skeptical listeners that time is, still and always, the fourth dimension. “Maybe you believe it, perhaps not,” he says. “It has been said so many times that it has ceased to have any meaning. It is simply a cliché that windbags use to impress fools.” He asks them now to take it literally and to visualize the shape of a human being in four-dimensional spacetime. What is a human being? A spacetime entity measurable on four axes.
In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to, perhaps, 1905, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man some place in the 1980s. Imagine this space-time event…as a long pink worm, continuous through the years.
A long pink worm. Slowly and gingerly, the culture was digesting the space-time continuum. The easy bits no longer needed quite so much explaining, so some nuances could be revealed.
The fun of “By His Bootstraps” lies in the comic encounters of the Bobs; it’s a one-man farce times five, with misplaced hats, a confused and irate girlfriend (the word two-timing has never been so apt), and, with the Time Gate, the sci-fi equivalent of comically timed slamming doors. The hat is tossed and found and lost again until it seems to be multiplying like rabbits. Bob gets drunk with Bob. Bob recoils at the sight of drunken Bob, and Bob calls Bob some choice names. But Heinlein also takes some pains with the science. Or the philosophy. The eldest and wisest of the Bobs, living thirty thousand years in the future, tells one of his past selves, “Causation in a plenum need not be and is not limited by a man’s perception of duration.” Young Bob thinks about this and offers a comeback: “Just a second. How about entropy? You can’t get around entropy.” And so on. Examined closely, this gab is as hollow as the painted storefronts on the set of a Western.
Heinlein himself apparently didn’t think much of the story at first and was surprised when the magazine’s influential editor, John W. Campbell, assured him it was something special. In its way, it begins to grapple with two philosophical difficulties that arise when people start looping back through spacetime. One is the problem of who they are—the continuity of the self, let’s call it. It’s all well and good to talk about Bob Number One and Bob Number Two and so on, but the diligent narrator finds language ill equipped to keep everyone sorted: “His earlier self faced him, pointedly ignoring the presence of the third copy.” Suddenly English doesn’t have enough pronouns.
His memory had not prepared him for who the third party would turn out to be.
He opened his eyes to find that his other self, the drunk one, was addressing the latest edition.
Not only does Bob gaze upon himself—worse, he doesn’t like the way he looks: “Wilson decided he did not like the chap’s face.” (But we don’t need time travel to reproduce that experience. We have mirrors.)
What is the self? A question for the twentieth century to ponder, from Freud to Hofstadter and Dennett with detours through Lacan, and time travel provides some of the more profound variations on the theme. We have split personalities and alter egos galore. We have learned to doubt whether we are our younger selves, whether we will be the same person when we next look. The literature of time travel (though Bob Heinlein, in 1941, would not have dreamt of calling his work literature) *1 begins to offer a way into questions that might otherwise belong to philosophers. It looks at them viscerally and naïvely—as it were, nakedly.
If you’re having a conversation with someone, can that person be you? When you reach out and touch someone, is it a different person, by definition? Can you have memories of a conversation while you’re speaking the
In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to, perhaps, 1905, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man some place in the 1980s. Imagine this space-time event…as a long pink worm, continuous through the years.
A long pink worm. Slowly and gingerly, the culture was digesting the space-time continuum. The easy bits no longer needed quite so much explaining, so some nuances could be revealed.
The fun of “By His Bootstraps” lies in the comic encounters of the Bobs; it’s a one-man farce times five, with misplaced hats, a confused and irate girlfriend (the word two-timing has never been so apt), and, with the Time Gate, the sci-fi equivalent of comically timed slamming doors. The hat is tossed and found and lost again until it seems to be multiplying like rabbits. Bob gets drunk with Bob. Bob recoils at the sight of drunken Bob, and Bob calls Bob some choice names. But Heinlein also takes some pains with the science. Or the philosophy. The eldest and wisest of the Bobs, living thirty thousand years in the future, tells one of his past selves, “Causation in a plenum need not be and is not limited by a man’s perception of duration.” Young Bob thinks about this and offers a comeback: “Just a second. How about entropy? You can’t get around entropy.” And so on. Examined closely, this gab is as hollow as the painted storefronts on the set of a Western.
Heinlein himself apparently didn’t think much of the story at first and was surprised when the magazine’s influential editor, John W. Campbell, assured him it was something special. In its way, it begins to grapple with two philosophical difficulties that arise when people start looping back through spacetime. One is the problem of who they are—the continuity of the self, let’s call it. It’s all well and good to talk about Bob Number One and Bob Number Two and so on, but the diligent narrator finds language ill equipped to keep everyone sorted: “His earlier self faced him, pointedly ignoring the presence of the third copy.” Suddenly English doesn’t have enough pronouns.
His memory had not prepared him for who the third party would turn out to be.
He opened his eyes to find that his other self, the drunk one, was addressing the latest edition.
Not only does Bob gaze upon himself—worse, he doesn’t like the way he looks: “Wilson decided he did not like the chap’s face.” (But we don’t need time travel to reproduce that experience. We have mirrors.)
What is the self? A question for the twentieth century to ponder, from Freud to Hofstadter and Dennett with detours through Lacan, and time travel provides some of the more profound variations on the theme. We have split personalities and alter egos galore. We have learned to doubt whether we are our younger selves, whether we will be the same person when we next look. The literature of time travel (though Bob Heinlein, in 1941, would not have dreamt of calling his work literature) *1 begins to offer a way into questions that might otherwise belong to philosophers. It looks at them viscerally and naïvely—as it were, nakedly.
If you’re having a conversation with someone, can that person be you? When you reach out and touch someone, is it a different person, by definition? Can you have memories of a conversation while you’re speaking the
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