timeline n.

The two Presidents—Templeton and Folson—were indeed the only men in the whole time[-]line who knew the real secret of a time[-]liner and how it operated. [Ibid. 34/2] Projection into the actual gas of evolution made it possible for Man to race far ahead of his own Age, into the distant future, or force his way back along the time line to the past.

A Wittenberg disrupter tears atoms apart. The free electrons are shunted off into accumulators, where we get power for lighting, cooking, heating and so forth. The protons go into the proton analyzer, where the gravitons are ripped out of them and stored in a special type of spherical field. When we want to move the ship, the gravitons are released. They spread through the ship and everything in the ship. The natural place for a graviton is a proton. The gravitons rush for the protons—which are already saturated with 1846 gravitons. Gravitons are unable to remain free in three-dimensional space. They escape along the time line, into the past.

At the moment, I was considering a means to cross these lines at right angles, especially since there may be independent time lines parallel to us of which we do not dream.

They cannot be made to see that to move along the time line with free volitional motion, unconditioned by the relentless force that pushes mankind along at the unchanging rate of—how shall one put it—one second per second—that to do this for even one little fraction of a second was as great a miracle as to zoom spectacularly ahead to 5900 A.D.

‘You can move—and continue to move—in only one temporal direction, either future or past. But you can’t return. You'd meet yourself coming back.’ ‘What?’ ‘It’s a one-way track,’ Wood said. ‘Two objects can’t exist in the same space-time.’ ‘You mean two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time.’ ‘Well? An extension of Ridgeley exists from now to his own period, along the time-line. He can’t go home. He'd bump into himself. He'd explode or something.’

It’s entirely illegal to transpose any extraterrestrial animal or object to any time-line on which space travel is unknown.

I know what you mean… Every displacement moves the observer to a new time line. But remember you’re not required to do anything once you get there; all you have to do is see what happened. As I understand it, you won’t be attached to that time line at all; you'll just be partially in it, the same way stuff in a transport tube is partially in this line.

The Paratime Commission has declared that time-line a study area, and it’s absolutely quarantined to everybody but University personnel and accredited students. And five adjoining, near-identical, time-lines for comparison study.

The temporal technicians took the pulse of the timeline, checking for damage.

The Timestream Split. In the event of a disruption of a magnitude sufficient to overcome temporal inertia, the effects of the Fate Factor would be canceled out by the overwhelming influence of the resulting discontinuity. The displaced energy of temporal inertia would create a parallel timeline in which the Uncertainty Principle would be the chief governing factor.

‘Look, in your timeline, who won the Peloponnesian War, and how long did it last?’ Anybody in any branch of history at least knows that. ‘Sparta. And it lasted about thirty years.’ ‘Well, in this timeline Athens won, very early in the war and all but bloodlessly. And then a couple of people you didn’t have in your timeline—Thucydides the Younger and Kleophrastes were the important ones—created a new Athenian Empire, with a very generous citizenship policy, structured as a sort of federation. That federation went on to win control of the Mediterranean, and then to conquer Asia east to Burma, all of Europe to the Urals, and all of Africa. A couple of thousand years later, they fought a long war with China over control of the New World—and at the end of that, Athens ruled the Earth, which meant one generation later, everyone as Athenian.’

In the film, the School has expanded into an institutional embodiment of the X-universe itself: an enormous Hogwarts for trainee superheroes, through which different team members from different generations pass in their own private timelines, all scrambled up so that Storm (for example) has already graduated while Iceman is still frozen in senior year.

Pitt and Blanchett play multiple roles in The Fountain, which features three timelines. Blanchett is cast as a queen and a ghost, while in the film’s third timeline, set in the present day, she plays Izzi, a woman dying of cancer, with Pitt as her husband, surgical researcher Tommy Verde, and Ellen Burstyn as his supervisor Lillian.