briefcase and made a great show of arranging certain papers on a small table before taking a quite deliberately long, slow sip of water. Finally he began.
‘Newton’s great leap of the imagination,’ he said in his pedantic-sounding, sing-song voice, which was half Calcutta lecture theatre and half London gentlemen’s club, ‘was to understand,
hundreds
of years before Einstein, that time is
relative
.’ Here he paused for theatrical effect and also to dab rather primly at the water on his lips with the enormous, brightly coloured silk handkerchief he kept stuffed flamboyantly in the breast pocket of his suit. ‘Time is not
straight
or
linear
. It does not progress in a regular and ordered fashion, and the reason for this is because it is affected by
gravity
. Yes! Just as are motion and mass and light, and indeed all the properties of the physical universe. It is, of course, generally believed that Einstein first proposed the idea of universal relativity but we in this room and we
alone
now know that in fact the first man in the world to make this leap of thought was our own Sir Isaac Newton. And we know also that Newton leapt further and with surer foot than Einstein ever did. For just as Newton showed the world that gravity explained the circular and elliptical courses of the
planets
, he also understood that
time
moved in a similar manner, twisting and ever turning,
shadowing
the expansion of the universe, bound by the gravitational pull of every atom contained therein. To put it plainly, Newton saw that time was
coiled
, and just as an understanding of gravity allowed him to track and map the course of planetary motion, it also enabled him to track the movement of
time
. And so
predict its course
.’
Here Sengupta paused briefly for another sip of water. He knew he had a sensational story and clearly did not intend to rush it.
‘So what? I hear you asking yourselves,’ he continued. ‘Coiled or straight, time progresses and there is nothing we can do about it. Why in the blinking blazes was old Isaac getting his knickers in a twist? I will tell you why! Because gravitational pull is not
uniform
! Just as the planets deviate slightly from the perfect symmetry of their ancient courses, so it is with time. We must think of it not as a
perfect spiral
but more as a
disobliging Slinky
in which, once in a while, coils get crossed. Time will, on rare occasions, pass through the same set of dimensions
twice
. The coils of the Slinky touch only for a moment, within the most limited parameters, after which the spiral of time continues on its merry way. No harm done … But what, Newton asked himself in the tortured journeying of his fearful imaginings, if someone were
present
at that point in space–time when the coils of the Slinky touched? That person would exist at both the beginning and the end of a loop in time. And so now the spiral does
not
continue on its merry way. It turns
back
on itself. For simply by drawing breath, our intrepid time-
straddler
reboots the loop. All that had been in the past is now once more
yet to come
. History is unmade. The loop is
begun again
.’
Sengupta mopped his brow with his handkerchief and took yet another sip of water. The flickering of the candles cast a ghostly ripple across his face. The assembled Companions of Chronos leant forward on their walking sticks and Zimmer frames, hanging on the great physicist’s every word.
‘And Newton really
did his sums
,’ Sengupta continued. ‘It is scarcely possible to credit but this divine genius, working alone and without modern equipment, was able to tell us
when
and
where
time would next cross its own path. No wonder he went a bit loony. I think
I’d
be looking for secret codes in the Bible myself if I’d just written a map of time when everybody else was just starting to think about mapping Australia. Sir Isaac’s conclusion was most specific. He calculated that the next closed loop in the space–time continuum would be
‘Newton’s great leap of the imagination,’ he said in his pedantic-sounding, sing-song voice, which was half Calcutta lecture theatre and half London gentlemen’s club, ‘was to understand,
hundreds
of years before Einstein, that time is
relative
.’ Here he paused for theatrical effect and also to dab rather primly at the water on his lips with the enormous, brightly coloured silk handkerchief he kept stuffed flamboyantly in the breast pocket of his suit. ‘Time is not
straight
or
linear
. It does not progress in a regular and ordered fashion, and the reason for this is because it is affected by
gravity
. Yes! Just as are motion and mass and light, and indeed all the properties of the physical universe. It is, of course, generally believed that Einstein first proposed the idea of universal relativity but we in this room and we
alone
now know that in fact the first man in the world to make this leap of thought was our own Sir Isaac Newton. And we know also that Newton leapt further and with surer foot than Einstein ever did. For just as Newton showed the world that gravity explained the circular and elliptical courses of the
planets
, he also understood that
time
moved in a similar manner, twisting and ever turning,
shadowing
the expansion of the universe, bound by the gravitational pull of every atom contained therein. To put it plainly, Newton saw that time was
coiled
, and just as an understanding of gravity allowed him to track and map the course of planetary motion, it also enabled him to track the movement of
time
. And so
predict its course
.’
Here Sengupta paused briefly for another sip of water. He knew he had a sensational story and clearly did not intend to rush it.
‘So what? I hear you asking yourselves,’ he continued. ‘Coiled or straight, time progresses and there is nothing we can do about it. Why in the blinking blazes was old Isaac getting his knickers in a twist? I will tell you why! Because gravitational pull is not
uniform
! Just as the planets deviate slightly from the perfect symmetry of their ancient courses, so it is with time. We must think of it not as a
perfect spiral
but more as a
disobliging Slinky
in which, once in a while, coils get crossed. Time will, on rare occasions, pass through the same set of dimensions
twice
. The coils of the Slinky touch only for a moment, within the most limited parameters, after which the spiral of time continues on its merry way. No harm done … But what, Newton asked himself in the tortured journeying of his fearful imaginings, if someone were
present
at that point in space–time when the coils of the Slinky touched? That person would exist at both the beginning and the end of a loop in time. And so now the spiral does
not
continue on its merry way. It turns
back
on itself. For simply by drawing breath, our intrepid time-
straddler
reboots the loop. All that had been in the past is now once more
yet to come
. History is unmade. The loop is
begun again
.’
Sengupta mopped his brow with his handkerchief and took yet another sip of water. The flickering of the candles cast a ghostly ripple across his face. The assembled Companions of Chronos leant forward on their walking sticks and Zimmer frames, hanging on the great physicist’s every word.
‘And Newton really
did his sums
,’ Sengupta continued. ‘It is scarcely possible to credit but this divine genius, working alone and without modern equipment, was able to tell us
when
and
where
time would next cross its own path. No wonder he went a bit loony. I think
I’d
be looking for secret codes in the Bible myself if I’d just written a map of time when everybody else was just starting to think about mapping Australia. Sir Isaac’s conclusion was most specific. He calculated that the next closed loop in the space–time continuum would be
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