Introduction to Chronomatics

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One of my all-time favourite writers is Stanislaw Lem. He is one of those authors who, like JG Ballard, gets categorised as Science Fiction because he won't fit anywhere else. That, plus the space ships and aliens. He started out writing the kind of Sci-Fi that's really political satire, and moved more and more towards philosophical musings thinly disguised with plot. One series of stories was a set of lectures on epistemology, presented as the output of a giant computer.

Halfway between the two were his reviews of nonexistant books, and "exerpts" from fantasy scientific papers from the future. Here, then, is my glimpse of the future, part of a study book which fell back through time.

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From 'Introduction to Chronomatics'
by Jorgen Lemski
Published 2248

The science of chronomatics is based on three key insights, the first two reasonably obvious, the third just the opposite.

The first insight is that knowing the future changes the future. Everyone knows this - indeed, the only possible reason for wanting to know the future is wanting to change it. There's no point in knowing the day of your death if you can't do something to avoid it.

The second insight has been phrased various ways - "the map is not the territory", "you can't tell the whole truth", "the description is not the reality" and so on. This is sometimes taken to mean that any description or representation is necessarily incomplete, and indeed this is the case, but is not the main point being made.

It also means that any description of any part of reality cannot include a description of the description itself. Why? Because then it would have to include a description of that self-description, and so on, to infinity.

In fact, a description can't describe itself - or it's role in a larger reality that it describes - for precisely the same reason that any description of reality cannot contain every detail of that reality. Because reality is by definition infinitely detailed, and the description by definition is not. And an infinitely regressing self description, to exist at all, nevermind being complete, would need to be infinitely detailed.

Some students give up in confusion at this point, and in doing so deny themselves the grandeur of the third insight - the one that makes Chronomatics concievable, and thus time travel possible.

The key third insight is highly counterintuitive and consistently misunderstood. It is that, just as the decisions we make in the present affect the future, they also affect the past. The past is not fixed - the waves of cause and effect rippling out from an act in the present flow into the past as well as the future.

The difficult thing to understand is that the events of the past reconfigured by actions in the present have effects of their own, which ripple out to affect both their past and their future, which includes our present. And occasionally the events of the present that are affected in this way cause secondary backward ripples, changing or even erasing the past events which caused them, thus erasing themselves and replacing themselves with a new present.

This process of oscillation continues until a stable timeline is reached - one with effects that do no erase their own causes.

However, these stable events (and decisions) of the present soon become events of the past, which can be affected by events of the new present. Thus time is in constant flux, and in principle an event today could change one that happened millions of years ago, which might in some way radically change all history. This may already have happened - there is, by definition, no way of knowing.

Once the student has grasped (and been a little scared by) these concepts, they tend to ask two questions: Is human existence really that precarious, and how does this knowledge help us travel through time?

To answer the first question, it is necessary to emphasise that when we talk about "events" and "decisions" echoing backwards and forwards, only a tiny number of these are the kind of events recorded in diaries and newspapers. Events like "The president declares war" and decisions like "Mary chooses blue shoes today" are in a sense tiny blips against the constant background of "One grain of sand falls from a stone", "One electron is displaced when a cesium atom decays" and "A small part of one string shifts in one dimension".

Essentially, from a chronomatics point of view. human affairs are a minor sideshow in one small part of the universe. This might make us feel small, but it should also make us feel safe.

The chronomatist Wilhelm Strondberg once famously addressed the assembly on this in his distinctive prose style:

"The universe is in chaos, eternally destroying and recreating itself, only to do so countless times again, and we poor creatures are flotsam in this storm. But fear not, for we are safe, not because we are too large to escape the waves, but because we are too small. The gods of time battle above us, on scales too immense and strange for us to imagine, as we are too simple for their weapons to hurt."

And so to the second question: How does chronomatic science enable us to travel in time? And more importantly, how does it enable us to do this without damaging it?

The answer lies in two facts. First, that ripples in history take time to travel, but this time is outside of history. Second, just as isolated bubbles can survive turbulence in a lake and insects can survive within them, so we can create bubbles of calm in the sea of history, and move them against the tide.

The notion that causality takes time - indeed, that it takes time for the timeline to be affected by events within itself - can at first be a little difficult to grasp. The difficulty is that the word "time" is being used in two very different ways...

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