Something that either I’m not getting or lots of other folks aren’t getting:
Time is a dimension, yes? We (our consciousness) moves through it in a linear, unidirectional fashion, which is why we experience “is” as “does” – i.e., the “state of what exists at x, y, z parameter such-andc-such when t = whatever” is perceived by us as part of a continuum of action.
But in order to conceptualize time more like space, as a dimention through which something can move (whether it be tachyon or H. G. Wells), we have to suspend our normative conceptualization of time as “things happening from moment to moment”, don’t we? In other words, if H. W. Wells travels backwards in time one year, he is “at” the temporal location marked at one year ago, and at that temporal location he is (“was”) in such-and-such a location, the molecules of his body were here and there and like so and so forth, and the thoughts in his mind (and the neurons and impulses by which they are physically manifest) are (“were”) this and that and so on – in other words, he would not know he had time-traveled, would not know he will (“had”?) at some future point sit in a time machine and set it to take him back one year.
I mean, on a two-dimensional graph, where the y axis is, I dunno, rainfall in inches, and the x axis is elevation above sea level, I can move my eye from the data that is “at” the 7,000 feet > sea level coordinate – I can glance “back” at the 1,300 feet > sea level coordinate. But when I do, I find myself looking at the data points that correspond to the new coordinate. That’s what’s there. Now, that’s me doing the glancing and the looking. The rainfall levels that exist at the 7,000 foot level aren’t themselves glancing back or “going to” the 1,300 level. If this were some kind of animated cartoon, we could imagine them doing so. But the “doing so”, the verb, the “move”, is itself an artifact of a dimension not represented on the sheet of paper: time. So on our four-dimensional graph called “reality”, there is no “glance”, there is no “move”, there is only “what, in each of the unspecified dimensions, corresponds to a specified value in one or more specified dimension”.
Otherwise – i.e., if H. G. Wells gets to go back one year and “be” in last year but in this year’s body and thinking (and remembering) this year’s thoughts, and occupying space other than the exact coordinates that H. G. Wells occupied “last year the firs time 'round”, how the heck is this truly “last year” --?? Things are different! It’s a different …different “then”? Different “reality”? However you want to express it, it isn’t “last year” as it was.
With subatomic particles, the same applies – “going backwards in time” is just a convenient mathematical way of expressing the idea that the motion and changes of things as “you” move along the time axis are mirror-image to the patterns expressed by their opposites.
