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I am planning to write a new book. It will feature a LOST AND FOUND story involving time travel.

Time Travel to the Past:

British physicist Stephen Hawking held a party for time travelers in 2009. No guests showed up — he sent out the invites a year later. Some time travel theorists argue that the guests—perhaps all of them—came to the party, but ‘our Hawkins’ didn’t notice because a parallel universe opened up creating another ‘story-line’ when each guest traveled back in time to attend the party.

Going to the past and creating a parallel universe are two major topics in my book. But unlike the universe ‘our Hawkins’ didn’t notice, my time traveling character gets to interact with her future self, and vice versa. In my book, a pregnant woman goes back in time via a time portal created by nature. Hawking and others have argued that you could never travel back before the moment your time portal was built. If true, she can only go back a few minutes in time to the point when nature created the time portal. But she doesn’t. She goes back seven years.

Hawking and other physicists say traveling to the past is probably impossible. But I write fiction, and I plan to have fun suspending belief—or disbelief—in my book. However, I don’t want to stray too far from the scientific reality, so I plan to use science theories to propel the plot. An early idea had been to use a wormhole as my time travel portal. Many physicists believe in wormholes and not only in a pure mathematical sense. But they are at the quantum scale, which happens to be far smaller than atoms. Either someone or some force of nature in my book would need to inflate a wormhole, or something or someone would need to shrink my pregnant character in order for her to pass through the hole. That’s quite a feat and would need a massive amount of energy—and shrinking someone and then bringing them back to regular size seems too Hollywood cliché and doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to write.

Another idea, put forward by the American physicist Ron Mallet, is to use a rotating cylinder of light to twist spacetime. Anything dropped inside the swirling cylinder could theoretically move around in space and in time. According to Mallet, the right geometry could lead to time travel into the past and the future.

Three things come to mind when I think of a cylinder.

1. A tunnel;
2. Point A, the entry; and
3. Point B, the exit.

A time tunnel has an entry and an exit and needs a lot of energy to make it work. I was 16 when I conceived my first time tunnel/time travel story, The Vanishing. Two of my main characters discussed a theory behind traveling in time:

     Vree turned and faced me. The look on her face was close to accusing. “Humor me. You like reading and watching science fiction, so you must know all about time travel theories. Tell me. Do you truly believe in time travel?”
     I shrugged. “If you mean like being able to pass through holes in space and time, some scientists believe it’s possible. But it’s all conjecture. I’m reading a sci-fi novel about a time tunnel that’s stationary at one end and accelerated at the other end by nuclear matter. The main character just entered the stationary end and went into the future.”
     “What about going backward in time?”
     “I suppose if you entered the accelerated end first. You would be in the future of the tunnel’s stationary end, so you’d go back in time to its moment of creation.”
     “Could lightning be powerful enough to cause a time tunnel?”
     “I don’t know if lightning would cause a time tunnel. But its energy is certainly powerful enough to accelerate one, if one existed.”

The story’s time tunnel was a large sinkhole with crystals in it powered by lightning. The lightning and crystals accelerated time along the top of the sinkhole. Anyone who fell into it went back in time, as long as he or she survived the fall.

Getting back to their proper time was a major problem for my characters. As one character asked, “How does one fall up from the bottom of a sinkhole?”

One partial solution was to create a crystal cave with its roof missing. The cave has two horizontal entry points at opposite ends, and the middle has our swirling mass of energy powered by crystals energized by lightning from the opening above, which is the previous sinkhole. Theoretically, in my fictional world, entry at Point A into the swirling mass, and exit at Point B will send a character to the past. And vice versa, entry at Point B and exit at Point A will send a character to the future.

But how can this giant mass of energy occupy the past timeline so my characters can get back to Point A? Why can’t they simply step through a doorway to the past, and return to their future from the other side of the same doorway?

Perhaps there is no way back.

Aha. Picture this:

The top of an underground crystal cave falls and creates a chimney to the surface. The crystals contain opposite energy that attracts lightning to strike them through the chimney. This creates a new energy strong enough to suspend time. Seven years later, someone—a geologist or spelunker—is underground, enters the energy, and exits seven years in their past. Let’s call this person Karrie Erickson. She is pregnant. She has an accident—a fall, perhaps—and gets amnesia. Someone—a geologist or spelunker—from a neighboring town or city finds Karrie (who has no ID on her) and takes her in their care. Let’s call him Pierce Rickman. Pierce calls Karrie Jane because she is a Jane Doe. She has the baby—Pierce names the baby Sara—and keeps her amnesia. She and Pierce marry.

From this perspective, the moment Karrie goes back in time, she, as the amnesic Jane Rickman, occupies the same timeline of Karrie Erickson for seven years until Karrie goes back in time. At this point, Jane no longer shares the timeline with Karrie.

Meanwhile, the moment Karrie goes back in time, this becomes a point of loss for Karrie’s husband Charles who is without a wife. She is attainable, though, because she is in his timeline, albeit seven years older, with a different name, and in another town or city.

So, Charles visits the town/city—let’s call it New Cambridge—and sees Jane Rickman. He recognizes her as Karrie and follows her home. Pierce refuses him entry and to let him speak to her. He goes to the police and Pierce hides Karrie from him. After a game of cat and mouse, he gets back his wife and a six-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

This is The Vanishing and Kismet, a novel in the works for too many years. Until now.

I plan to rewrite those stories put them together in a new book for 2019. I will defy laws of nature and science with this book. This is fiction, after all. Science fiction. My crystal cave will be a place where time has stopped—or moves extremely slowly. To stop time, the experts say, the energy in the cave has to travel faster than light. And nothing can travel faster than light without gaining infinite mass and energy, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. That’s a lot of mass and energy, which would kill a person passing through it. But in science fiction, why couldn’t electricity create a place where new laws of physics allow for someone to survive and go back in time?

It certainly deserves pondering by us time-bound beings.

I hope you’ll join me.