Reverse chronology — narrating a story, or parts of one, backwards in time — is a venerable technique in literature, going back at least as far as Virgil’s Aeneid. Much more interesting is a story with incompatible arrows of time: some characters live “backwards” while others experience life normally.
Probably the most famous contemporary example is Martin Amis’s chilling novel, Time’s Arrow.
Eating is unattractive too… Various items get gulped into my mouth, and after skillful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon. That bit’s quite therapeutic at least, unless you’re having soup or something, which can be a real sentence. Next you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly, of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette, where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for my pains. Then you tool down the aisles, with trolley or basket, returning each can and packet to its rightful place.
The narrator of Time’s Arrow is a disembodied consciousness who lives inside another person, Odilo Unverdorben. The host lives life in the ordinary sense, forward in time, but the homunculus narrator experiences everything backwards – his first memory is Unverdorben’s death (although, for expository purposes, he comes into existence as a full, speaking intellect). He has no control over Unverdorben’s actions, nor access to his memories, but passively travels through life in reverse order. At first Unverdorben (going under the name of “Tod Friendly”) appears to us as a doctor, which seems like a morbid occupation – patients shuffle into the emergency room, where the doctors suck medicines out of their bodies and rip off their bandages, sending them out into the night bleeding and screaming. But near the end of the book, we learn that Unverdorben was an assistant at Auschwitz, where he created life where none had been before – turning chemicals and electricity and corpses into living persons. Only now, thinks the narrator, does the world finally make sense.
My favorite example is Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse Five), who lives his life going forwards, but out of order: “Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fight, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”
Time does go in both directions.
While physical reality goes from past events to future ones, the information of these events goes the other way. First it is future potential, then past circumstance. If time is a fundamental dimension, then physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones, but if time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and the events, once created, are replaced by the next and recede into the past. It isn’t presentism because time as a point would be meaningless as a measure of motion. The only absolute time would be like absolute temperature; the complete absence of it. Of course most motion is at the speed of light, but we cannot process it in real time, so our minds create flashes of perception, like frames of film. Thus to us, time does seem like a series of instants. So the physical brain moves forward in time, but the mind is a record of the events receding into the past.
Consider a thermal medium, say a pot of hot water, with lots of water molecules moving about. To construct a timekeeping device out of this we would measure the motion of one of these points of reference against the medium it is moving through. The point is the hand and the medium is the face of the clock. Obviously all the other points are hands of their own clocks, but are medium/face for all other clocks. The motion of any point/hand is balanced by the reaction of the medium/face of the clock. So to the hand of the clock, the face goes counterclockwise. At any one moment, the positions of all these points constitute an event, so while any and all of them go from past events to future ones, the medium against which any point is being judged is the overall context, which once created, is displaced by the next, as all these individual points move around, so the events go from future potential to past circumstance. The illusion of direction is created because the reference point moves through the series of circumstances, though these events go the other way. There are innumerable points of reference describing their own narrative, so every potential clock constitutes its own measure of time. Whether the earth rotating and creating days, or a cesium atom going through transitions, or strings and vibrations, conserved energy goes toward the future, as the information defining it recedes into the past.
There’s also a very gross recent (2002) French film called Irreversible.
[ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290673/ ]
Thought I’d mention it for completeness, given the theme of this discussion, but can’t think of any other reason it deserves publicity.
On a less cerebral note: The Red Dwarf book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backwards uses a similar device in which the characters’ time runs backwards. It seems to me that there are some unfotunate paradoxes in the plot/concept – it helps if you try not to think about them too much. Nevertheless, it’s a good comedy.
Messed up the link, sorry
backwards
The character of Merlin in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is also living backward, but White doesn’t press it – it’s kind of a conceit he uses whenever he wants to.
There’s also a character named Rachel in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion who is caught in a “time tide” (named but never described) which causes her to age backward. In the setting of the novel she is an infant. Her father’s retelling of their story is heartbreaking.
