SPECIAL FEATURE: SPACE AND SCIENCE FICTION

www.iop.org/journals/physed

Probing the limits of reality:

the metaphysics in science fiction
John L Taylor
Rugby School, UK
E-mail: jlt@rugbyschool.net

Abstract
Science fiction provides a genre in which metaphysical questions
concerning the ultimate structure of reality regularly arise. In addressing
these questions, contemporary scientists tend to assume that the questions
are of a scientific nature and should be handled solely by reference to our
best theories. In this paper, it is argued that we cannot afford to neglect the
role of conceptual analysis—a distinctively philosophical task—in thinking
critically about the possibilities that science fiction claims to describe.

The fascination of metaphysics In the modern era, philosophers have,

Physicists have, in recent years, turned their
attention to the question of the ‘science’ in
science fiction. Partly, this can be seen as a
reciprocation of the attention that the script-writers
have paid to physics. The more exotic denizens
of the physics world (wormholes, time travel,
singularities, antimatter and the like) have been put
to imaginative use, most frequently in the Star Trek
series. The question that has occupied the attention
of physicists is whether the scenarios so described
represent real physical possibilities. Could there
be travel to the past or through a wormhole to a
parallel universe?
These questions tend now to be discussed
by scientists, yet traditionally, questions about
what can loosely be termed ‘the ultimate structure
of reality’ were within the provenance of
philosophers. They fall within that branch of
the subject called ‘metaphysics’. Examples of
metaphysical questions include: was the world
infinite or did it have a beginning? How is time
different from space? Could we affect the past? In
what does a person’s persisting identity consist?
Is free will illusory? Do we perceive real physical
objects or merely mental images?
for a variety of reasons, been distrustful of
the enterprise of metaphysics—at least, of
metaphysics construed as a kind of ‘deeper’ quest
into the structure of reality than is possible for
the mere physicist. In the Western tradition,
questions of logic and conceptual analysis have
come to the fore, with the result that, whilst
metaphysical questions are still pursued, the
method of pursuit is now seen to involve tracking
the metaphysical beasts through the linguistic
jungle. The question ‘Is free will illusory’?, for
example, in contemporary vernacular, is roughly
the same as the question ‘Is it correct to speak of
the existence of free will?’.
Yet the impulse towards metaphysical spec-
ulation has not been removed. Indeed, in recent
years it has surfaced most powerfully in the lit-
erature of popular science. A casual glance over
the bookshelves reveals that much of what passes
for popular exposition of fundamental physics is
in fact camouflaged metaphysics. Philosophers
might have decided that there are principled ob-
jections to asking questions about the fundamental
structure of reality, but theoretical physicists have
not shared their scruples. The nature of time and
space, the origins of the universe, determinism,

