Aluminum Book From Nowhere Triggers Time-Travel Musings

When we asked Wired.com readers to go deep with their thoughts on time travel in order to win the one-of-a-kind Book From Nowhere, commenters weighed in with more than five dozen theories. Aside from a handful of goofball replies, most responses demonstrated an abundance of smarts, wit and skepticism.

However, there's only one Book From Nowhere to give away. The aluminum-bound, foil-paged volume, pictured above, was inspired by Charles Yu's new book How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The Los Angeles-based novelist judged 12 semifinalists culled from 63 entries.

As judged by Yu and Wired.com's staff, the contest winner is New Yorker Matt Katz, whose creative commentary on time travel deals with clones, Bayesian filters and hopes of finding a true path to happiness.

Matt Katz on Time Travel

I wanted to go back and fix all the little things that had gone wrong. The girls I never asked out, the job I had settled on, the time I took a gamble on a fart and lost. From a young age I had been aware of all that could go wrong, that I would make so many mistakes in this life. I wanted a record that I could review so I could analyze and avoid past mistakes in the future. I kept a journal, then a livejournal, then a lifestream, then a full HD/stereo record of every moment. I rated and revised every night and tagged my posts and reviewed. Always a slight improvement, after every mistake an addition to my list of things to change when we found the time-travel technology.

I studied the science and technology of time, but never found a way to swim against the tide of moments and mistakes. I despaired.

After yet another night of fruitless research and restless napping, the alarm jolted me out of dreams and inspiration jolted me into consciousness. If I could not swim back, perhaps I could swim forward. I would send my experiences forward to where they could do some good.

When my clone-son was a toddler and beginning to form a mind, I fitted him with cameras and screens. Bayesian filters compared what was happening to him and what had happened to me – the metadata from all my lonely nights reviewing my experiences provided a framework to play back experiences to him and make recommendations. If I knew then what I know now – he could! I could be the voice of guidance in his ear, the guardian angel that sheltered him from harm. He could make the right call, learn the paths that lead to happiness, be the best that I could be.

I haven't heard from him in years and his harness lies empty in the basement. I gave too much, pushed too much, made some mistake that drove him away so he could be his own man and make his own choices. So many wasted years and so little accomplished. With this next clone-son I won't make those mistakes – I can get it right this time.

Runners-Up on Time Travel

Three runners-up – from Germany, Australia and Los Angeles – left comments that earned them each a copy of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

Germany's Marco Baumgartl, cited by Yu for offering the most "real science," wrote:

Time travel, the old story. Time flowing constantly in one direction seems to be the thing we can't technically control or modify, let alone "bend" so that travelling into the past is possible. Speaking as a theoretical physicist: It's true, the theory of general relativity does have solutions with time loops. If they are realized in nature we do not know. The issue is rather if one could think of a realistic engineering process which could create time loops – that's something many scientists are very skeptical about....

In quantum theory we daily deal with particles running back and forth in time. The amazing thing there is that they can do this without violating causality. Of course such particles cannot be used to change the past. Causality seems to be a fundamental principle in our world, and that is a consequence of Lorentz symmetry (that's the symmetry which mixes space and time according to Einstein's theory). In physics we know that symmetries can be scale-dependent, which means that at a certain energy level a symmetry may be present, but at other energy scales it might be broken.

Therefore a priori it is possible that physics at a fundamental level does not display Lorentz symmetry, but that Lorentz symmetry "emerges" at lower energy scales. That's scientifically a completely legitimate approach, and such ideas are being investigated. That doesn't mean we should hope to be able to travel through time in a sci-fi-esque manner. It just means on a very fundamental level we shouldn't think of time being a one-directional "flow," or even something that always exists. Time itself (and space, too) can be an emergent phenomenon and I would say it is reasonable to expect that our concept of space and time breaks down at energies high enough.

Time travel artifact Book From Nowhere features foil-imprinted pages.
Images courtesy Random House

Yu commended Jack Butler. of Queensland, Australia, for his "interesting thoughts about the loop artifact, i.e., the Book From Nowhere:

I like the whole predestination approach to time-travel causality. If you go for reality-collapse, it's really the only way you can go. All events leading up to your departure point have clearly already happened – which includes your arrival and subsequent (prior?) "interference" in the timeline. If you travel back in time with the intention of killing your grandfather before your daddy was born, you obviously already failed ... nor could you accidentally kill him. Of course, that doesn't stop you from sleeping with your grandma and being your own biological grandfather (Granny was a sly old cow). It happened already. Let the genetics be down to throwback anomalies or whatever (if I could explain them decently, I'm reasonably sure I could explain in detail the intricacies of a working time-travel device, so forgive any vagueness on that score).

And there you've got your loop artifact. The thing I find curious about loop artifacts in some time-travel stories is that they never seem to wear. Like, fair enough, that book that you gave yourself when you were 10 years old/35 years old.... If that same book is looping constantly over the same 25-year circle ... conceivably the book itself could be thousands ... millions of years old (OK, millions is stretching the hardiness of paper, or even a Kindle).

Maybe that accounts for an origin point. Things wear out. The book would have to be rewritten (assuming it was written in the first place). The ultimate causality of the book's existence would still be intact. Or your genetic code (if you're a familially inclined weirdo who has an itch to boff his granny ... I mean, I'm not judging or anything, but ... man ... ew).

I'm personally inclined to agree that you don't have to worry about screwing your future by travelling back in time. That is not to discount other avenues for pooch-related fastening via sharp squiggly metal things. But then, by the time those other options fruited, they already happened ... right?

Peter Basch of Los Angeles stood out to Yu for being "endearingly self-deprecating":

I speak from the depressing experience of traveling back in time to 1973, and trying (failing, actually) to teach my younger self some truths – simple things like don't be afraid to ask for help, other people have feelings too, people are smarter than you think, and you're not as smart as you think.... That kind of thing. When I came back, absolutely nothing had changed! Perhaps it's because space-time is an M-manifold, with 12-dimensional branching.... I don't know. Or it could be because I'm an idiot.

Follow us on Twitter: @hughhart and @theunderwire.

See Also:

• Giveaway: Science Fictional Universe Inspires Unique Aluminum Book From
  Nowhere
• Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe