Since It is the day after Groundhog day, here is an interesting video that discusses a number of different modes of time travel in Science Fiction. Definately worth a watch:
My personal favorite time travel story is a short story called “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang which I read last term for the “Nature of Time” FYWS. Time travel in that story takes the Harry Potter esque time travel to the extreme, calling into question our free will whether or not we engage in time travel.
There are also tonnes of questions about causality (and it’s possible violation) rising out of the fields of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity which is very exciting. Does time proceed in one specific direction (forward)? if it does does that mean that backward time travel is impossible? if entropic time is not a universal law, what would complete time-reversal be possible? lots of SF material here.
Hey Colin!! I loved the post and the video was super interesting. Like many people I think the concept of time travelling and time loops are amazingly complex and cool. I was wondering if you had ever seen Palm Springs. I believe it was on Netflix for a while. It was a more heavily comedy version of Groundhog Day in the sense that it deals with a time loop. If you have not given it a watch, I would recommend.
Great post, Colin! Excellent video. There are SO many time travel narratives in lit, film, tv. A few of my favs are the German TV series _Dark_ , Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies” (it’s in Wes Anthology), the Canadian TV series _Continuum_, PK Dick’s _Man in the High Castle_ (the the tv series), the film _Tenet_, and the film you will watch for Wednesday! The last trilogy of short films we’ll see for the course (last day of class) also involves complex time travel, as you will see. It is interesting to think about whether our time (the now) is being visited/has been visited by time travelers from either the past (if t.t. is possible into the future), or from the future (if it ‘could’ happen into the past).