The Man Who Reinvented Time

The name George Herbert was not always a synonym for genius, nor was his work on temporal translocation universally celebrated as it is today. During his lifetime, he was largely ignored, and most of those familiar with his research summarily dismissed it, often with a cruel dose of mockery. Now, of course, it is the basis for a whole branch of technology.

As a young journalist, I was fortunate enough to interview Mr. Herbert several times at different stages in his career. My last interview took place just days before his mysterious disappearance.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about Herbert when he was young. His performance in grade school was average, and although he was president of his high school Science Club, his grades were undistinguished. During his first year at the university, he sampled various fields including philosophy and anthropology. Although he later chose physics as a major, he told me that those "soft" courses made a lasting impression upon him and encouraged him to question the consensual western notion of Time.

In particular he mentioned to me his surprise at learning in a course on the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers that Pythagoras had been reported to be able to appear in two places at the same time. More significant was a course on the indigenous peoples of the Amazon in which he discovered that some of those cultures had no vocabulary to describe "Time as Such." What we take to be universally acknowledged as a fixed component of our environment is actually a cultural construct created by language and social convention and instilled in the minds of children born into the Western European tradition. In fact, the concept of Time has no objective reality - it is a purely subjective phenomenon synthesized by our perceptual organs.

Herbert liked to say that rather than being an obvious impossibility, time travel was as natural to humans as waking on two feet. In actuality, he would insist, we travel forward in time every day at a very low speed. Just because we currently drive a car that has no accelerator and no reverse gear does not mean that those improvements could never be added.

Regarding the typical reference to the paradox of traveling back in Time and killing one's own grandfather, he always said that it was foolish to assume that one could not cross a river just because the water was flowing in a different direction to that one was walking. If he was able to kill his grandfather, it would be because the man was not his biological relative. Whose family tree is not immune to a little "hanky-panky" somewhere along the line? George Herbert was a hard person to win an argument against.

As a physics major, Herbert performed well following the required curriculum, but found the standard mathematical formalizations of Time to be deeply flawed. When he realized that if he obtained a PhD in the field and became a professor he would be doomed to inflict this erroneous model on young minds for the rest of his life, he decided to transfer to the engineering department and thus left the university with a degree in mechatronics engineering and an offer of employment at Rocket Science International.

For several years Herbert occupied himself designing and building planetary landing modules for RSI during work hours and using the company facilities at night to pursue his first experiments with temporal translocation. All went well until he decided to try to publish some of his preliminary results with the unfortunate result that his papers were summarily rejected. As a secondary unfortunate consequence, his decision to share the unpublished manuscripts on a public academic website brought them to the attention of the senior management of RSI, who did not look kindly on an employee's unauthorized activity on their premises. Without any recourse, Herbert was immediately invited to leave their employ.

These vicissitudes did nothing to diminish Herbert's enthusiasm. Free from his responsibilities to RSI, he went on a prolonged sojourn in the Amazon and lived among the indigenous tribes he had learned about second-hand in his anthropology class. After his return, he built a laboratory in the basement of the small house he had purchased earlier using his salary from RSI. Although he had no obvious external sponsor, the sophistication of this facility increased enormously every time I visited to conduct my interviews. A little investigative research revealed that he had won large payouts from several state lotteries and that he was a major stockholder in a number of companies which consistently outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial average.

During one of our sessions, Herbert reluctantly yielded to my endless entreaties and allowed me to witness a demonstration of his translocation apparatus. He led me into his basement laboratory, which had expanded considerably since the first time I had been allowed to see it. The room was enormous and the walls were lined with shelves containing various tools and devices whose purpose I could not begin to divine. There were long work tables around the perimeter, but the center of the room was empty aside from a large apparatus which resembled an old-fashioned half-moon swing from a children's playground.

Herbert instructed me to watch from behind a yellow line painted on the floor around the room and strapped himself into the swing. His explanation of the process involved “adjusting the tangential velocity of angular momentum,” a notion which was far beyond the limits of my comprehension. A large electric motor began to hum and the device began to spin. First it moved in an upright circle but then it slowly moved from side to side at the same time. Soon both Herbert and the machine turned into a gray blur shaped like some kind of irregular sphere. The spinning reached a crescendo which went on for fifteen or twenty minutes, after which interval it gradually slowed to a stop.

I myself was feeling somewhat dazed after just watching all of this, but Herbert seemed completely disoriented. He sat in the seat of the swing for several moments before attempting to unfasten the straps which held him in place. Finally, in answer to his request, I ventured into the forbidden area to help him get to his feet.

"Get a notebook and pen," he mumbled.

"I'll record it on my phone," I replied and showed him that my smart phone app was poised and ready.

