The Growth Of An Idea II

(The attached image is an internal illustration of Poul Anderson's "The Year of the Ransom," which I first used on the blog in 2014 here.)

I continue to quote from the long italicized passage in "The Year of the Ransom." For full reference, see here.

"Already in the twentieth century, physicists had a dim glimmering of this. But not until time travel came to be did the fact of it stab into human lives." (p. 671)

There is an ambiguity here. "...this..." refers to the probability-waves of ultimate underlying quantum chaos changing their rhythm and thus also changing conditional reality. This happens later in The Shield Of Time when a Time Patrolman based in 1137 learns that King Roger of Sicily has died in battle that year instead of living longer. Of course, only a time traveler from the future could have known that Roger "should have" lived longer. Everyone else just accepts their "reality." In the reality protected by the Time Patrol, Roger survived the Battle of Rignano whereas, in the changed reality, he did not.

However, the italicized passage goes on to discuss not time travelers finding that reality has changed but time travelers themselves changing reality. This we already know about. In fact, the passage, when explaining that ordinarily time travelers' effects on events are slight, repeats the earlier comparison of the space-time continuum to:

"...a mesh of tough rubber bands, restoring its configuration after it's felt some disturbing force." (p. 672)

So reality is compared both to a changeable wave pattern on a sea and to a change-resisting mesh of rubber bands. But the latter comparison is the one that "ordinarily" applies.

There is more but first I ought to gym and swim.