Sunday, 13 May 2018

Evanescence


Manse Everard and Janne Floris eat in the Ambrosia in Amsterdam:

"Maybe the sense of evanescence, this warmth and light and savor no more than a moment in an unbounded darkness, something that could come to never having been, gave depth to pleasure."
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 6, P. 522.

I have discussed the conceptual incoherence of the phrase "...could come to never having been..." before. Within a single timeline, it makes no sense to suggest that anything, e.g., a city, might exist until time t1, then, at t1, cease having existed until t1! However, imagine that something very like that could happen: a macroscopic quantum fluctuation not only changes the present state of the universe but also changes all memories and records so that they seem to have led up to that altered present. Time travelers returning from further in the past would remember the unchanged universe but would find themselves in the changed universe. Logically possible, I think.

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