Hey kids, welcome back to The You-Know-What! Just two more days until the first Mythoi trade hits the general consumer market, so go pre-order immediately.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Quantum Theory and ways fiction writers use it for stories, and one of those ways was time travel. This got me thinking about the number of different time-travel novels I’ve enjoyed, and so I thought I’d take The Book Report on its own journey through time, examining time travel literature.

The Long Sleep
Perhaps the earliest time-travel story occurs in the 4th century Hindu script of the Mahabharatha, concerning King Revaita. He travels to Brahma to ask who among the candidates would be a worthy suitor for his daughter, to which Brahma replies that time runs differently on each plain of existence and while the King was making his request many ages have passed on earth.
Early time-travel stories have much in common with this story, where the main character falls asleep (such as in Washington Irving’s 1819 story Rip Van Winkle) or visits a magical realm and when they awake or return they find that many years have passed. One early example is Urashima Tarō, an 8th century Japanese legend about a fisherman who rescues a turtle and as a reward is allowed to visit the Palace of the Dragon God under the sea. When he returns to his village three days later, he finds that three centuries have passed.
What nearly all of these early time-travel stories have in common is the idea that time can move faster, allowing the character to view or visit (or be stranded) in the future. One of the first examples of a time traveler going backwards in time is Mark Twain’s 1895 satire A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But even then, the main character goes through time by a blow to the head.

Rise of the Machines
The first example of a character using a machine to travel through time is in a story by H.G. Wells, but it wasn’t in his 1895 novel The Time Machine. Seven years earlier, he wrote a serialized story called The Chronic Argonauts. The characters mention the different years they traveled to, but they don’t offer any detailed accounts of what happened on their adventures. Wells’ popular novel The Time Machine holds that distinction. The concept of a time machine remains popular to this day.

A Couple of Places to Tie A Boat
The main issue most time travel stories have to get around is the paradox. It is called the Grandfather Paradox, first proposed by science fiction writer René Barjavel in his 1943 book The Imprudent Traveller. Here’s how it works: “if one goes backwards in time and kills one of their ancestors before he had children, the traveller cannot exist and therefore cannot kill the ancestor.”

Time Travel novels come up with several different ways to avoid the Grandfather Paradox. One way is through the many-universe theory of quantum mechanics, which I briefly described when I examined Crichton’s Timeline.
Another way to deal with the Grandfather Paradox is through a Destruction Resolution. One of the most well known cases would be in the movie Back To The Future, where (Spoiler) Marty McFly starts to disappear because his mother fell in love with him instead of his father. Most stories that deal with a Destruction Resolution work to prevent it. In Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, Orson Scott Card writes of a situation where a Destruction Resolution might be embraced. I generally enjoy most things Card writes, and this novel is no exception. It’s a great examination of the mistakes humans made in discovering the Americas, and a lovely fantasy of how to prevent it.
A final way to deal with the Grandfather Paradox is by strict adherence to the Novikov Principle, employed to great effect in The Time Traveler’s Wife, published in 2003 by Audrey Niffenegger. The Novikov self-consistency principle was developed in the mid-1980’s by Russian scientist Igor Novikov, and asserts that if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to change the past in any way, then the probability of that even occurring is zero. What this means is that our history is a fixed timeline. Everything that happened did so either because the time-traveler failed or was never there. You can’t go back and stop the Titanic from sinking because it already sank. Science fiction author John Varley proposed an acceptable way to deal with that problem in his 1983 novel Millennium (which became the 1989 film of the same name), where passengers of a plane that was doomed to crash were saved by bringing them to the future and replacing them with copied duplicates to be found in the crash debris. Since there was no deviation from the fixed timeline, ie. a plane crashed and there were no survivors, there was no paradox.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey through Thyme. Give the books I mentioned a read, they are all great fun.

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

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-_