Here’s a new rule about what constitutes a time-travel story: If the author claims that
there’s time travel in the story, then it’s a time-travel story. That’s the case for
this story, which doesn’t feel like time travel to me, but in the afterward of
The
Omnibus of Time Farley says that the airplane bomber in this story becomes soundless and
invisible via a “laminated” model of space-time in which a series of different worlds are
stacked one on top of another, each just a short time in front of its predecessor. According
to Farley, “time-traveling will carry the traveler, not into the future, but rather into an
entirely different space-time continuum than our own.” The plane becomes invisible by
traveling just a short distance toward the next world without reaching anywhere near it.
My
thought on this is that the notion of time as a dimension does not have anything to do with
the stacking dimension. In fact, I don’t think they can be the same dimension because that
would imply that there is nothing to distinguish a point in our space-time continuum from a
point with the same space-time coordinates in some other continuum.
P.S. I also didn’t
care for the president’s solution to the story’s problem.
We human beings live in a three dimensional space, or which time has sometimes been
called the fourth dimension. But did it ever occur to you, Mr. President, that we do not
extend in time. We never experience any other time than the present. Our so-called
space-time existence is thus seen to be a mere three-dimensional layer, or lamina,
infinitely thin in the time direction. There could exist another three-dimensional space
just a second or two away from ours, and we would never know it.