!tihslluB
To add a piece of irrelevant information: ‘unverdorben’ means ‘ingenuous’.
The narrator of Sean O’Faolain’s novel “And Again?” relives his life in reverse from death to birth. I’ve been a little surprised that nobody ever mentions this novel (from 1979) when reviewing Amis’s “Time’s Arrow” since they seem quite clearly related, though O’Faolain’s is closer to autobiography and there is no Amis-Holocaust-shock value component.
?wolp eht evigrof mrow tuc eht seoD .dnatsredu ot detimil ot tsuj si dnim rouY !cinyc ,hO
By the Way, Imagine you could trace a trajectory in space
who could counteract all the movements to which we are
subjected, so we could stand still motionless in a point
in the universe. What would happen to our time?.
Is it not very similar to be flying at c where time gets
slower?
Some one to answer?
Thanks.
Surely someone’s going to mention Greg Egan’s masterful story “The Hundred Light-Year Diary” (from his book Axiomatic)?
I had an idea once, of what if we all experience “now”, our consciousness at this moment, at entirely different points. So, from my perspective, the rest of you are robots, locked in place, while someone else’s “now” is yesterday for me. Anyway, pointless idea, just kind of interesting to consider.
I’m sure arrows of time going in different directions are incompatible. Consider again the weird thought experiment I posed before in the “Arrow of Time FAQ”:
Suppose I could intervene in a time-reversed world W’. I could deflect a bullet that (to me) had popped out of a tree it “hit”, and then – instead of reentering the gun barrel, it would smack into maybe some other tree that it shouldn’t be “coming out of” from the point of view of W’. That would be weird, and it would ruin the whole “past” of W’. Well, we think our own past has already happened, so what if (if time flow really is relative) some Being did that to us, how could it possibly alter our past? Food for thought. I figure, worlds either can’t be intervened in from the outside, or time flow is absolute.
My posts are not showing up here for some reason. So this is a bit of a test and I will make it short. The basic dynamical equations are time reversal invariant, such as Newton’s second law of motion. Yet for a large number of particles or states we have to approximate things and use statistics. The H-theorem of statistical mechanics is used and we then compute thermodynamic variables such as temperature, pressure and entropy. These are time irreversible. Yet, as statistical mechanics is based on a Bayesian system it then appears that thermodynamics and time irreversibility is a subjective aspect of nature. Mind you it is stiff and perpetual motion machines are still outlawed, but it is probably due to our observer perspective which we model with coarse graining.
Lawrence B. Crowell
It’s hard to think how energy flows, now that entropy *decreases*.
The chilling thoughts in Time’s Arrow are not just the backward narrative, but the realization that as far as we know, we could well have multiple “experiencing” beings in one brain/mind, all unaware and isolated from each other, but perhaps all experiencing different aspects of reality (for instance, our lower brain could have its own primitive consciousness separate from what we consider “us”). A backwards consciousness is just one of many many possibilities.
Aww Spoilers!
Trolls experience time in reverse, too.
If this thread ends up in NODNOL, I hope Kryton is around to translate the papers.
There have been times after being woken by the abrupt onset of some sound, such as an alarm, when I’ve had a clear recollection of an interrupted dream in which the same sound occured as the natural culmination of what seemed a logical progression of events.
Now I don’t believe in premonitions, and my body clock isn’t accurate to anticipate the morning alarm to the nearest second. So it seems the most likely explanation is that the alarm has triggered a fast sequence of “reverse inferences”, subsequently recalled in the opposite order as a meaningful plot.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most dreams actually run in reverse, in so far as they unwind previous wakful experiences or occur in response to external stimuli (or internal for that matter, such as from the brain stem).
Mattie: they visualise time in reverse, not experience it.
Eating is unattractive too
The unattractiveness of eating in that context pales in comparison to that of bowel movements.
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Okay, so I know it’s gross to think about but the bowel movement made me wonder. How is physics affected by time in reverse? Relative to the people that experience the reversed time they would certainly find a different set of theories that attempt to explain the world around them right?