More Wrinkles in Time...with Unicorns!

In my previous post, I wrote about Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Now I've read its second companion, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which narrates the story of Charles Wallace who, now an intelligent adolescent, was introduced as a sheepish boy in the first novel. An interesting theme that L'Engle threads through each book is the idea of time travel, altering the past for the sake of a better future.

Charles Wallace, the youngest son of a family of world renown physicists who chat with the President more often than the average rocket scientist. After a chance meeting with a time-traveling unicorn on Thanksgiving day, Charles Wallace finds himself on an adventure back in time to save the world from nuclear warfare.

Without divulging any more plot details and possibly spoiling it, I want to explore some of the science common to L'Engle's novels, which, written in the 1960s and 70s, were on the cutting edge of scientific theory.

At the time the book was written, physicists were just beginning to note the hypothetical possibility of time travel. In quantum mechanics, the study of the microscopic fundamental components that make up all matter, physicists hypothesized due to faulty equations the possibility of quantum unpredictability. This concept is centered around the necessity for these particles to act spontaneously, wherein the cause of their coordination is unpredictable. This unpredictability implies that results in the quantum realm are not predictable based on formulaic function but operate in a paradigm of multiple possibilities. For theorists, it has become necessary in recent years to integrate this concept into Newtonian physics (the physics of large objects).

As a result, string theorists are incorporating multiple dimensions. Hypothetically, these dimensions would operate under the same laws but would be invisible to the other yet in some way pertinent to the whole. Essentially, these ideas, if true, would promote a constantly changing present reality. For instance, if I throw a rock through a window and it disrupts the lives of those inside the building, in another timeframe their lives go on as if the event never happened. While mathematically complicated and philosophically dense, these possibilities exist and elude to the reality of time travel. Methodically, this is not the same idea of time travel that functions in the novel, but the implications are the same.

In each dimension, actions are reverberating toward different futures. This is the concept that allows the protagonist to "travel" throughout time and alter the reality of certain events occurring in the novel's "real time."