World Line - World Lines in Literature

World Lines in Literature

A popular description of human world lines was given by J. C. Fields at the University of Toronto in the early days of relativity. As described by Toronto lawyer Norman Robertson:

I remember lecturing at one of the Saturday evening lectures at the Royal Canadian Institute. It was advertised to be a "Mathematical Fantasy" — and it was! The substance of the exercise was as follows: He postulated that, commencing with his birth, every human being had some kind of spiritual aura with a long filament or thread attached, that travelled behind him throughout his life. He then proceeded in imagination to describe the complicated entanglement every individual became involved in his relationship to other individuals, comparing the simple entanglements of youth to those complicated knots that develop in later life.

Because they oversimplify world lines, which traverse four-dimesional spacetime, into one-dimensional timelines, almost all purported science-fiction stories about time travel are actually wishful fantasy stories. Some device or superpowered person is generally portrayed as departing from one point in time, and with little or no subjective lag, arriving at some other point in time — but at the same literally geographic point in space, typically inside a workshop or near some historic site. However, in reality the planet, its solar system, and its galaxy would all be at vastly different spatial positions on arrival. Thus, the time travel mechanism would also have to provide instantaneous teleportation, with infinitely accurate and simultaneous adjustment of final 3D location, linear momentum, and angular momentum.

World lines appeared in Jeffrey Rowland's webcomic Wigu Adventures as part of the "Magical Adventures in Space" side story line, in which Topato Potato and Sheriff Pony accidentally delete a world line relating to the initial creation of Earth from asteroids, causing the Earth to never have existed. According to this webcomic, calculating the exact coordinates of a world line is "embarrassingly simple", and the deletion of the world line specified is executed by making a call and entering the coordinates of the world line, and pressing 3.

Author Oliver Franklin published a science fiction work in 2008 entitled World Lines in which he related a simplified explanation of the hypothesis for laymen.

In the short story Life-Line, author Robert A. Heinlein describes the world line of a person:

He stepped up to one of the reporters. "Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross-section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen-eighties.

"Imagine this space-time event that we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end in his mother's womb, and the other at the grave..."

Heinlein's Methuselah's Children uses the term, as does James Blish's The Quincunx of Time (expanded from "Beep").