How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Right. See, the reason nobody's even tried to send messages back is an obvious one, once you think of it. We can build a transmitter, see, but there's no receiver. Nobody in the past ever built one."
Peterson frowned. "Well, of course—"
Renfrew went on enthusiastically, "We've built one, naturally, to do our preliminary experiments. But the people back in 1963 didn't know about tachyons. So the trick is to interfere with something they're already doing. That's the ticket." (1.76-78)
Let's open this discussion by giving Benford the shout-out he deserves. Most time travel stories just come up with some device that says time travel works and so it does. Benford, however, really took the time to add some scientific rigor and consider how and why a connection could really be made to the past. And for that, we salute you, sir.
Quote #2
Marjorie locked the kitchen door behind her and walked round the side of the house, carrying a bucket of chicken feed. The lawn behind the house was crisply quartered by brick paths, with a sundial at the intersection. (2.1)
Imagery related to time pops up all over Timescape—it's basically the Waldo of the novel. Thing is, the imagery tends to show up in places outside of the laboratory settings, such as the sundial and later Marjorie's mechanical clock. Time may be the realm of physics, but it seems the imagery of time serves as a reminder of how physics is connected to everything else.
Quote #3
Greg smiled at the jibe. "Especially physicist, since we know what's going on. Point is, Einstein showed that two people moving with respect to each other can't agree on whether two events happen at the same time. That's because light takes a finite time to travel from the events to the two people, and that time is different for each person. I can show you that with some simple mathematics—" (5.50)
Yeah, we're willing to bet those mathematics aren't so simple, Markham. But he does make an interesting point in regards to our perception of time, and it's one you can see for yourself. Go out one night and look at the stars. Because those stars are so far away, the light we see tonight left them years ago, so we are, in a sense, looking into the past with every night sky. And we think that's pretty awesome.
Quote #4
Markham nodded. "True—but the advanced wave is there, in the mathematics. There's no way around it. The equations of physics are all time-symmetric. That's one of the riddles of modern physics. How is it that we perceive time passing, and yet all the equations of physics say that time can run either way, forward or backward?" (9.108)
That's a fascinating question and one that doesn't have an answer in the book. It leads us back to what we said at the start of this discussion: Science can create as many riddles as it can answer questions. Assuming you like riddles, that's not a bad thing at all.
Quote #5
It was as though some unnoticed force came over the horizon, all the way from Asia, and chipped away at this cozy pocket of Americana. Stubby breakwaters tried to blunt the effect, but Gordon could not understand how they could last. Time would eat all this away; it had to. (13.6)
We see more time imagery here in the ocean. Like time, the ocean is vast and holds back many of its secrets from Gordon, who can only view it from the shore. As such, he can't get a complete picture and only sees the way it erodes the world around him like, well, the traditional view of time.
Quote #6
He and Renfrew and Peterson would emerge from the Cav to find that no one knew what they were babbling about. Ocean bloom? We solved that ages ago. So they would be madmen, a curious trio sharing a common delusion. Yet to be consistent, the equations said that sending the message couldn't have too great an effect. It couldn't cut off the very reason for sending the tachyons in the first place. So there had to be some self-consistent picture, in which Renfrew still got his initial idea, and approached the World Council, and yet… (15.82)
The difficulty in messing with time is the potential of a paradox, and Timescape shares this trope with many other famous science fiction stories. But while each has its own take on the conundrum, in all cases, the relationship between time and the paradox represents science's exploration and questioning of the unknown.
Quote #7
"Interesting," Ian murmured, "how we keep on wanting to know the time, in the midst of all that's going on."
"Yes."
"As if we still had appointments to keep."
"Yes."
A silence stretched between them, a chasm. She searched for something to say. Tick. The shelves seemed more substantial now than the walls. The clock nested in the middle of them, surrounded by preserves. (37.66-70)
This novel has taken our typical understanding of time and given it an upgrade (think of it as Time 2.0). But this quote shows us that our perception of time is something fundamental to people. The clock symbolizing time has been surrounded by preserves, as though Marjorie is trying to preserve it along with the world she once knew.
Quote #8
Gordon got a few words here and there, and a very clear RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, and that was all. The coordinates made sense now. Up ahead in the future they would have a precise fix on where they would seem to be in the sky. The solar apex was an average of the sun's motion. Thirty-five years from now the earth would be in a location near the average motion. (41.38)
This reveal of how the future could find the past harkens to some ideas in Einstein's special relativity, specifically that we move not only through space, but through time, too. But click on that link if you want to really explore this.
Quote #9
Hello, 2349. Hello out there. This is 1998, an x and t in your memory. Hello. ATTEMPT CONTACT.
Renfrew smiled with flinty irony. Whispers came flitting, embedding soft words of tomorrow in the indium. Someone was there. Someone brought hope. (45.25-26)
Essentially, time goes on. Renfrew may have been unsuccessful in securing a future for his spot in reality, but the way time works in the universe suggests that this doesn't mean there will be no future for humanity, which is uplifting… in a way.
Quote #10
But they were all simply figures. A piercing light shone through them. They seemed frozen. It was the landscape itself which changed, Gordon saw at last, refracted by laws of its own. Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea. (46.93)
Going back to the ocean imagery from the previous quote, Gordon has come a long away and he has peered a little bit deeper into the ocean of time. But even at the end of the novel, time remains a "great beast in the dark sea," eluding the characters and, ultimately, the reader as well. For more on this, be sure to check out the "Symbols" section.