Time Travel Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

 Davies & Gribbin (1992: 272):

The conventional position is that time travel should not be permitted by any physical process whatsoever, precisely because it would threaten the consistency of physics.

Consider, for example, the case of the time traveller who visits his grandmother when she is still a child and murders her. If the grandmother dies as a child, then the time traveller could never have been born, and could not, therefore, carry out the murder after all. But if the grandmother was not murdered, the time traveller would have been free to murder her.

 

Blogger Comments:

As previously explained, from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the notion of travelling through time can be seen as a category error that arises from treating time as if it were equivalent to space.  For space, there is the distinction between 'moving from here to there' and 'extending from here to there', but for time, there is no distinction between 'moving from now to then' and 'extending from now to then'.  In the case of time, both renderings construe the Extent (duration) of the unfolding of the process.

That is, there is motion from one location in space to another, but only duration from one location in time to another. Time is the dimension along which the process unfolds, from its beginning to its ending. In this view, the notion of "travelling" backward in time is therefore nonsensical.