20 PHYSICS EDUCATION 38 (1) 0031-9120/03/010020+07$30.00 © 2003 IOP Publishing Ltd


personal identity, the mind/body problem, time
travel, consciousness, the existence of God and
God’s relationship to the material universe—all of
these avowedly metaphysical issues have been the
mainstay of contemporary popular science.
Unsurprisingly, science fiction has made great
play of similar ideas. The genre uses speculative
extrapolations from present-day science to provide
a context for the exploration of philosophical,
ethical and religious ideas. In this most speculative
of art forms, metaphysics is never far from the
surface. Star Trek episodes are often structured
around a problem that is metaphysical in character:
what would occur if a spaceship were to travel to
the past? If a teletransporter malfunction were
to occur, what would become of the person?
Do robots have emotions (or could they, with a
microchip implant)?
Recently, however, there has been a marked
increase in the number of science fiction
productions that take metaphysical questions
as their central theme. The Matrix is
a contemporary restatement of the Cartesian
philosophical problem: could all of our
experience of the physical world be an elaborate
deception? Questions about personal identity
and individuality have come to the fore in films
concerned with the production of human clones.
The summer blockbuster Minority Report probed
questions surrounding the concepts of choice,
determinism and predictability.
The prevalence of metaphysical themes in
both contemporary science fiction and popular
science writing is testimony to the abiding
fascination that these questions possess. Yet the
contemporary public in the Western world would
probably, if asked, be inclined to think of these
problems as ‘deep’, ‘speculative’, ‘mysterious’ or
‘age-old’. Each of these terms contributes to the
feeling that such questions are ones that will never
be answered.
This is not quite the full story, however,
about contemporary attitudes towards metaphys-
ical questions. It is no coincidence that metaphys-
ical questioning has resurfaced in the public con-
sciousness under the guise of science (either in
science fiction or in popular science). This is part
of the prevalent assumption of the superiority of
science as a means of gaining knowledge about
reality. Such an assumption amounts to an arti-
cle of faith amongst popular science writers. Sci-
ence has now taken over the role once occupied
January 2003
Probing the limits of reality: the metaphysics in science fiction
by philosophy, of dealing with the deep matters of
metaphysics. Thus Hawking writes:
. . . the people whose business it is to ask
why, the philosophers, have not been able
to keep up with the advance of scientific
theories. In the eighteenth century,
philosophers considered the whole of
human knowledge, including science, to
be their field and discussed questions
such as: Did the universe have a
beginning? However, in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, science became
too technical and mathematical for the
philosophers, or anyone else except a
few specialists. Philosophers reduced
the scope of their enquiries so much
that Wittgenstein, the most famous
philosopher of this century, said, ‘The
sole remaining task for philosophy is the
analysis of language.’ What a comedown
from the great tradition of philosophy
from Aristotle to Kant! [1]
Steven Weinberg is even more blunt in
his assertion that science has taken over from
philosophy in matters of metaphysics:
It is true, of course, that many of the
subjects of physics—space and time,
causality, ultimate particles—have been
the concern of philosophers since the
earliest times. But in my view, when
physicists make discoveries in these
areas, they do not so much confirm or
refute the speculations of philosophers as
show that philosophers were out of their
jurisdiction in speculating about these
phenomena. [2]
Weinberg and Hawking share the assumption
that contemporary science (chiefly, theoretical
physics) provides the best tool for handling the
problems previously termed ‘metaphysical’. In
fact, a survey of the popular science literature
shows this assumption to be more or less universal.
The choice of problems is invariably metaphysical,
whilst the method of solution is invariably
scientific.
Commentators on modern science fiction also
take the view that the metaphysical questions
raised in these works should be probed using the
tools of modern science. In his analysis of the
plausibility of the scenarios that figure in Star Trek,
PHYSICS EDUCATION 21
J L Taylor
Figure 1. Just what is the past? (Cartoon courtesy Ralph Edney.)
Lawrence Krauss takes it for granted that it is the
physics of Star Trek that determines whether or not
the situations depicted could occur [3, ch 5]. Thus,
for example, in a chapter on teletransportation,
he moves straight into a discussion of the
technical feasibility of transporting atoms, or
bits of information. He does not pause to ask
himself whether there may be prior philosophical,
conceptual questions about the very coherence of
talking about the process. Likewise, in his popular
scientific writings, Stephen Hawking tackles a
wide range of metaphysical problems and always
turns immediately to a discussion of what physics
has to say. The fact that there has been a rich,
detailed and technical philosophical discussion of
many of the concepts that he uses is not something
that attracts his interest at all.
In this paper, I will be arguing against
the assumption that science alone, unaided by
the resources of analytical philosophy, can deal
with metaphysical questions. I will illustrate
this by considering the philosophical views of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who held that metaphysical
questions are chiefly a reflection of grammatical
or linguistic confusions, and their solution is to
be found by a careful analysis of the concepts
involved. (For Wittgenstein’s own discussion of
22 PHYSICS EDUCATION
questions about time, see [4].) I will conclude with
some comments on the bearing of my argument
for our understanding of the questions raised by
science fiction.
The linguistic analysis of metaphysical
questions
To illustrate Wittgenstein’s method, take the
question ‘What is the past?’ This question seems
grammatically similar to the question ‘What is the
Sun?’ We are led to suppose that there is some
thing called ‘the past’. What could it be? It seems
to be a place of some sort. For you can say ‘My
trip to London is now in the past, and today’s bad
weather will soon be there too’. We speak of events
slipping away from us into the past and, again, our
use of language suggests to us that the past is some
kind of strange space-like domain.
This image of space-like time may be
reinforced for physicists by the relativistic
representation of spacetime as a four-dimensional
realm in which, so it seems to some, time is spread
out in a manner akin to the spatial dimensions.
Yet this image is the source of considerable
metaphysical perplexity. It suggests that past
events are still happening (not here, but in a strange
place called the past). This thought leads to
January 2003

