Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
By JL Peridot (Guest Blogger)
A tornado may begin with a butterfly flapping its wings
Known officially as Chaos Theory, the butterfly effect theorises that small changes can ripple out into big impacts over time, due to how sensitive a system can be to its initial (and ongoing) conditions. So the story goes, a butterfly flapping its wings can be instrumental in creating a tornado, according to mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz in 1972.
You can see a great example of this in the “double pendulum” demonstration video on Wikipedia, showing six slow-motion videos of a double pendulum being started in the same way for each recording, only to end up with wildly varying trajectories after the passage of time. It is a representation of cause and effect in a complex universe, one we live in, one in which we may set our stories.
With a good dose of handwavium, the butterfly effect makes it possible to, say, craft a world where survivors in a post-collapse society must travel back in time and perform small actions to undo the climate disasters that destroyed the future they were meant to inherit.
This isn’t love between us, more a love by proxy. He says I remind him of a woman he thinks he remembers, says I make him feel the way he suspects she might have. He’s convinced they were married before some long-ago stitch erased her from his life, hopes a yet-to-happen one weaves her back into his future.
People understand time differently
In How Different Cultures Understand Time, author Richard Lewis describes three different models of time used by cultures throughout history and around the world today:
o The Western model of time is Linear, in that it flows in one direction. Fulfilment comes from moving fast and seizing what you can in the time you have, because once the past is over it’s gone.
o The European model of time is Multi-Active, where the more value you can derive from the present, the more fulfilled and happy you can be. Multi-Active people prioritise emotions, connections, and people orientation, measuring time by events and feeling.
o The Eastern model of time is Cyclic, based around the idea that the past informs the present because the future eventually cycles back around to what we might think of as the past. This gives rise to slow contemplation and long-term thinking, as choices are reflected upon deeply without necessarily believing that an opportunity will be missed, because it will simply come around again.
My favourite model of non-linear time in fiction is the alien ‘all at once’ time in Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (which later became Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival), where cause and effect don’t happen one after the other, but simply exist relative to one another. In understanding the alien language built around this teleological concept of time, the protagonist achieves a clairvoyance that enables her to prevent a crisis. To a Linear-time mind, that clairvoyance would be called “precognition”, but to an “all at once”–time mind, it is a perfectly ordinary understanding of an event.
The “all at once” model of time, by the way, is often considered a threat to the idea of free will, but oh what amazing science fiction it makes! Just knowing that other models of time (besides the industrialised Linear model) exist made me look at the world in a different way. It made me wonder, what are the benefits of understanding time the way we do – and what does it cost us in turn?
If we had a different understanding of time, a different vocabulary about it, a different psychological conception of it, how would it affect our ability to work around or manipulate it? Could we break the laws of temporal physics as we know them today, simply by comprehending them differently?
The Lace peaks, I peak. It ravages my body, igniting my nerves. Muscles tighten. What air remains inside me bubbles through the gel. The Annex falls away and scattered dreams take over. I run my thumb over my own tingling, nail-bitten fingers. The fingers feel, and I feel. Five seconds. The past is the present. Another history becomes my own, a future yet promised. We are particles in superposition, collapsing into a moment. Memories rush into me like water. A face like Tarkan’s turns to me. His smile is your smile. And then it’s gone.
Our sense of time changes from moment to moment
Time exists in the mind, says neuroscientist Dean Buonomono, author of Your Brain is a Time Machine. He suggests our brains run their own internal timers for various purposes, such as the circadian clock that tracks with Earth day-night cycles, and back-of-your-mind tickers that tell you how long you have to run to the bathroom during TV ad-breaks. He says brain timers work by neuron excitation, where we measure time based on which neurons are active in any given moment.
Our sense of time also changes depending on the situation we’re in. We’re all familiar with losing sense of time when in flow, or time seeming to slow down during intense experiences like falls, car accidents, or being quite high. Such experiences commanding so much of our attention are called time expansion experiences (aka. “tees”), according to psychology lecturer Steve Taylor, who wrote a whole book on the subject.
Stepping across to the field of quantum physics, there may well be absolutely nothing to the idea that quantum activity in the brain gives rise to human consciousness, but it’s certainly a fun idea to play with. What if you could somehow control the spin of quantum particles in your mind, such that you recreate elements of your physical state from certain times in the past, like when your lips remember the kiss of a lover who is longer around? What if some of this control leaks out of you, affecting the world you perceive around you, transporting you back in time in such a way that entangles with the future?
I must say, this is about where my monkey brain taps out. I’m not smart enough to ponder the hard science around it, but spending a couple of months exploring these ideas in a piece of time travel fiction was, to my mind, time very well spent.
I hope you’ll think so too.
It’s funny, don’t you think, to consider this moment the present, as if the past and future I came from aren’t supposed to exist? If you were here, I’d ask. You’d smile and kiss my forehead and say you love my nonsense questions… But you’re not here. They want me to forget you ever were.
Until We Met Again: A Time Travel Novelette
A time traveller absconds to the past in search of her lost love.
One word: my name. A call from Origin through the neural lace grafted to my brain and nerves, connecting me to another place in another
time. A reminder of what I’m here to do.
I clutch a bottle cap; its sharp metal edges ground me in the present. It’s funny, don’t you think, to consider this moment the present, as if the past and future I came from aren’t supposed to exist? If you were here, I’d ask. You’d smile and kiss my forehead and say you love my nonsense questions.
But you’re not here. They want me to forget you ever were.
Releases 28 October 2025. Available for pre-order now.
JL Peridot writes love letters to the future on devices from the past. She's a qualified computer scientist, former website maker, amateur horticulturist, and sometimes illustrator. But most of the time, she's an author of romantic science fiction. She lives with her partner and fur-family in Boorloo (Perth, Australia) on Whadjuk Noongar country.
Visit her website at jlperidot.com for the full catalogue of her work.
