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From: KFL@MIT-MC.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Time travel
Message-ID: <250@caip.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Mon, 28-Oct-85 00:42:22 EST
Article-I.D.: caip.250
Posted: Mon Oct 28 00:42:22 1985
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: "Keith F. Lynch" 

    Date: Thu, 24 Oct 85 13:54:23 cdt
    From: Alan Wexelblat 

    ... It seems to me that time
    travel *must* imply spatial (not necessarily space) travel because
    if you move in time, then the spot you left from is going to be in a
    different spatial location when you stop moving in time.

  This would only be true if velocities were absolute.  They aren't.

    Can anyone think of SF in which time travel was explicitly separated
    from spatial travel?

  I can think of several.  The authors obviously didn't undertand what
they were talking about.  To say that the earth was 'there' in 1955 and
will be 'over there' in 2015 is meaningless.
  For instance see Benford's _Timescape_, in which, when sending messages
to 1963, scientists in 1997 point their transmitter in the direction the
earth was in 1963.  This was the only major flaw in an otherwise excellent
book.
  Also see James White's _Tomorrow_Is_Too_Far_, in which it is discovered
that traveling a day back in time will put one in the outer solar system
because the whole solar system moved in the meanwhile.  (Also, the time
travelers lose their memory and gradually regain it, both for no reason
I could understand.)
  Both of these books share the implicit notion that it is the center of
our galaxy which is stationary.  Presumably a time traveler there would
always remain in the same place.  There is no better reason to regard
that as non-moving as anyplace else.
								...Keith