16 Feb 2005 @ 12:05, by Beto Hoisel
How could Jonathan Swift foresee, in his Gulliver's Travels, that planet Mars has two moons which revolve in opposite directions, more than a century before science discovered that?
How did Jules Verne know in his novel From the Earth to the Moon, with an anticipation equivalent to Swift's, that the conquest of the Moon would be attained by an American vehicle with a three men crew that should depart from Florida for a three days trip and in its return would splash down in the sea?
How could H.G. Wells, in his book The World Set Free, describe a war that would take place in the 1950s, where football sized atomic bombs were dropped from aircraft with explosive power to destroy an entire city? This was written in 1913, when no one had an idea of what a chain reaction could be, nor that atoms could be disintegrated yielding fantastic energy.
Finally, to stop an endless series of examples, how could the obscure American writer Morgan Robertson, in a 1898 novel named Futility, describe the wreck of a brand-new liner named Titan, sunk in its maiden voyage between England and the United States, after a collision with an iceberg, with hundreds of casualties due to the lack of life-boats? This book describes with such a wealth of details the ship, the travel and what came to happen in 1912, in the sinking of the Titanic, that it should be a serious object of consideration by everyone who intends to study what time really is.
The flood of premonitions that occur – and the press reports – related to happenings that result in collective emotional shock have been studied in many universities and research centers. A sweeping new conception of time certainly will come up from these studies with important effects on science and philosophy.
My answer is that time is not linear and one-dimensional. Things will become more clear when we grasp the simple idea that time is as three-dimensional as space is [link]
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