intolerable paradoxes, since we also feel inclined
to say that if an event is still happening, it must
be a present event. So it would seem that, in a
strange manner, past events are also present—yet
this seems contradictory.
Confusions like these arise, Wittgenstein
argued, because we are misled by a picture. The
image before us is of time as a dimension rather
like space. But although there may be analo-
gies, there are important grammatical differences
between the ways in which time and space enter
our language. It is these differences that we neglect
once the picture is before our eyes, and it is this
neglect that leads us into metaphysical confusion.
The way to remove the confusion is empha-
tically not to ask a question like: what does modern
science have to say? For if we remain gripped by
the picture, then when we go to science, we will
there find the same confusions surfacing. What
is needed is a perspicuous account of the ways in
which language really works when we talk about
topics such as the past.
Such an account might begin with the remark
that ‘the past’ is not a name for some strange
domain. When we say that an event is ‘in the
past’, what we really mean is simply that it took
place. To say ‘My trip to London is in the past’ is
to say ‘I went to London’. It is only superficially
grammatically like ‘My home is in Warwickshire’.
When we re-express the sentence in this
fashion, the temptation that we experienced is
removed. Talking about events being ‘in the past’
or ‘moving away into the past’ may have tempted
us to think that the past is the name of a quasi-
spatial domain. But this temptation is removed
once we recollect that to say that an event has
moved away into the past is one and the same as to
say that some time has elapsed since it occurred.
Someone might have thought: ‘if an event can be
in the past, surely the past is a sort of place’; they
are scarcely likely to think ‘if an event can have
happened, surely the past is a sort of place.’ Once
we free our minds from what Wittgenstein would
call ‘captivity to a picture’ of time as a quasi-
spatial dimension, we can hope to find that the
metaphysical puzzles about the nature of the past,
and the reality of events in the past, cease to arise.
The image of space-like time is a powerful
one, and its hold on our imaginations is reinforced
by the role it plays in contemporary theoretical
physics. A physicist is likely to respond to this
January 2003
Probing the limits of reality: the metaphysics in science fiction
linguistic argument by saying, ‘It may be the
case that language alone should not lead us to
think about time as a space-like dimension, but
surely, this is exactly what relativistic physics has
discovered.’
In response, I would argue that talk about
the ‘four-dimensional spacetime manifold’ should
not be treated as descriptive. The picture has a
role to play in explanation, but this role does not
license the inference that the fundamental nature
of time has now been discovered to be the same
as space. What has been discovered is that a
useful mode of representation of time is spatial,
but this no more implies that time is really a spatial
dimension than the fact that maps are a useful
mode of representation of the Earth implies that
the world is made of paper.
The conceivability of time travel
An immediate consequence of the spatialization of
time is the possibility of time travel. Conversely,
talking about ‘travelling through time’ is itself a
use of language that can tempt us to think of time
as a spatial domain. Once the image of time spread
out as a line, or a surface of a block, is before us, the
inference that it would be possible for the traveller
to ‘double back’ and travel in the reverse direction
seems inescapable.
I would suggest that the many attendant
paradoxes of such an assumption should be taken
as further reasons for suspecting a grammatical
confusion in the picture that suggests the
possibility of time travel.
I do not wish to repeat the paradoxes, which
are well known, but instead to ask about their
character. They are frequently represented as
being problems demanding technical solutions—
problems, that is, of a physical nature that may
or may not be resolved by scientific means. In
fact, the paradoxes are better seen as conceptual
in character: once we begin talking about the
possibility of visiting the past, we are using
language in such strange ways that it is no longer
clear to us what we should say.
To see this, consider first of all the use of the
language of travelling. In itself, this is odd. We
do not normally think of ourselves as travelling
through time in a ‘forwards’ direction. If today
is Sunday, it would be odd to announce ‘I am
journeying towards Monday’. An odd expression,
but perhaps not senseless. Journeys involve
