Josh McNeely
Amanda Hoppe
English 136
12/10/2017
Open versus closed loop time travel
Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”, uses intricate writing style to describe its subject matter in an elegant way. In this novelette, Fuwaad ibn Abbas, a merchant in ancient Baghdad is brought before the Caliph, the chief Muslim civil and religious ruler, with a story of time travel brought on by the Egyptian Alchemist Basharaat. Basharaat’s shop is filled with numerous strange, mechanical and artistic oddities crafted by the shop owner. The strangest item is located in the back, the “Gate of Years”, a circular doorway made of black metal, which when entered takes you to the past or future depending on which side of the Gate you enter.
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Chiang chose to use closed loop time travel system in this novelette, meaning that if the time traveler is currently in the past, they have been in the past before, making it impossible for history to change.
Despite choosing to use a closed loop time travel system, Chiang contradicts Ronald Mallett’s theories that two intense beams of light pointed at each other would slowly start to rotate, pulling in time itself with it, but you cannot go backwards in time farther than the first time machine. Warren Ellis explains “The theory has been tested and found valid. One would step into the loop and walk in time, exiting the loop at the desired point on the calendar. Re-entering the loop and walking back to return to your own time. But you could not walk back in time further than the point at which the time machine was switched on” (Ellis, 04/15/2007). Instead, Chiang’s characters are unable to change the past, but able to observe it and try to change it, resulting in each of them realizing a bigger picture because of their …show more content…
travels. In contrast, the critically acclaimed movie “Back to the Future” directed by Robert Zemeckis follows an open loop time travel system.
In an open loop time travel system the time traveler can change the future by influencing the past. In “Back to the Future”, after traveling back in time 30 years, Marty Mcfly attempts to save his father's life from an oncoming car. Little does he know the car wasn't destined to kill his father, but cause his mother and father to meet. Now Marty’s mother is infatuated with Marty and he must figure out how to reverse this, and get back to the future with no plutonium left. This is a perfect example of open looped time travel because Marty was able to change the past in ways that influenced the future. We see this when Marty starts to fade out of existence because his mother no longer knows his father. If we were dealing with a closed loop system, Marty pushing his father out of the way of the car would probably have been the thing causing his father and mother to meet in the first place.
I think that by choosing a closed loop system in which you can't change what is to come, Chiang is following Buddhist beliefs of fate and destiny. Perhaps he is trying to get his readers to realize that we can't change the past, as Marty almost did, but instead learn from it. Many people dwell on negatives that have previously occurred, but instead we can realize our mistakes and move on to live our lives with the knowledge gained from
them. Works Cited Chiang, Ted. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate. Buton, MI: Subterranean, 2007. Print. Ellis, Warren. "(no Title)." LiveJournal. N.p., 15 Apr. 2007. Web. 10 Dec. 2017. (-- removed HTML --) . Lundberg, Jason Erik. "Final Staff." The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2017. (-- removed HTML --) . "Predestination Paradox." Futurepedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2017. "Back to the Future." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2017. Zemeckis, Robert, Bob Gale, Neil Canton, Steven Spielberg, Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, Thomas F. Wilson, Alan Silvestri, Dean Cundey, Arthur Schmidt, and Harry Keramidas. Back to the Future. , 2009.
'"What's wrong with a man becoming intelligent and wanting to acquire knowledge and understanding of the world around him"' (pg.528). This quote comes from the Short story, Flowers for Algernon. The quote shows how all Charlie wanted was to be normal and smart, like everyone else on planet earth, and wanted to understand what was happening around him. Also to make the most out of the things around him and make himself and others proud of what he can do, but people are not understanding him. Flowers for Algernon the novel and the film Awakenings can be studied together because of their important similarities along with some notable differences regarding Lenard and Charlie, making it difficult for the reader and viewer to refrain from
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Travelling through time is certainly easy to imagine. You step into the time machine; press a few buttons; and emerge out not just anywhere – but anywhen. However, in reality things aren’t quite as convenient as science fiction would suggest, as you will understand later on.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was an intriguing and exciting book about a Time Traveller and his journey’s through time. In this book, the Traveller explained to a group of men who were discussing the nature of time that time was the fourth dimension; just like the three dimensions of space: length, width and height. The Traveller argued that since time was a dimension, then it stood to reason that people should be able to move along the time continuum, into the past or the future. Most of the men do not seem to believe the Traveller or his theory, but agreed that they would like to travel in time, and talked about what they would do if they could. To illustrate his point, the Time Traveller went and got a model of his time machine from his laboratory to demonstrate and later returned to detail the places, things and people he had seen in his travels with his working Time Machine. Throughout the story, the Time Traveller faced setbacks and challenges, but the book outlined how he persevered and pointed to the future mankind faced.
Many science fiction shows, films, and novels today have been influenced by science fiction novels from the past. A few examples are Frequency,The Butterfly Effect, and A Sound of Thunder relating to A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. These films all express Bradbury’s idea of the butterfly effect and that time traveling can change the past, therefore changing the future. Although they share the same idea, they each have different outcomes.
By going back and forth between the time frames, the first being in the present and the second being in 800,000, H.G. Wells lets the reader know that the time traveller has made it back from the future by providing passages that prove he made it home, to the present, alive. However, during the time span of the novel, the time traveller from the future did not know that he was able to escape the future. This changes the point of view throughout the story, even though the main character doesn’t change. Because of the changes in the time frame, the time traveller in the present and the time traveller in the future can be considered different people. “Selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course the (dynamite sticks) were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence. I really believe that, had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the Time Machine, all together into nonexistence.” In this excerpt, the time traveller is speaking of his own adventure after coming back from the future. However, he makes it sound as if he were in the future. By putting interjections into the story, he changes up the storyline
... is only there to attempt to take him off track as the fear of suffering is worse than the action itself, which never happens when one pursues their dreams anyways. Therefore, the fear of the suffering in the future should be conquered as it is nothing but a burden to one’s life. Thus, the fear of the future must be conquered because people do not know if what they are afraid of will actually happen.
The author starts the narrative with the memories of her family house built in a traditional Arab style, where the nature is replaced by “geometric
The two books by Markus Zusak and Paulo Coelho tells the stories of two characters, Liesel Meminger and Santiago, each in their own respective stories. In The Alchemist, Santiago’s story is a much lighter tale with an overall optimistic and adventurous air. He journeys from Spain all the way to Egypt and back before his adventure ends. Zusak’s The Book Thief, sharply contrasts Coelho’s story with the much darker and dangerous world of Nazi Germany.
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An essential requirement for the possibility of time travel is the presumption that future and past were somehow real. But according to one popular view only the present is real, and to suppose that the past or future are also real is to suppose that the past and the future are also present -- a contradiction. According to this sort of Heraclitean metaphysical conception, the future is genuinely open: there is no realm of determinate future fact, no denizens of the future to identify or talk about, though of course -- in the fullness of time -- there will be. Travel to the future on this view would be ruled out because there is simply nowhere to go.
...from the future has given us the secrets to do so? Is it because the future has not been acted out yet? Or has it been, and we are simply the past, seeing it as the present? Time travel has been a long debated subject. One such debate is, can it even be done? Many models of the big bang suggest that it can, while the theory of relativity says that it cannot be done.
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We Like It, We Love It, We Want Some More of It: The Allure of Time Travel