I've said it before and I'll say it again, Doctor Who is my favorite show on television and lately I have been intrigued with how it handles Time travel. For those of you who don't know, Doctor Who is a British show about an alien being called the Doctor who travels through time and space and runs into trouble were ever he goes. He finds aliens who have distorted the time line by taking on human form and interacting with humans, or by introducing technology that we shouldn't have, among other things, and the Doctor sets things right wherever he goes. The place that I'm going is this idea of a being existing outside of time. We often say that God exists outside of time, but often I don't think that we can wrap our minds around this, I can't at least, but looking at time through the eyes of the Doctor it's almost as if for him going to the year 1599 is kind of like going to Sioux Falls or something. Instead of thinking of him as traveling through time, as if it were impossible, I find it easier to think of time more as a road map and the Doctor just goes from one town to another. For a being such as this it seems impossible to screw up the "Space Time Continuum" because that straight line view of time is blasted apart when thinking about it in this way. Just something kind of cool to think about.
Labels: "Doctor Who" and Time Travel


3 Comments:
I've been a fan of the doctor for a long time, from those classic sci-fi friday nights on Iowa Public TV. Doctor Who and Red Dwarf were my favorite shows back in the day. Wrapping our minds around the time travel or "God outside of time" is tough indeed.. like trying to think of heaven or the entirity of the universe. Finite people stuck in a single time with a single place have it rough thinking of infinites. At any rate, those shows (if nothing else) got me interested in sci-fi in general and time warps and cheesy villians and irreverent humor. I think all of these things stuck with me too!
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Tales that involve time travel have always fascinated me. However, after reading some of the examples of scientists and physicists have attempted to explain how time travel is possible, my head is spinning. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to be outside of time completely. I have read a lot of books that would be considered more as fantasy than science fiction, and in a lot of these stories, time travel is more of an unexplainable, almost magical, phenomenon. I like these explanations better because they rely a lot more on faith and don't make my head hurt nearly so much with technical explanations. This also kind of applies to thinking about God as outside of time, at least it makes it a little easier to comprehend.
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