Janne says:
"'An object uncaused, formed out of nothing for no reason. What a terrifying universe. It was easier being ignorant about variable reality. Sometimes I regret I was recruited.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 20, p. 631.
As I said about the hereafter here, I would prefer to know the truth.
Imagine if something like Tacitus Two came to light, maybe a history book, preserved in a private library since the early twentieth century, that seemed authentic, not a work of fiction or a fake, but that also seemed to have originated in an alternative version of reality, e.g., where the Cuban Missile Crisis had become World War III: prima facie evidence that a time traveler from a future that has not come to pass, or that has been prevented from happening, had traveled to the period before the Crisis.
If reality really were "variable" in the way described by Time Patrol members, then evidence of other timelines could be out there.
7 comments:
the implications would be philosophical, but also scientific. Evidence of time travel and alternate histories would affect physics in particular profoundly -- and in ways that would probably result in very rapid advances.
If analysis of the paper, ink etc showed that the text had been printed by a technology that did not exist earlier in the century or even was still unfamiliar, then this would lend weight to its extra-temporal origin.
Gentlemen,
VERY fascinating speculations! At least part of me hopes such evidence will actually be found.
Sean
What might happen if physicists did ASSUME the reality of alternate worlds and timelines and went on to see what might be discovered using that premise or hypothesis? Here I had in mind both what Poul Anderson said in his preface to THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS and private comments to me in a letter discussing a real scientist named Hugh Everett. That last named person made serious suggestions or speculations about alternate worlds.
Sean
Sean,
I think that at present alternative timelines are mathematically describable but not experimentally testable.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And Poul Anderson would agree! In the same letter to me that I mentioned above, he stated that then (and now) there were no known means of experimentally proving the existence of alternate worlds. But he then wondered if it might be possible to access a parallel universe at or near a black hole.
Sean
If you did have proof, it would be significant because you can work back from the data to the theory -- and the theory would then imply the existence of other data (would make falsifiable predictions about how the universe works), and of engineering applications.
If you had evidence proving either time travel, or travel to alternate worlds, in other words, then there would be a clear (though not necessarily easy or short) path to duplicating it.
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