Timeline

Poster of the film based on Timeline

In 1999, Michael Crichton published his novel Timeline, a typical science fiction novel about time travel, whose plot can be summarized as follows:

A research company has developed a procedure to travel into the past. Using it, they sent to 14th century France, in the midst of the 100 Years War, a history professor who is conducting archaeological studies in ruins near the medieval fortress of La Roque. His collaborators, who do not know what is happening, find among the ruins a call for help from the professor, which when subjected to carbon-14 dating turns out to come from the 14th century. Picked up by the company that sponsors their studies, they are sent into the past to save the professor, who cannot return on his own.

In another post in this blog, I discussed the paradoxes that can be caused by traveling into the past, and various procedures invented by scientists and writers to escape them. In the novel, Crichton mentions two:

• When explaining the situation to the characters who are going to be sent to the past, the head of the company mentions (without naming it) the principle of consistency, i.e. the theory that any event that can cause paradoxes has zero probability of happening.
• But curiously, at the same time he asserts that the protagonists are not going to be sent to their own past, but to another universe different from ours, located in Everett's quantum multiverse. This is the theory proposed by David Deutsch to avoid paradoxes: according to it, the time traveler won’t end his journey in our universe, but in another, and if he performs in that other universe some action that may give rise to paradoxes (such as murdering himself as a child), he won’t be able to travel in time in that other universe, since he has died, but there would be no paradox, as his travel started from this universe.

The funny thing is that, although Crichton quotes David Deutsch in the novel's acknowledgments, he does not seem to have understood his theories. If Deutsch's theory is applied to avoid paradoxes, the principle of consistency is unnecessary. On the other hand, if the time travelers go to another universe, how then did they find the professor's request for help in this universe? This note would have been placed in another universe, and it couldn’t be found in ours six centuries later. But let’s accept that it was really discovered in our universe, for otherwise the novel wouldn’t be possible. Then the call for help itself gives rise to the possibility of a paradox: suppose that the saviors were sent to the past at a time after the arrival of the professor, but before his placing the call for help. Suppose he is picked up and brought back to the present. So who posted the note whose find triggered the salvage trip? No one. This is the paradox of objects without a cause, which I mentioned in a previous post.

Michael Crichton

As usual, Michael Crichton tries to do science fiction with a very imperfect knowledge of the science he is trying to apply. When discussing his novel Jurassic Park, where he confuses the theories of chaos and catastrophes, we saw that this is quite normal in Crichton's novels. In the introduction to Timeline, where he is trying to give a scientific justification to the argument of the novel, he takes for granted that time travel will be possible shortly, that the quantum multiverse exists (something that many physicists consider absurd and impossible to prove) and that quantum teleportation, which until now has just succeeded in transmitting quantum states of particles and atoms, will soon allow the transmission of matter, and even of human beings. The bad thing is not that he tries to give a scientific appearance to a science-fiction idea (I have done the same, for instance, in my novel A Face in Time, where I use arguments very similar to Crichton's to justify teleportation). The worst is that he’s trying to convince the reader that his novel is not science fiction, but science. In a way, he’s misleading those readers who don’t know enough to notice the fallacy.

The same post in Spanish
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Manuel Alfonseca