Nature tolerates a paradox but abhors a vacuum

“Nature tolerates a paradox but abhors a vacuum” is the governing expression for the Gleister sequence’s account of time travel: temporal displacement leaves a gap that the world fills by producing another Gleister. The phrase turns an apparent contradiction into a rule of replacement, while also explaining why the inventor cannot simply return to an untouched past and erase what he has done.

Form and Meaning

The expression appears both as a compact maxim and as part of an explanation of how Nature responds when a Gleister departs from his normal position in space-time. Its two halves work together: paradox is permitted, but absence is not. Time travel may disrupt the expected order of events, yet the resulting vacancy does not remain empty.

The wording gives an impersonal process the image of an active force. Nature does not prevent the paradox; instead, she supplies what is missing. The distinction matters: the sequence’s world does not restore a single, undisturbed history but accommodates displacement through further change.

Application to Time Travel

After learning that he has multiplied Gleisters and affected the human race, Gleister considers going back to the time before he invented the time machine and refraining from inventing it. His experience of the other Gleister suggests that this cannot undo the consequences. The past offers no unchanged niche for him to return to and occupy: everything modifies everything, including the traveler who would attempt the return.

The maxim makes this failed remedy intelligible. A Gleister who travels into the future leaves a hole in the space-time fabric, so Nature supplies an identical or near-identical Gleister from elsewhere. Each later use of a time machine produces another displacement and another replacement. The process is therefore not a one-time anomaly that can be erased by reversing the first journey; it reproduces the conditions that created it.

Consequences and Significance

The expression links the physical mechanics of the time machine to Gleister’s problem of responsibility. He sees no point in trying to persuade another Gleister not to invent the machine: there is not one stable counterpart waiting to be convinced, but a multiplicity of potential Gleisters who remain identical only up to the moment of contact. Interference changes them, just as a novel input redistributes the contents and alters the cycling rate of a mind.

For Gleister, the principle closes off the simple solution of undoing the past without making the consequences acceptable. He judges the situation he has presented to the world intolerable and remains determined to act, but the maxim offers no ready-made escape. Its significance lies in defining the trap: Nature fills temporal vacancies, while each attempt to intervene becomes another change within the system.