I settled down for a long night of home-brewed LSD and (in homage to Balzac) coffee and brandy. A fabulous mixture, and the result was pure joy, although I paid a price with a headache of monumental proportions when the effects wore off. So very simple. It was merely a question of turning my insights into mathematics and much of that was there already, just not in a coherent form. I felt drained and exhausted when I finished after five days of delirium, but more satisfied than at any time in my life.
It was gorgeous. Elegant, stylish and so obviously correct that my one regret was that there was no one to tell. No one could possibly understand it. Many generations of physicists and mathematicians would have to do their work before anyone could even begin to grasp what I had accomplished. It would have been as if Einstein had laid out his work in the Middle Ages. Out of context, without the background of another couple of centuries of other people’s labour, even the notation was meaningless. That was a pity, as a little applause and admiration would have been most welcome.
My insight marked the point where orthodoxy and I diverged for ever. The standard model, current for several centuries by my time, assumes that all pasts, presents and futures exist, and that time does as well; out of that came Hanslip’s insistence that travel through time is impossible. If we change events in the past, and the past is fixed, then we cannot be changing our past, but must be moving to the universe where what we do takes place. QED. He even stole my phrase for it: ‘What was, is.’
Cute. But wrong. ‘What was, is. Until it isn’t.’ Not as elegant, I admit, but more accurate. The universe is not wastefuclass="underline" why have lots of universes, when one will do perfectly well? It is simpler to assume an infinite number of potential universes, than an infinite number of actual ones. So, a universe with Cousin Bette in it could exist, but doesn’t. If it did, then a universe without her — like ours — could not. One or the other. Take your pick.
What was more, I had already proven it before I left. I just didn’t understand the proof. It was the bluebottle experiment that nailed it, an attempt to examine the hoary old paradox-of-time business that has so annoyed anyone who has dealt with the issue. It got no funding, as no one took it seriously; only a very lowly researcher was assigned to it as a training exercise and so, naturally, no one paid any attention to the result.
What if you go back and shoot your grandmother before you are born, so that you are not born and can’t shoot her? Dealing with this logical impossibility gave birth to the alternative universe theory: you can shoot your grannie, but not in your own universe, so that in one you exist as a murderer but are not subsequently born, and in the other you are born, but disappear when you transit to a different one to commit your crime.
Experimental simulations were carried out to test the hypothesis, but were subsequently abandoned because there were so many errors. The idea was simple: a bluebottle was persuaded to eat its own egg. This was difficult, as it was assumed this had to take place within the confines of the machine and the technicians kept on making mistakes. The results were confusing and meaningless; sometimes the bluebottle simply refused to eat its own egg, which prevented a paradox; sometimes the controlling programme altered the present so that, if the insect did eat the egg presented to it, then it was subsequently discovered that the wrong egg had been sent and again no paradox occurred. But occasionally the right egg was sent and the bluebottle happily ate itself without any consequences.
Nobody could understand how such a simple thing could be so badly handled and the poor researcher was fired as a result. But, much later, I began to wonder what explanation could be offered if you assumed that everything had, in fact, been done perfectly. The answer was that if everything was done perfectly to create a paradox, then both past and future had to change simultaneously. Clearly, this was difficult to prove, because not only would all documentary evidence be re-formed, all memories would be as well — the researchers could not remember having done the experiment properly because, the moment the fly dug its nasty little choppers into its own egg, then everything changed so that, in fact, it hadn’t been. The point being that the re-formation of events took place subsequent to the paradox; at neither point, past or future, were paradoxical actions prevented.
Let me put it this way. We accept easily the idea that the future is the consequence of events in the past. With a bit of an effort, we can wrap our heads round the idea that the past is the consequence of events in the future. What this suggested was that neither of these was quite true; rather both are simultaneously dependent on the other. An event which we consider to be in the future is not happening after, or as a sole consequence of, events in the past. Remove that illusion, and the whole business becomes understandable.
People are naturally so fond of themselves that they assume the past must lead to them. They have egos of such size that they cannot imagine it doing otherwise. Rather like biologists of the past imagining the whole of evolution leading to Homo sapiens, so that we almost become the point of evolution, or religious types assuming that the world was created to give us somewhere nice to live, so those who concern themselves with time assume that the only purpose of the past is to produce the present, with us as the lead characters. This desire is so strong we wilfully ignore all evidence to the contrary.
The central point is that while all variants of the universe exist in latent form, only one is actualised. A simple metaphor will suffice; say that reality is a piece of string on a flat surface. Birth at one end, death at the other. Big Bang to Big Crunch, if you prefer. ‘Now’ is at any point between the two. The piece of string can, in theory, move anywhere on the surface, but can only be in one place at a time.
Now, if you push it at any one place, the string on both sides of your finger will change position a little — in temporal terms, both before and after will adjust. Next, move the end — create a different future. Again, the rest of the string will move. There are an infinite number of places where the string can be, but only one where it actually is.
Now add another illustration. Say that the relationship of future and past is also like a pair of scales: events in one balance the other; ‘now’ is merely the fulcrum. A change in the relationship between the two alters the balance. Either side can instigate that change or it can even take place from outside the balance, but the sides respond equally.
The more strongly an alternative world is imagined, the more it becomes a viable candidate as a successor to our present. Then events become merely probabilistic. Historical evolution will naturally tend to the easiest destination, a bit like water finding the easiest route down a hill. The point is that there is nothing special about my future, except in terms of probability. Nor (by extension) is there anything particularly special about my past. The trouble was that the computer simulation had already established that, in terms of probability, my own history was both highly unlikely and very unstable. If it was knocked off course, it would tend to flow in a different direction very easily. I should have paid more attention to that than I did.