The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Time can run backwards; the future is as real as the past; and the same event can be in one man’s future and another man’s past.

Using or proving these propositions, scientists groped along the boundaries between physics and philosophy at the American Physical Society meeting here today.

Time plays a major role, as the search for a theory to explain the universe and all its constituents continues.

... It was also suggested that we live in only one particular model of the universe, one of the several models permitted by the theory of relativity. In this universe, it has been speculated, past and future are distinguishable by the fact that it is expanding. Future time is linked to a larger universe. If shrinking occurred, time might seem to run backwards. (From a news report of a meeting of the Physical Sciences Association.)

Meanwhile, Fred Hoyle has published (Galaxies, Nuclei, and Quasars, Harper and Row, 1965) a book questioning his own “steady-state” theory of cosmology, in the light of new information about quasars; and all around, it seems, the more we know, the less we seem to know—and the more we seem on the verge of Knowing. (Just what, we will have to wait a bit to find out—trusting in Time to keep moving forward for a while.)

The last word, for this year, comes in still one more “first,” from a freshman at Knox College in Illinois.