A Christmas Carol and human understanding of Time Travel before the concept of Relativity
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The other day I was treated to an excellent local production of Charles Dickens' Christmas classic, "A Christmas Carol". As much as I enjoyed the show, open of the things that I remarked upon is that even back when the story was published in 1867 at the beginning of the industrial age that people were comfortable with the concept of Scrooge's time travel.

In today's post-industrial age media, we are commonly used to the idea that the character of a fictional story a character can travel in time, like in the favorite 80's time travel movie "Back to the Future". This was not a common concept in 1867. Who would think of visiting the past or future?

Numerous movies and TV shows show time travel, but in our post-industrial minds the method by which time is navigated is something mechanical. But in Dickens' world, the method of time travel is a powerful set of Christmas ghosts.

It is interesting how the human mind, pre-mass education and pre-relativity can still come to grips with the concept of time travel. People of the past could recognize the phenomenon of time travel, however it is explained not by worm-holes, or the balance of energy and matter, but by ghosts that take on a humanoid form.

It makes me wonder about the things that we are vaguely aware of in today's society but cannot explain. At least now we know that we cannot explain everything and that just because we have reached the limits of our technology's ability to explain things does not man that some mystical power is at work.

As W.R. Clement wrote in his book Quantum Jump, once we move up a level of abstraction in the way we see the world, systems that once appeared random become understandable. Is that all that has gone on between Charles Dickens and Steven Spielberg? We've come to see the world in such a profound jump in understanding that we no longer need ghosts to explain time travel.

To give Dickens credit, he may well have had many of the notions of current theorists in his head. For example, the ghosts always told Scrooge that the images that he is seeing of the past are simply shadows. Is this an alternate reality of some kind? And in the future, Scrooge wonders if the images he is seeing are shadows of what is yet to come, or are they subject to change? Is this dealing with multiple universes again? Pre-Destination?

Dickens deals with heavy stuff you can find these days in Stephen Hawking's a Breif History of time. The human mind is a much finer instrument than we give ourselves credit for. We can intuit things we do not understand and try to make sense of them.

With this in mind, one has to wonder how much we really do understand about time travel? Or was Einstein just telling us a more complicated version of Dickens' beloved Christmas Classic?