Welcome back to The Book Report!

We’re gonna take an interesting journey today, kids. One that will hopefully entertain as well as get your learn on.

In 1989, NBC debuted a show that was a pleasant mixture of comedy, drama, science-fiction, and social-commentary. The show starred a captain of the Enterprise and a Cylon, ran for five seasons, and was titled Quantum Leap.

The name Quantum Leap comes from a branch of physics known as Quantum Physics. A Quantum Leap is a change of an electron from one quantum state to another, but in a way in which the change happens abruptly, rather than a gradual shift over time. Sound confusing?

Quantum Theory could be considered the ultimate bad-ass of mathematics. Scientists and mathematicians believe that quantum mechanics will enable supercomputers the size of a thumbnail, enable faster-than-light space travel, permit time-travel (or categorically prove its impossibility), and create a unified theory of everything.
A lot of books, mostly science-fiction, have explored most of what Quantum Theory tries to do, but in most of these books, the author lets the readers’ suspension of disbelief take care of the problem of explaining how these things work. Han Solo tells Chewie to “Punch, it!” and the Millennium Falcon leaps into hyperspace. How? Who cares, right? It’s freakin’ hyperspace!

In 1999, the late Michael Crichton penned a novel exploring how quantum theory might make time travel possible in his thrill-ride of a book Timeline. Some of you may remember the Richard Donner film version starring the always enjoyable Gerard Butler (and the always horrible Paul Walker). The film did a perfect job of keeping the action of Crichton’s novel while removing its brains. The plot of the book essentially followed the same basic formula Crichton used in his 1990 best-seller Jurassic Park: scientists utilize discoveries made in their field to make huge profits, until something goes horribly, horribly wrong.
In the case of Timeline, a team of historians and archaeologists go back to 14th Century France to rescue their father-figure professor who’s been trapped there. And then, of course, something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

The way Crichton explains it, time travel isn’t really jumping to different points in time at all. It’s jumping through different dimensions of the multiverse. Think parallel dimensions when I say multiverse. In 1956, Hugh Everett presented a thesis on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics, and by 1970 had the attention of a great number of quantum physicists. The idea behind it all is imagining a roll of a 6-sided dice. As soon as the dice leaves the hand, the universe must account for the possibility that the dice could land on any one of its six sides. In mathematical terms, what this means is that as the dice falls, each side of the dice exists in its own universe simultaneously. Only once the dice falls still does the proper universe assert itself. Or does it? Perhaps the other universes continue on with their own outcomes. What Crichton imagines, then, is visiting those alternate universes. The way time travel works is by visiting alternate universes that run slightly less than parallel, or on an alternate timeline, as it were.
The real tricky thing (as if it’s not already tricky enough) is that the only reason the group discovers their professor went back in time is because they unearthed his glasses at their dig site. So if they’re traveling to a different dimension, how is it they are able to affect the past of their own?
Don’t worry, Crichton doesn’t break his own rules. His answer is that a near-parallel universe sends their versions of the characters to our past, performing actions similar or the same as the main characters. This is not as unlikely as it sounds. If the multiverse contains an infinite number of possibilities, than the likelihood for any event to occur is highly probable.

If all of this sounds incredibly confusing, don’t worry. Crichton makes it all much more understandable, just like how he made genetics and chaos theory more understandable in Jurassic Park. One of his strengths is breaking the technically complex down to a layman’s understanding and then creating one hell of a read out of it.

So go pick up Timeline, give it a read, and then come back next week for when I talk about a book that puts Crichton’s grasp of Quantum Theory to shame.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_