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Time travel, hyperspace and Cheshire cats

Alasdair Richmond

pp. 5037-5058

Abstract

H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller inhabits uniform Newtonian time. Where relativistic/quantum travelers into the past follow spacetime curvatures, past-bound Wellsians must reverse their direction of travel relative to absolute time. William Grey and Robin Le Poidevin claim reversing Wellsians must overlap with themselves or fade away piecemeal like the Cheshire Cat. Self-overlap is physically impossible but ‘Cheshire Cat’ fades destroy Wellsians’ causal continuity and breed bizarre fusions of traveler-stages with opposed time-directions. However, Wellsians who rotate in higher-dimensional space can reverse temporal direction without self-overlap, Cheshire Cats or mereological monstrosities. Alas, hyper-rotation in Newtonian space poses dynamic and biological problems, (e.g. gravitational/electrostatic singularities and catastrophic blood-loss). Controllable and survivable Wellsian travel needs topologically-variable spaces. Newtonian space, not Newtonian time, is Wellsians’ real enemy.

Publication details

Published in:

Cossara Stefano, Rauzy Jean-Baptiste, Zhang Xiaoxing (2018) Cartesian epistemology. Synthese 195 (11).

Pages: 5037-5058

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-017-1448-2

Full citation:

Richmond Alasdair (2018) „Time travel, hyperspace and Cheshire cats“. Synthese 195 (11), 5037–5058.