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.
About
JL Peridot
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.
