How the Impossible Remains Impossible: Mundane Reason Confronts Time Travel Images

Every culture has a cosmology containing fundamental beliefs about the nature of time and space, the human individual, and causality. The classical sociology of E.E. Evans‐Pritchard and Melvin Pollner shows this bedrock helps solve the problem of social order. For them it is an unexamined resource against which agents ingeniously reason, using common sense, to resolve disputes, explain anomalies and so preserve a sense of shared reality. But what happens when cosmology is itself subject to open challenge based on evidence ? Potentially destabilizing speculations and beliefs about alternative cosmologies are widespread in popular culture today. The paper looks to the paradigm case of the “time travel image.” Widely available on the internet and viewed by millions, these are pitched as an evidentiary threat to established beliefs on the unidirectional flow of time. The study explores the ethnomethodology, mundane reasoning, and cultural framing through which these images are routinely discounted by common sense. It establishes a methodological benchmark for a wider sociological investigation of the movement of the “impossible” to the “possible.”