An Experiment with Time

For Serialism in music, see Serialism.
An Experiment with Time
Author J. W. Dunne
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Publisher A. & C. Black
Faber & Faber
Publication date
 1927
Pages 208pp
ISBN 1-57174-234-4
OCLC 46396413
LC Class MLCM 2004/02936 (B)

An Experiment with Time is a book by the British aeronautical engineer J. W. Dunne (1875–1949) on the subjects of precognitive dreams and a theory of time which he called Serialism. First published in March 1927, it was widely read and his ideas were explored by several other authors, especially by J. B. Priestley. He published three sequels; The Serial Universe, The New Immortality, and Nothing Dies.

Contents

Appendix to the third edition:

Index

Description

Overview

The first part of the book describes many precognitive dreams, most of which Dunne himself had experienced.

The second part of the book sets out a theory to try and explain them. This is, simply put, that all moments in time are present together. Anyone could see their own birth, life and death in the same instant, were it not for the human consciousness, which focuses attention on a "now" which travels through time at a fixed rate.

This means there are different kinds of "time": one kind is just one direction in the four-dimensional landscape of spacetime, as fixed as a map, while another kind of time is needed to explain the moment of "now" which travels across the map in the direction of map-time and which we experience.

Dunne believes that these multiple kinds of time lead to a complete rethink of the way that we understand both time and consciousness.

According to Dunne, whilst wakeful attention prevents us from seeing outside of the part of time we are "meant" to look at, whilst we are dreaming we have the ability to recall all of our timeline without the restriction of focused attention. This allows fragments of our future to appear in pre-cognitive dreams. Other consequences include the phenomenon known as Deja vu and the existence of life after death.[1]

Dreams and the experiment

The main part of the book begins with anecdotal accounts of precognitive dreams which Dunne had experienced. These included several major disasters; a volcanic eruption in Martinique, a factory fire in Paris, and the derailing of the Flying Scotsman express train from the embankment approaching the Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland.

Dunne tells how he sought to make sense of these dreams, coming to the conclusion that they were events from his own future, such as reading a newspaper account of a disaster, which were intruding into his dreams. In order to try and prove this to his satisfaction, he then developed the experiment which gives the book its title. He wrote down details of his dreams on waking and then later went back and compared them to subsequent events. He also persuaded some friends to try the same experiment.[1]

The Theory of Serialism

Having presented Dunne's evidence for precognition, the book moves on to a possible theory in explanation which he called Serialism.[2]

The theory harks back to an experience with his nurse when he was nine years old. Already thinking about the problem, the boy asked her if Time was the moments like yesterday, today and tomorrow, or was it the travelling between them that we experience? Any answer was beyond her, but the observation formed the basis of Serialism. The theory resolves the issue by proposing a higher dimension of Time (say, t2), in which our consciousness experiences its travelling along its timeline along t1 within the fixed spacetime landscape described by general relativity. But Dunne found that his logic led to a similar difficulty with t2, leading to an even higher t3, and so on in the infinite regress which gives the theory its name.

Accompanying these levels of time are levels of the observer's conscious self. Dunne suggested that when we die, it is only our immediate selves in t1 which die and that our higher selves are outside of mundane time and therefore effectively immortal.[1]

Relation to other metaphysical systems

Dunne's theory of time has parallels in many other scientific and metaphysical theories. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, believe that the Dreamtime exists simultaneously in the present, past and future, and that this is the objective truth of time, linear time being a creation of human consciousness and therefore subjective. Kabbalah, Taoism and indeed most mystical traditions have always posited that waking consciousness allows awareness of reality and time in only a limited way and that it is in the sleeping state that the mind can go free into the multi-dimensional reality of time and space (examples: "Dreams are the wandering of the spirit through all nine heavens and nine earths," The Secret of the Golden Flower, trans. Richard Wilhelm). Similarly, all mystery traditions speak of the immortal and temporal selves which exist simultaneously both within time and space and without.

Dunne wrote a book just before his death which revealed that he believed himself to be a spiritual medium. He had deliberately chosen to leave this out of An Experiment with Time as he judged that it would have affected the scientific reception of his theory.[3] The partially-revised manuscript was completed by his family and published after his death under the title Intrusions?.