PHYSICS EDUCATION 23
J L Taylor
leaving one location and arriving at another, and
in a metaphorical sense we can speak of taking
journeys from one time to another. Language
like this is more common when a significant
destination is in view (e.g. ‘In 1999 we were
moving steadily towards the 21st century.’).
Our progress through time is a continuous
journey. We do not ‘hop’ from now into future
times. So if we wish to speak about a ‘journey
backwards in time’ on this model, it will also have
to be a continuous affair. This immediately raises
a difficulty. For to call the journey continuous is to
imply that, at every moment in time between the
moment we ‘leave for the past’ and the moment we
‘arrive’, we are engaged in the process of ‘reverse
travel through time’.
This fact alone indicates that time travel of this
kind is not going to be of much use to the science
fiction author. For the whole point of sending
someone into the past is that they can be part of
a significant drama once they arrive. But if their
journey is a continuous transition from the future
into the past, then at every moment subsequent to
their ‘arrival’ they will be engaged on what will
seem to everyone else to be some strange reverse
process of time travel.
This difficulty shows that time travel, as
proposed by H G Wells, is logically impossible.
Wells postulated a time travel machine that
progressed continuously into the future, or into the
past, and from which the time traveller was able to
step out and begin exploring historical worlds. Yet
this would imply that he was simultaneously in two
places at once—both in the time machine heading
‘backwards’ and also outside of the machine
exploring—and this is a logical absurdity.
Would the time travel stories be logically
consistent if the traveller did nothing but pass
through time ‘in reverse’? Before we can answer
that question, we need to ask what we mean when
we talk about ‘going backwards in time’.
It is tempting to argue, ‘We know what it
is to go forwards in time, so surely we can
conceive of doing the same thing, only in the
reverse direction.’ This argument might be valid
if travelling through time really was a process like
travelling through space. But we have already seen
reasons to question the cogency of the space/time
analogy. One obvious difference between the two
is that, whilst different directions in space may
be equivalent, it is plausible to suppose that there
24 PHYSICS EDUCATION
are fundamental differences between the past and
future directions in time.
But what exactly does it mean to assert that
the past and future directions are fundamentally
different? This sounds like a metaphysical
utterance—a discovery, perhaps, about the ulti-
mate structure of temporal reality. I prefer, in
line with Wittgenstein and many contemporary
analytical philosophers, to think that we should
explain such a statement by exploring the linguistic
differences between talk about the past and talk
about the future.
One way to begin thinking about this is to note
that we cannot generally ‘turn around’ the words
we use when speaking of the past in order to speak
of the future. We can talk about remembering
events that have happened but we cannot use the
verb ‘to remember’ in the same way about the
future. True, in Alice in Wonderland, we meet
a Queen who claims to remember ‘things that
happen the week after next’—but we are meant
to appreciate that such talk is nonsensical, like
‘believing six impossible things before breakfast’.
But someone who seriously considers that
time travel in reverse might happen seems bound
to talk such nonsense. The time traveller, on the
hypothesis we are considering, will be living his
mental life in reverse. Thus, his ‘memories’ will
be of future events. The very fact that we need to
put quotation marks around the word ‘memories’
indicates the uneasiness we feel in supposing that
someone might really remember events that have
not yet happened. Perhaps, strangely enough,
there could be someone who had a faculty for
knowing what the future would hold, on the basis
of visions or premonitions. But even this (odd
enough) supposition would not license us to talk
about ‘remembering’ the future, for it could better
be described as fore-knowing or foreseeing what
will be. It is hard even to begin to conceive of
circumstances that might seriously tempt us to say
that someone was remembering what will occur
tomorrow.
Similar conceptual problems arise with other
aspects of the supposed reverse time travel process.
Whilst we may decide today to do something
tomorrow, the backwards traveller will ‘decide’
today to do things yesterday (or should we say
that he will decide to have done things yesterday?).
He will be ‘ageing’ in reverse (or should we say,
‘growing younger as he grows older’?). Whilst
January 2003