"The bank on Main Street," he began. "The First National Savings. It will be robbed in three days."

"Why are you telling me this?" I wanted to know.

"It's part of the demonstration," he explained. "So you know that I went forward just now. Check the news reports in seventy-two hours."

"Anything else?" I asked.

"A fatal accident on Morgan and Third. Also in three days."

"Related to the robbery?" I asked.

"I don't think so," he guessed. "And that's all I can tell you.”

When I questioned him about translocations longer than three days, Herbert insisted that of course it was possible, but he appealed to his metaphor of driving a car in order to illustrate the difficulty of achieving fine control of the process. Just as the increasing speed of a motor vehicle made it harder and harder to stop because of momentum, it became more difficult to control the temporal targets of his device as the intervals became larger. He then introduced a new analogy and compared his excursions to swimming at the seashore and riding a current out into the ocean. The farther out you went, the more problematic it became to return to the exact same place from which you had departed. You might come back to shore miles from your starting point. It was already far from easy to guarantee that he would return within ten or twenty minutes of starting a translocation.

“Who knows” he laughed. “If I tried to go forward or backward for more than a week I might end up gone for years if I even made it back at all. Instead of lost at sea, I could become lost in Time.”

As I saved the recording on my phone I noticed that there was a new item in the folder just above the most recent one. It was timestamped just after I had arrived at Herbert's residence.

"What's this?" I asked, mostly to myself.

Herbert responded with a blank look.

I played the recording, and it turned out to be in Herbert's voice, but speaking in a quick, furtive tone as if he were engaged in some kind of conspiracy.

"This is part of the second demonstration," he almost whispered. “I am using your phone while you are looking out my back window waiting for me to join you. You really should keep better tabs on the tools of your profession!"

"When did you record this?" I asked.

"I haven't yet," was his answer. "But I assume that this means a second demonstration is now inevitable. Go take your place behind the yellow line."

He repeated the process of strapping into the half-moon device, and started spinning. The thing might have been moving in a different direction this time. I couldn't tell for sure.

I checked the news feeds three days later, as requested. There was indeed a robbery as Herbert predicted, but such crimes are all too common in this lawless day and age. As for the accident, it was not fatal. A pedestrian was injured fairly seriously, however, and was reported to be comatose. When I checked back some months later, they had recovered and were released from the hospital. To a casual observer, the accident might, of course, have appeared to have resulted in a fatality. The recording was harder to dismiss. Herbert didn't even know that I used my telephone to record interviews until our conversation after the first exercise.

As I mentioned above, my final interview with George Herbert took place just days before his mysterious disappearance. He seemed to have aged rapidly in the interval since my previous visit. Although his calendar age was somewhere around 57, he could easily have been twenty years older. Unfortunately his cognitive functions seemed to have been adversely affected as well. The Nobel laureates for the year had just been announced, and Herbert repeatedly voiced his rage at having been once again overlooked. This seemed strangely out of character for a man who had cared so little about the opinions of the orthodox scientific community in his earlier years.

"How can any other scientific advance be more significant than my work?" He fumed. "When will my contributions be properly appreciated?"

I urged him to be patient. With enough time, I assured him, the committee would no longer be able to ignore the impact of his efforts. I tried to continue the session, but with every new question I asked, he returned invariably to the same topic, often repeating the exact same words to express his dismay. I finally drew the conversation to an early end.

The value of George Herbert's work is now universally acknowledged. Although he may not have anticipated the practical applications of his research, he would no doubt now be gratified by the global adulation his name has received. After his disappearance, his many unpublished theoretical papers and the voluminous notes and records of his experiments were rediscovered. The experiments were replicated and his techniques refined and perfected. Without application of Herbert's temporal translocation, interplanetary space travel would be close to intolerable. Now, however, a ten-year expedition can be accomplished with passengers experiencing only a few days of subjective temporal dislocation. Herbert's discoveries and stubborn refusal to abandon his apparently eccentric studies have resulted in a literal revolution of the field of extraterrestrial transportation.

The posthumous award of a Nobel prize would have especially pleased Herbert if he were still with us, as would the conversion of his house and laboratory into the George Herbert Museum. A heroic bronze statue of Herbert has been erected in the very same place where I witnessed the man himself demonstrating an early version of his translocation device all those years ago.

Note: Some weeks after the publication of this article, a strange occurrence was reported at the George Herbert Museum. Although there were no external indications of a break-in, the statue described in my article was brutally vandalized. The perpetrator himself was killed in his attempt to upend the statue, which apparently tipped over and crushed the intruder, mutilating his body behind recognition. Genetic testing has not yet resulted in a positive identification of this deluded individual.