We Are All Already Time Travellers

I have been fascinated by time travel ever since watching Back to the Future when I was young. I always wondered what it would be like to go back in time, to see how buildings, towns and cities looked in the past, to smell the smells and experience the lives of the people living in the same space but a different time. 

Of course as a kid I also watched Dr Who and although when he, now she, travels in the TARDIS this never really felt like pure time travel, as the Doctor also moved about in space visiting different planets, except during the reign of Jon Pertwee, where perhaps the lack of a BBC budget marooned him on planet Earth in a yellow car called Bessie. 

No, I was more interested in how time affected one place. Perhaps the best example of this is in the 1960’s classic film telling of H.G. Wells The Time Machine, where George travels in time from his Victorian conservatory workshop through the First and Second World War’s watching as the local London scene changes ravaged by time.  I love this part of the film, the rest of it not so much.  Incidentally, this sequence and others won the film an Academy Award for Special Effects. 

Of course in The Time Machine the inventor travels forward in time. I am more interested in travelling back. 

When I was at University I had a holiday job as a guide in a castle. As a guide you get to tell visitors about the objects, the fabric of the building and the people who lived there. As a guide you needed to make the history of the place come alive. You needed to tell a good story. There were times when you would be on your own in a room in the castle and during those times you could start to get a feel for what it might have been like. 

Yesterday I visited a castle. A building that is still lived in and beautifully maintained and a building that surprisingly has tremendous importance in the history of England through the Wars of the Roses and the Tudor dynasty. Some of the building is now in ruins; most spectacular ruins. As I stood in the Sun looking at these I wanted to go back in time to experience what it was like. 

And that’s it really. If I could travel in time it would be to go backwards never forwards. I wouldn’t want to disturb the fabric of time, to cause an effect on the future even to get anywhere near the grandfather paradox. I would just want to be present, just out of phase, like a ghost. I don’t want to interact, I just want to observe but not be observed myself. To see what it was really like. It’s something that Mrs Vogue and I share. We talked about just the other day as we drove through a beautiful, historic area of North London. 

I don’t need to travel back to the medieval past, to witness some historical moment. I would be delighted just be to able witness those moments in my own lifetime again. To watch my children being born again, to stand in the rain to celebrate my wedding day, to see how my house looked when it was first built or to ride my bike through the streets of Victorian London...

If you read or google about the possibility of time travel you will find theories suggesting it could be possible. But these are just theories involving crazy physics ideas bending time and space, wormholes, infinite time cylinders and cosmic strings. 

An argument against time travel is that if it was possible that sometime in the future humans would have discovered it and travelled back and if they had we would know. Perhaps they have and perhaps we don’t. Perhaps they are out of ‘phase’ as I suggested I wanted to time travel. Perhaps ghosts are actually time travellers, people observing, just out of reach of our dimensions. Or perhaps you can’t travel back to a time before the time machine existed.  Perhaps these questions are destined never to be answered. Or perhaps they are in the future...

We are already in some way time travellers. When we look at the night sky we time travel.  We look back in time whenever we look at the stars. If you go outside tonight and search for Polaris, The North Star, you will be looking back in time!

According to Wikipedia the calculations on the distance between Earth and Polaris put it at a distance of 433 light years. Let’s take this measurement as absolute. This would mean that the light takes 433 years to travel from Polaris to Earth. If you were to look at that star tonight in 2020 you would be looking at light generated by that star in the year 1587, 433 years ago. You are looking at what that star looked like in the year 1587. You are a time traveller. 

In 1587 Mary Queen of Scots was executed, beheaded for treason.  Incidentally on display in the dining room of the castle where I was a guide are the rosary beads that Mary was holding when her head was severed from her body...

So this is the thing.  If I could travel far enough away from the Earth, perhaps 2 years and 150 light days. If I were to turn around and point an incredibly powerful telescope towards the hills just North of Lyme Regis in Dorset I could peer through the rain and once again witness my wedding day. And if I could I think it would be apt to have Huey Lewis and the News playing in the background. 

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