History And Physics

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series seamlessly blends historical periods and turning points with spatiotemporal physics and quantum mechanics. Because of other current reading, I am thinking of the English Civil War as a historical turning point. Of course, the Time Patrol series does not address this particular period, although it is in Anderson's alternative history novel, A Midsummer Tempest, but the point is that Time Patrol thinking is applicable to any historical events. Some speculate about Sarajevo... If the series had been extended indefinitely, then it would undoubtedly have covered almost every era.

Thus, Anderson initiates an endless discourse with, at one end of the agenda, ancient, medieval and modern historical battlefields and, at the other end, Guion's quest for the hypermatrix of the continuum. Although Everard does not understand the physics, he fully accepts that the continuum is especially vulnerable around moments like Palestine 69-70 A.D. and that reality is unstable as far away as barbarian Germany.

Soldiers in the seventeenth century have no idea that, although they remember a particular outcome for a battle, their counterparts in Reality B remember it differently. That their lives from birth to death can be metamorphosed by quantum fluctuations is beyond their comprehension. How much is beyond ours? At the Time Patrol Academy, Everard is told that his class is being given the truth - or as much of it as they can take.