TIME TRAVEL MYTHOLOGY: MAHABHARATA

One of the very first time travel stories recorded in history appears in the Hindu epic, Mahabharata, speculated to be written as early as 400BC. The story follows a king, his daughter, and their search for a perfect suitor.

Revati was the only daughter of King Kakudmi, a powerful monarch who ruled Kusasthali, a prosperous and advanced kingdom under the sea. Thinking no one could prove to be good enough to marry his beautiful daughter, Kakudmi took Revati with him to Brahmaloka, the home of Brahma, to ask the god’s advice about finding a suitable husband for her.

Brahma was listening to a musical performance when they arrived, and so they waited patiently until the performance was finished. Finally, King Kakudmi humbly bowed and made his request:

“O Brahmâ! To whom shall I betroth this daughter? I have come to you to ask on this point I have searched for many princes and seen also a good many of them and none of them is to my liking and so my mind is not at rest.”

Brahma laughed at the foolishness of the King.

“O King! The princes that you thought would become the bridegroom of your daughter, all died; their sons and grandsons and their friends even have all passed away.”

Time, Brahma goes on to explain, runs differently on different planes of existence. During the time they had waited in Brahmaloka to see him, 27 chatur-yugas, had passed on Earth. Everything that Kakudmi had and owned, his friends and family, his sons and wife, his armies and treasures, had vanished with the time that had passed. The King and his daughter were overcome with astonishment and grief for everything they had lost, but Brahma comforted them, and recommended a worthy husband currently on earth: Balarama, the twin brother of Krishna.

What is really interesting though, is how similar their view of time was 2500 years ago to how physicists and astronomers conceptualize space-time today. In the theory of relativity as proposed by Albert Einstein, time is relative to the observer’s frame of reference — it depends on the observer’s motion and strength of gravity. For instance, one could argue that time here on earth runs slower than in space because gravity slows the passage of time.

In the same way that Einstein says time is relative to the observer’s frame of reference — it depends on the observer’s motion and strength of gravity, Brahma tells the father and daughter 2500 years before Einstein was even born that time runs differently on different planes of existence. That is, during the time they had waited in Brahmaloka to see Brahma 27 chatur-yugas had passed on Earth. Everything that Kakudmi had and owned, his friends and family, his sons and wife, his armies and treasures, had vanished with the time that had passed.

Hindu philosophy was familiar with the concept that time is relative and many passages on the Vedic scriptures continuously point out that the cosmic time of the gods is different than the time on earth.

Were King Kakudmi and his daughter two unwitting time travelers? What they thought were just minutes in front god Brahma, millennia had taken place at home. When they came back, they did so to a vastly different place.

Wormholes, although theoretical, are ‘tunnels’ or shortcuts predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity that link two places in space-time — as visualized above — where negative energy pulls space and time into the mouth of a tunnel, emerging in another time or place in the universe, or possibly even another universe. Wormholes remain hypothetical but have been used in science fiction and films as conduits for time travel, for example as found in the movie Time Bandits (1981), where their locations are shown on a celestial map. Notice the circle within a circle on the map. It is almost as though you are above looking top down into an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.

Today, we so often think of time as an arrow moving in one direction, with a beginning, middle and end. But it is interesting to look at different cultures and how they view time. Their perceptions help us look at time, and the idea of time travel, a little bit differently.

“It is widely believed that spacetime must be both orientable and time-orientable. Arguments are that there is no evidence of a lack of orientability and that a nonorientable spacetime would be incompatible with the observed violations of P (parity) and T (time reversal invariance).”

The above quote, written by Mark J. Hadley, is found in The Orientability of Spacetime, linked below. What is not shown is the sentence that immediately follows the aforementioned quote which reads: “These arguments are shown to be false,” setting the scene for the rest of the contents of Hadley’s paper. So said, not everyone would agree with Hadley and scientists of a similar vein. The first two links below, which includes Hadley’s paper, have a favorable tendency toward support of the potential possibility of non-orientability if not an explanation of what it is. I did have an active PDF link to a rather extensive work by Stephen Hawking with a more traditional view. In the Hawking book there is a segment on Orientability on page 181 Section 6, 6.1, however the accessibility to the full book disappeared into cyber space. The third link, below, should take you to Section 6, 6.1.

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