Supposition
A Time Patrol agent arrives in a timeline where somehow he knows that:
time is stabilized;
there are no more quantum effects;
there are no more emergencies for the Time Patrol to deal with;
the Time Patrol can stand down.
What might this mean?
Does it mean that he is now in a universe where subatomic particles obey laws other than those of quantum mechanics? Are atoms and molecules now really like miniature planetary systems and galaxies?
How did quantum mechanics come to be associated with time travel in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series?
The Early Time Patrol Stories
Events are like tough rubber bands, tending to spring back to their original position.
Usually, only a carefully planned extra-temporal intervention, preferably at a nexus point, can change events.
The Patrol is a temporal police force that prevents civilian time travelers from either deliberately or accidentally changing events.
The Later Time Patrol Series
Events continually flicker quantum mechanically/chaotically.
Not only extra-temporal interventions but also random quantum fluctuations in space-time-energy can change events.
The Patrol is the stabilizing force, holding time to a single course, and would be necessary as such even if there were no other time travelers.
In the later series, quantum mechanics and time travel become connected in two ways:
the Patrol must counteract temporal quantum fluctuations (see above);
a time traveler arriving from a prevented future is compared to a macrocosmic quantum fluctuation - indeed, may even be such a fluctuation.
Is a stabilized timeline one in which time travel is impossible or just one in which causality violation is impossible? Either way, that timeline will retain the effects of causality violations that had occurred earlier along the second temporal dimension. Thus, Everard and Denison will still appear in time to prevent the murder of the infant Cyrus, Everard and van Sarawak will still counteract the Neldorians' intervention in the Second Punic War etc.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I question whether it is even possible for there to be a universe where quantum mechanics has been observed to "work" to ever cease to have random quantum effects, and thus at least he possibility of emergencies requiring the Time Patrol's attention.
Sean
Sean,
On the hypothesis that I consider here, there would not be a single universe that had quantum mechanics in an earlier period but then some other kind of subatomic mechanics in a later period. Instead, there would be, along the second temporal dimension, a sequence of four-dimensional continua, each with quantum mechanics, then a single continuum without quantum mechanics.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I think I can just barely conceive of a universe not having quantum
mechanics while other universes do. An alternate universe without the quantum mechancics we have become used to with have to be very strange indeed!
Sean
Sean,
More like the way particles used to be conceived as just very small objects.
Paul.
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