(urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
Jerry Friedman
jerry_friedman at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 10 12:28:45 PDT 2010
From: Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com>
> Is the linearity of time a reputable concept that might conceivably be
> shared by Severian and Apheta?
It's reputable among physicists and most other people. That doesn't mean
Severian and Apheta, or Wolfe, have to believe it.
> After all, some Hiero*s travel
> backward in time relative to Severian. Is BFO's past Severian's
> future? Certainly the narrative of Severian would place it so.
I'm not arguing, but it's hard to see how they could converse with him and
Baldanders. Maybe they live forwards during interactions with people and
backwards most of the time.
> Then again, what little I know of physics seems rather consistent with
> Apheta's statement.
"Time runs backward when the ship sails swiftly"? According to present-day
special relativity, if some observers could see something going faster than
light from A to B, other observers would see it going faster than light from B
to A. That makes the direction of time on the "something" problematic, as well
as bringing up the possibility of a more complicated trip where you end where
you started but earlier in time. Most scientists see this as one good reason to
believe that nothing can go faster than light. Science fiction, of course, is
different. Though few sf writers have appreciated, as Wolfe explicitly does,
that FTL and time travel imply each other.
Jerry Friedman
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