the Scipios died at Ticinus, Hannibal sacked Rome and the Carthaginians won the Second Punic War;
the Popes won the medieval church-state conflict;
the Emperors won it;
Keith Denison played the role of Cyrus the Great;
a knight and a friar disappeared from within a treasure house in South America;
there was a sensation about a Bactrian letter.
Wanda Tamberly is shown records of time gone awry. Guion informs Everard of anomalous variations in reality and reminds him that the question of how many temporal catastrophes there have been is inherently unanswerable. Everard wonders whether they in the far future are (will be) making whatever desperate provision they can for a chaos that they cannot chart and therefore cannot turn aside.
On the other hand, if the currently experienced timeline really were the only existent timeline, then there would be no need to prevent its deletion. Certainly the fact remains that, since we are experiencing this timeline now, it follows that we are indeed experiencing it now. (If p, then p.)
13 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Using the logic seen in your last paragraph, I have to concluded time traveling is logically impossible.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it's more a case of time travel and mutable time making logic, as currently conceived, an incomplete system.
"If p, then (but only conditionally) p."
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that is alarming, the very basis of rational thought becomes precarious and unstable.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, that's the "logical" consequence of time being mutable.
Of course, if time travel weren't possible then we'd never know about the quantum fluctuation which could un-cause us.
Whereas I think that there would one timeline in which we were born, lived and died and another divergent/subsequent timeline in which we were never born but not an intermediate timeline in which we ceased to exist at some arbitrary moment in life.
Kaor, to Both!
I find it difficult to imagine us KNOWING we exist and then some how not knowing we had been known to exist.
Ad astra! Sean
My own take -- for what it's worth -- is that the many-worlds hypothesis is literally true; that there are an infinite number of universes, or at least a 'very large' number.
And, in those universes, there may be many different versions of each of us but each of those versions is born, lives and dies. None of them has any reason to disappear at what should have been a mid-point of life.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
I too agree that it seems very likely alternate or parallel universes exist. The trick seems to lie in somehow empirically proving that. And how might it be possible to contact or go to such universes?
I don't know if there are alternate versions of US, but I can see it as being possible.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that, in quantum mechanics, contacting alternative universes is theoretically impossible.
Paul.
In the limited layman's understanding of the literature that I have, there currently seems to be speculation that there are forces which can communicate between the different universes.
OK.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Now that fascinates me! Maybe something like the Old Phoenix Inn is possible!
Ad astra!
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