Changes In Time

The Shield Of Time, PART SIX, 1245beta A.D.

Manse Everard reflects on what happens when a divergent timeline has been initiated:

"...changes in time don't spread outward on any simple wave front. They're an infinitely complicated interplay of quantum functions..." (p. 399)

Agreed that changes in events would not spread outward at a uniform rate but surely they would be determined by macroscopic causal relationships, not by microscopic quantum interactions?

It is always interesting when Anderson discusses "the time-flow," as he calls it here, in the Time Patrol timeline. The text continues:

"The tiniest alteration could conceivably annul an entire future, if the event concerned was crucial. There should theoretically be countless such; but hardly ever were they felt. It was as if the time-flow protected itself, passed around them without losing its proper direction and shape. Sometimes you did get odd little eddies - and here one of them had grown to monstrousness -" (ibid.)

Of course, two temporal dimensions are implied here. The "time-flow" is our empirical arrow of time whereas the phrases "...hardly ever..." and "Sometimes..." refer to temporal relationships not within that time-flow but between alternative directions of the time-flow.

The following paragraph acknowledges that causality spreads temporal changes:

"Yet change must needs spread in chains of cause and effect. Who outside the immediate vicinity would ever even hear what went on, or did not go on, in a couple of families of Anagni? It would take a long time for the consequences of that to reach far. Meanwhile the rest of the world moved onward untouched." (pp. 399-400)