Like space, it is a basic aspect of experience early philosophical treatments of the idea hesitated in a similar fashion over the question of whether time could be said to exist apart from the objects manifesting its effects. Science fiction scholar Andrew Sawyer writes, 'The paradoxes of time-do we move in time, or does it move by us? Does it exist or is it merely an illusion of our limited perception?-are puzzles that exercise both physicists and philosophers.' History īrian Stableford writes of the historical and philosophical concepts of time (and using the terminology of 'flow'): Some physicists and science fiction writers have speculated that time is branching-it branches into alternate universes (see many-worlds interpretation).People exist within time, but move with it.

People can stand in a stream, but will be pulled along by it.This conception has been widely used in mythology and in fiction. The concept of the time stream, and the ability to travel within and around it, are the fundamentals of a genre of science fiction. Timestream is the normal passage or flow of time and its historical developments, within a given dimension of reality. In Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, the term is more narrowly defined as: 'the series of all events from past to future, especially when conceived of as one of many such series'. The timestream or time stream is a metaphorical conception of time as a stream, a flowing body of water.

For other uses, see Time Stream (disambiguation).

Time Streams by J. Robert King