Finney, as probably if not all but most of you know, wrote "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers." But he also wrote the intriguing "Time and Again," a genre-blurring time travel thriller romnace novel that, thank goodness, has resisted a Hollywood movie adaptruination. For those of you who know this book, I apologize for the retelling in advance.
In it, our hero, mild-mannered but talented artist Si Morley who works in an advertising agency, gets invited to participate in a secret government project working on the various theories of time travel. So far, so good for my personal fantasy. But Finney doesn't use gee-whiz machinery or hifalutin physics -- that would drag the story, after all, and he ain't Michael Crichton.
Nope. Si gets outfitted into clothes of the 1880s and put up in The Dakota apartments in New York City with a view of Central Park that is nearly unchanged from when the building was first constructed. Si eats meals in the room, reads newspapers of the day that are delivered, until one day he steps out of the building and he's in New York City of the late 19th century. He has to prove he's been there, of course, which he later does.
The late great Finney didn't know it, or said he didn't, but essentially what he was positing is that reality is mutable, and can be influenced by merely concentrating on it really hard. (I am being somewhat facetious; but, this is the Internet, and a Time Travel forum for pity's sake, so.) I doubt he ever read any Tibetan anything, and no erstwhile time travler swung out of the Quantum Mists of Mystery (henceforth, QMM) to whisper into his ear the Great Secrets of All (henceforward, GSA) He was just writing a rattling good story.
Of course, it does raise the question. What distinguishes a real time traveler and a crazy -- or just mildly amusing -- person who claims to be a time traveler?
Proof.
Si provided proof by inserting a note at a local library, among other things.
Finally, in his "John Carter of Mars" series, Edgar Rice Burroughs sent Virginian Civil War veteran off to Mars with a Native American enchantment. No machines, no fuss, no muss, and effective immortality. I mention this at all because for Barsoom to have existed, Carter must've been time traveling,also, since there's no Barsoom up there now. I have an affection for Carter, as the first book's action is sprung in Richmond, Va., where I live, and the first meeting with Carter and his nephew takes place in what can only be the Jefferson Hotel. There, he handed the nephew a manuscript detailing his exploits on Mars.
Proof.
Until such time as we don't actually meet again, I am
HEK