Daniel: When you were talking about Dr. Manhattan viewing time as a solid object, the reader sees it that way too, and maybe as you say it is a way of letting us see something that we couldn’t see with our eyes by looking out the window…
Alan: Like I say, maybe when we’ve caught up with quantum theory, maybe when we’ve caught up with Stephen Hawking, maybe when we’ve caught up with some of the shit I read about in New Scientist every week, when we’ve assimilated that to the extent that we understand apples falling from trees, who’s to say that our perception of time wouldn’t change? I mean, if I understand Stephen Hawking, unless I’ve misread A Brief History of Time (laughter), the whole of space time, if it came into existence in the Big Bang, that was the whole of time, not just the whole of space that came into being and it all came into being inextricably linked together, then that means space time is a kind of giant football – more like a rugby ball, Big Bang at one end, Big Crunch at the other – and all the moments in-between are all co-existing in this one big hyper moment of space-time.
Now, I can accept that, intellectually, but to really know it, in the same way as apples fall from trees, to have it as an observable reality…sometimes I can almost get there. I’ve got a pretty good memory, and I’ve had odd premonitions from time to time the same way everybody does, never about anything significant, enough to strike a little eerie chord, and I came to think that time was happening all at once, and it’s only our conscious perceptions that arrange it all into a linear sequence.
And there by exploring the consciousness of the fictional Dr. Manhattan I can suggest to the reader what such a consciousness might be like. And Swamp Thing, where I was actually trying to think my way into: “What would a mass vegetable consciousness be like? What would the concerns of a vegetable consciousness be? What would its emotional range be?”. All these things are useful – or potentially useful – tools for getting people to understand natural phenomena from the inside, in the way that no other tool short of fantasy really can allow people to be put into those spaces and those mindsets.