Quantum Time Travel

Michael Crichton's "Timeline" - "Corazón" to "Black Rock"

John’s Comments:

Well this is a nice change. Not much has happened yet, but Timeline has been a ton of fun to read so far. 125-ish pages of setup and I’m hooked. This is a welcome departure from any of our other recent picks (I’m looking at you Name of the Rose). The characters are fun, and the typical guy-girl flirting and dialogue has been done in a tasteful way—no corn here. This is a book written by a seasoned pro.

As a history nerd, I’ve loved immersing myself among the graduate students at the medieval site in Dordogne. The feelings it invokes have been similar to any other Crichton books I had read when I was younger. I find myself wanting to go (back) to college so I can start doing my own medieval research.

There hasn’t been much action, but the prose has kept me engaged. I’m wondering if any of our new friends will die on the road to saving the professor. My favorite character so far has been Chris.

The decision to make Marek take the reigns is the only questionable point of the novel so far. The character had a bad introduction and I find him unlikable, so I haven’t loved the story taking on his point of view since the second half of this week’s reading.

In all, it’s a fun book. Do I expect to be blown away by the end and contemplating my own existence? No. But not every book needs to be like that (something I think I’m finally understanding). I look forward for what’s to come. I’m going to let Melissa get into the Quantum Theory stuff; she’s the brains behind the operation, after all. With that, I will see you next week. Happy reading!

Melissa’s Comments:

As always, I’ll start with the disclaimer that I’m not an expert. I am not a historian, and I am definitely not a physicist. Since we’re examining a work of fiction here, a second disclaimer might be warranted: everything that’s talked about here may not be true. The whole point of this is to hear your thoughts. If you’d like to chime in separating the fact from the fiction, feel free.

That being said, one of the things I really enjoyed about this book was Crichton’s ability to teach his reader about the subjects he’s writing about. For example, he included a very brief history of the Middle Ages that I really enjoyed.

I’ll summarize it even more briefly here: first, the Romans controlled Europe, then the Romans lost some of their power and tribes like the Goths and the Huns and the Vikings took over and everything was chaotic and kind of sucked for a while, and then feudalism happened and things took shape again and became the foundations for our modern world.

It was cool. It was an extremely simplified version of events that wouldn’t satisfy a historian, but for the average reader who left the American education system without even this basic understanding of history (I’m including myself in this population), I think it was a decent lesson. I also liked how Crichton took this opportunity to wax philosophical about the importance of history and how the public doesn’t seem to care about it at all.

A fun fact about me is that I love used books with writing in them. One of my prized possessions is a copy of Plato’s Republic that was marked up by a professor who was teaching a course on the book.

My copy of Timeline (the used mass-market paperback which John ordered online and then traded in for a shiny new copy) is virtually spotless. The only bit of writing I’ve encountered in the book was on one dog-eared page (the horror!), where the previous owner of the book highlighted these paragraphs:

Yet the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation-states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love had first been established in medieval times. These stockbrokers owed the very notion of a market economy to the Middle Ages. And if they didn’t know that, then they didn’t know the basic facts of who they were. Why they did what they did. Where they had come from.

Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

Cool, right?

Now for the quantum physics.

First of all, I think the time travel mechanics of this book are pretty cool. The idea that the professor went “back in time” by going to a near-identical alternate reality is an interesting thing to think about. I’m assuming that, in order to find him, the students are going to go to the same timeline that he’s in.

I’m curious to see how Crichton wraps it all up. Are they going to all come back to the current timeline, or are they going to travel to a new one which also takes place in the ‘present’ day?

This week’s reading ended with a pretty detailed quantum physics lesson in which Crichton details the theory of multiverses and uses the double-slit experiment as evidence of multiple universes.

For the purposes of this book, we’re accepting it as absolute fact that there are an infinite number of universes, an infinite number of posisbilities, that all exist simultaneously. This is something that some scientists believe, but not all.

Crichton’s scienfic ‘proof’ of this comes from the double-slit experiment. Do a quick google search or read my article for a run-down of what the experiment is; I don’t feel like explaining it here. All caught up? Good.

When beams of light are shot through the double-slit and onto a back wall, the photons of light interfere with one another and form an ‘interference pattern’ on the back wall. Simple. This illustrates the wave-like properties of light.

It gets weirder, though. When individual photons are shot through the double-slit, one by one, they still form the interference pattern, even though there aren’t any other photons to interfere with. What’s causing them to behave this way?

Well, according to the scientists of Timeline, the reason is that the photons are interfering with photons from other universes—proof of the multiverse theory. I doubt this is actually true (any scientists reading this please weigh in), but it’s still a cool basis for a science fiction novel.

And imagine it were true? The question it poses are endless.

First of all, this would mean that other universes actually interact with this universe. Can we move from one to the other? Are we hopping around from universe to universe with each choice that we make, like characters in a choose-your-own adventure video game? Which timeline is the ‘real’ timeline?

It seems like the book is really picking up now, and for the first time since the Thinking Man Book Club started, I can genuinely say that I’m excited to keep reading. See you guys next week.

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