I love the Heinlein treatment of time, in which he figures out a tale which completely presents the paradoxes inherent in allowing time travel.

There is a really deep fundamental flip-flop in play here -- those who (understandably) derive metaphysics from the instinctual, body-derived sense of space and time are constantly wrestling with paradoxes such as the time issue, which goes all wonky the moment relativity gets turned on. Quantum dynamics don't make sense and fry your brain.

Those who assume that space is merely a viewpoint projected from a spiritual decision to know things dimensionally have a much easier time surfing the paradoxical nodes and all that, but they are useless when pragmatic matters come up.

Almost like politics.


A