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"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."
- Philip K. Dick
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| Time Warp | ||
| Provides a kind of foothold for time travel. |
As far as I know, the first use of the phrase "time warp".
| Relativists have suggested that around the heavier stars time progresses at a slower rate, because the immense masses warp both space and time Cameron had invented neutronium with this in mind. Though the total mass of the neutronium plate was negligible, it was so highly concentrated that near it was produced an almost visible spacetime warp. Light rays passing above it were refracted because their time rate — and therefore their speed — had been changed momentarily.
Just as a body in space cannot move unless it has something to push against, so a body cannot travel in time — change its time rate — unless it has a foothold on that medium. The time warp produced by neutronium was the foothold; traveling along and against it. the Time Traveler could move forward in time! It could not travel into the post, for the neutronium plate had to exist in all the ages traveled, and it had not existed before Cameron had made it...
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| Technovelgy from The Time Bender,
by Oliver Saari. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1937 Additional resources -
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Here's another use of this handy phrase, in Anachronistic Optics (1938) by M. Schere:
“It’s permanent,” Dr. Meadow said in a tired voice at dawn. “Dan Murphy is in 1940, without his eyes. The machine is out of order. But my planemodulus light had some effect. They prevented the time-warp, at the last moment, from affecting that part of his body most sensitive to light — his eyes.”
I found that I was believing him. There was nothing else to do.
“Then what’s he doing?” I asked in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own.
“He is standing in the wrecked time machine, in your barn. At least I am quite sure he won’t move, for he can see nothing in 1940. I think he can see here, now.”
Compare to space warp from Redmask of the Outlands (1934) by Nat Schachner and warp-speed from Yachting Party (1952) by Fox B. Holden.
I hardly recollect what happened during that night. The doctor figured and worked and tried one thing after another. But nothing happened. The eyes stayed there, turning this way and that a little, till I could feel the fingers of skeletons crawling up and down my spine.
('Anachronistic Optics' (1938) by M. Schere)
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