Figure 2. A time machine as pictured by a 14-year-old.
we regret things after they have happened, he will
regret them even before they have occurred. He
will die before he is born, and learn to run before
he learns to walk.
The point could be laboured, but the moral
should be clear. Since much of our language
depends upon the fact that we are, so to speak,
travelling forwards in time, the real problem with
reverse travel in time is a conceptual one. Can the
so-called process even be described in a coherent
manner? Are we not bound to lapse quickly into
the nonsensical talk of a character from Alice
in Wonderland if we try seriously to describe
temporally reversed processes?
Now it may be that the defender of time travel
feels able to meet this challenge. Such matters are
part of the concern of philosophers. Yet my chief
purpose is not to cast doubt on the conceivability of
backwards travel in time, rather to point out that it
is a conceptual difficulty that the hypothesis faces.
Before we can ask questions like, ‘is backwards
travel in time technically possible?’ we need to
be clear about what exactly is meant by speaking
of the possibility. So there is a philosophical
challenge to be met before we can even begin
properly to address the technical, scientific aspects
of the puzzle.
This is why the widespread assumption that
science alone can be called upon to resolve
metaphysical problems cannot be the whole story.
If the problems are conceptual in nature, then the
January 2003
Probing the limits of reality: the metaphysics in science fiction
resources of philosophical analysis will have to
come into play as well as considerations of what
our best scientific theories have to say.
Regardless of whether the logical problems
raised above are considered to be decisive against
time travel (and of course, they are debated
by philosophers), the fact that they are logical
problems is itself enough to validate my main
thesis: that philosophical analysis cannot be
supplanted by an appeal to a new metaphysics
based solely upon scientific methods.
Why is the vital role for conceptual consi-
derations so widely neglected? I suggest that
those scientists (and even philosophers) who argue
that science alone can deal with metaphysical
problems have fallen into what Wittgenstein would
call ‘captivity to a picture’. It is very easy to
draw pictures that represent (allegedly) particular
temporal possibilities. For example, time travel
can be represented by a line that curves back on
itself. For some physicists, the fact that we can
draw spacetime diagrams with this shape is enough
to warrant the claim that time travel is possible.
Similarly, we can easily be bewitched by diagrams
in which timelines divide into supposing that time
could (logically) divide into two separate streams.
Possibility and imaginability
The role of pictures brings us back to our concern
with science fiction. Lawrence Krauss (quoting
PHYSICS EDUCATION 25
J L Taylor
a character from the series) speaks of the way
that Star Trek ‘charts the unknown possibilities
of existence’ [3, p xvi]. It might be accurate to say
that Star Trek provides images of new possibilities,
but is that the same as demonstrating that the events
depicted could really occur?
Seeing a picture in front of us does not
generally license us to assert that a particular state
of affairs is logically possible. It is easy to draw
pictures that provide us with images of impossible
states of affairs. Escher’s staircases are an obvious
case. I can imagine watching my own funeral
but there is no real possibility of my ever really
doing this. One of the fallacies in the style of
argument used by Descartes for an immaterial soul
is the move from the premise that we can imagine
ourselves without a body, to the conclusion that it
is possible for us to exist outside the body. It is
vital to distinguish between what can be imagined
and what could really occur. Imaginability is not
to be equated with possibility.
How then should we decide questions of
conceptual possibility? The key question is
whether we can consistently describe the scenario
that the diagram claims to depict. To work this
out, we have not merely to inspect the picture,
but to ask questions like, ‘What would we say
if. . . ?’, or ‘If something like this really were to
occur, what would it imply?’ The arguments given
above are designed to show that, once we begin
to try to describe the reality that a ‘time-travel’
diagram purports to depict, we rapidly realize that
we cannot do so without misusing language.
At this point, the questions raised above
(about the adequacy of the spatial mode of
representation) recur. If spatial representations
of time have misled us into thinking that talk
of visiting the past makes sense, they might be
misleading in other ways too. To take but one
contemporary debate from the philosophy of time,
these diagrams may give psychological support to
the view that the flow of time is essentially unreal
(for in the diagram, time does not flow!) But we
might equally well say that if the diagram tempts
us to say that time does not flow, might that be
because we are misusing the diagram?
The narrator of a science fiction tale need
not concern themselves overly with questions
26 PHYSICS EDUCATION
of consistency. It is sufficient for them if
the actual course of events depicted fits into
some sort of coherent framework. It is no
business of the author to concern themselves
about whether or not the scenarios depicted
would, or would not, turn out to contain
logical contradictions when their implications
were spelled out. We simply do not expect Star
Trek to respect the standards of philosophical
clarity that a professional philosopher aspires to
when analysing metaphysical problems. It would,
to say the least, take the edge off the drama if they
made a serious attempt to do so!
This is not to say that science fiction cannot
play an important role in raising the profile of
particular, significant, metaphysical questions.
The recent interest in such themes is surely
welcome if it leads to a wider engagement with
serious reflection on questions that have been
puzzled over by the greatest minds. What
is important, though, is that people (and in
particular, young people, for whom philosophical
questioning often holds considerable appeal)
should be correctly directed when they are inspired
to delve deeper. My argument has been that they
would do well to give attention to the relevant
science, but also that they need to begin cultivating
the analytical habits of mind and concern with
conceptual clarity that characterize philosophy at
its best.
Received 26 September 2002
PII: S0031-9120(03)54349-0
References
[1] Hawking S 1988 A Brief History of Time (London:
Bantam Press) pp 174–5
[2] Weinberg S 1977 The forces of nature American
Scientist 65 176
[3] Krauss L 1995 The Physics of Star Trek (London:
Flamingo)
[4] Wittgenstein L 1958 The Blue and Brown Books
(Oxford: Blackwell) pp 107–9
John Taylor is Head of Physics at Rugby School, where he
also teaches Philosophy. He is currently coordinating
‘Perspectives on Science’, a project that is preparing materials
for a proposed new AS-level in the History and Philosophy of
Science.
January 2003