Scientific reception

In 1928, Sir Arthur Eddington wrote a letter to Dunne, a portion of which was reprinted in the 1929 and later editions of An Experiment With Time, in which he said:

“ I agree with you about 'serialism'; the 'going on of time' is not in Minkowski's world as it stands. My own feeling is that the 'becoming' is really there in the physical world, but is not formulated in the description of it in classical physics (and is, in fact, useless to a scheme of laws which is fully deterministic). ”

Some psychical researchers such as George N. M. Tyrrell and C. D. Broad have suggested that there are problems with Dunne's theory of time. As Tyrrell explained:

“ Mr. J. W. Dunne, in his book, An Experiment with Time, introduces a multidimensional scheme in an attempt to explain precognition and he has further developed this scheme in later publications. But, as Professor Broad has shown, these unlimited dimensions are unnecessary, ... and the true problem of time—the problem of becoming, or the passage of events from future through present to past, is not explained by them but is still left on the author's hands at the end.[4] ”

In a review for the New Scientist John Gribbin described An Experiment with Time as a "definitive classic".[5] Paul Davies in his book About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution (2006) wrote that Dunne was an entertaining writer but there is no scientific evidence for more than one time and that Dunne's argument seems ad hoc.[6]

In his book Is There Life After Death? (2006), British writer Anthony Peake wrote that some of Dunne's ideas are valid and attempts to update the ideas of Dunne in the light of the latest theories of quantum physics, neurology and consciousness studies.[7]

In popular culture

Dunne's theory became well known and many authors have referenced him and his ideas in numerous literary works. He "undoubtedly helped to form something of the imaginative climate of those [interwar] years".[8][9]

One of the first and most significant writers was J. B. Priestley, who based three of his "Time plays" around them: Time and the Conways, Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls.[8]

The ideas of Dunne also form the basis for "The Dark Tower" a short story by C. S. Lewis, and the unpublished novel, "The Notion Club Papers" by J. R. R. Tolkien. Both Tolkien and Lewis were members of the Inklings, and Tolkien also used Dunne's ideas about parallel time dimensions in developing the relationship between time in Middle Earth and "Lórien time".[10]

Other important contemporary writes who used his ideas included John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain), James Hilton (Random Harvest), his old friend H. G. Wells (The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper and The Shape of Things to Come), and Rumer Godden (A Fugue in Time).[8][11]

Following Dunne's death in 1949, the popularity of his themes continued. Philippa Pearce's childhood fantasy Tom's Midnight Garden makes use of Dunne's ideas and includes a brief discussion of them.[12]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Priestley, J.B. Man and Time, Aldus 1964 (reprinted Bloomsbury 1989).
  2. ↑ Dunne, J.W. An Experiment with Time, First Edition, A.C. Black, 1927, Page 163.
  3. ↑ Ruth Brandon Scientists and the supernormal New Scientist 16 June 1983 p. 786
  4. ↑ G.N.M. Tyrrell; Science and psychical phenomena 1938, p. 135.
  5. ↑ John Gribbin Book Review of An Experiment with Time New Scientist 27 Aug 1981, p. 548
  6. ↑ Paul Davies About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
  7. ↑ Anthony Peake Is There Life After Death? The Extraordinary Science Of What Happens When We Die 2006
  8. 1 2 3 Stewart, V.; "J. W. Dunne and literary culture in the 1930s and 1940s", Literature and History, Volume 17, Number 2, Autumn 2008, pp. 62-81, Manchester University Press.
  9. ↑ Anon,; "Obituary: Mr. J. W. Dunne, Philosopher and Airman", The Times, August 27 1949, Page 7.
  10. ↑ Flieger, V. A Question of Time; JRR Tolien's Road to Faerie, Kent State University Press, 1997.
  11. ↑ Victoria Stewart; "An Experiment with Narrative? Rumer Godden's A Fugue in Time", in (ed. Lucy Le-Guilcher and Phyllis B. Lassner) Rumer Godden: International and Intermodern Storyteller, Routledge, 2010, pp. 81-93.
  12. ↑ "Authors : Pearce, Philippa : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia". www.sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2016-01-15.

External links

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