In her book of essays, Ordinary Wonder Tales, which I mentioned in my previous Substack, Emily Urquhart recounts the Japanese folk tale, “Urashima Taro,” in which Taro, a fisherman, saves a turtle that is being tormented by a group of children. In gratitude, the turtle, who is in fact Otohime, the daughter of the Emperor of the Sea, rewards Taro by taking him to the Palace of the Dragon God, at the bottom of the ocean, where Taro and Otohime fall in love and marry. Taro spends three years with Otohime, then declares that he wants to return to his homeland and family. Otohime gives him “a protective gift, a box made of shells and gems and light,” and tells him he must not open it unless he is in extreme distress (in some versions, he is told never to open it).
When Taro returns to dry land, he finds everything changed. His house has vanished, his mother and father are long gone, the forested hillsides are now farms and pastures. Taro asks an elderly man if he has heard of a man named Urashima Taro, and the old man replies that he vaguely remembers a character of that name in an ancient folk tale. Taro learns that in the three years he was with Otohime under the sea, three hundred years have passed on the land. In despair, Taro opens the protective box. A wisp of white smoke comes out of it, and in an instant, Taro becomes a white-haired old man (again, in some versions he dies instantly, in others he is transformed into a crane).
As a folklorist, Emily Urquhart is intrigued by parallels between life as it is experienced by us and the folk tales of many nations. She notes that in a paper published in the Journal of Psychogenetics, the authors find similarities between the Urashima Taro story and a person suffering from dementia. Dementia patients often escape from the unpleasantness of reality by experiencing pleasant hallucinations in which time collapses, as it does for Taro. She writes that “time, as we experience it in the human world, is also a kind of magic. It can fly and it can stand still depending on our emotions….Time is as much a human construct as fairy tales.”
What I find spooky is the parallel between the Urashima Taro story, which originated in eighth-century Japan, and Einstein’s hypothesis about what happens to time when objects travel through space. It was Einstein’s belief, expressed as part of his theory of special relativity, that motion through space creates an alteration in the flow of time. The faster one moves through the three dimensions of space, the more slowly one travels through the fourth dimension, which is time.
Here is Einstein, writing in 1911: “If we placed a living organism in a box…one could arrange that the organism, after any arbitrary lengthy flight, could be returned to its original spot in a scarcely altered condition, while corresponding organisms which had remained in their original positions had already long since given way to new generations.”
He might have been describing Urashima Taro’s journey.
Einstein’s hypothesis has been restated as the “Twin Paradox,” as paraphrased by physicist Robert Resnick: “If the stationary organism is a man and the travelling one is his twin, then the traveller returns home to find his twin brother much aged compared to himself.”
By “any arbitrary lengthy flight,” Einstein meant travel through space, adding the proviso that “the motion took place with approximately the speed of light.” Although he didn’t say so, by “in a box” he must have meant in a space ship travelling at or near the speed of light, both of which were inconceivable in 1911. They aren’t inconceivable now. Since the launch of the Kepler telescope in March 2009, NASA’s stated mission has been the discovery of planets in our galaxy habitable by humans. Kepler, as stated on NASA’s website, has shown that “our galaxy contains billions of hidden ‘exoplanets,’ many of which could be promising planets for life. They prove that our night sky is filled with more planets even than stars…”
The nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light years from Earth. Let’s suppose that Kepler discovers a habitable planet about the same size as Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri. With current technology, it would take a space craft 1,000 years to reach it. The physicist Freeman Dyson worked on Project Orion in the 1950s, which proposed a nuclear pulse projection system of space travel that would get a ship to Proxima Centauri in about 100 years. (The project was cancelled in 1964 when the U.S. signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits the dumping of nuclear waste in space.) Given NASA’s current zest to find habitable planets in the galaxy, it is not inconceivable that they are also reviving experiments like Orion to find a feasible means of reaching an exoplanet in the span of one or two human generations.
So let’s say one day it will take 100 years to get to a habitable planet. That would be 100 Earth years: 100 years will have passed on Earth while the space ship was in flight. But if Einstein (and Emily Urquhart) are right, the humans on the space ship would experience much less time. If they travel near the speed of light, they might not experience much time passing at all.
It’s intriguing to me that a Japanese storyteller thirteen centuries ago thought about the problem of what travel does to time. His traveller didn’t go to the stars, he went to the opposite unknown, to the bottom of the sea. But he aged only three years while, on land, three hundred years passed. If future Proxima Centauri astronauts return to Earth, what will happen when they step out of their “protective box”? Will they instantaneously age 100 years and vanish in a puff of white smoke? Will they turn into cranes?
Time collapsing. Magic. It’s fascinating stuff. Starting with the physics, but psychologically it also rings true.
And I am smiling widely thinking of all the fun you must have had with that Einsteinian illustration, ending with that delightful “E me”!
I love your columns. I’m reading it at Rustica, SMA. A place I know is your second home as it is mine.