16 August 2032, 1843 GMT / University of Sydney, Australia (about 12 years earlier)
Doctor Craig Richards gestured to the large screen where several key vocabulary words had just appeared. He looked out to the lecture hall, where over a hundred students awaited the remaining points of his lecture. Students enjoyed this class, and that helped him enjoy teaching it. Students always like learning about things that are not so concrete. Some, even some of his fellow professors, refer to this, his most popular class, as ‘fluff’. They mention it in the same sentence as ‘Badminton’ and ‘Beginner’s Pottery’. It’s an elective, although he has always felt that it is just as essential as any other philosophy class. What makes ‘Theoretical Time Travel and its Ethical Ramifications’ any less valuable than ‘Eastern Philosophy’ or ‘Ethics of the Information Age’? Probably the word ‘Theoretical’…
Most of his students were young, taking this course in their first year, after hearing about its odd professor, and its fairly easy grade, but despite their lack of academic experience, he often got the students into rousing debates about some aspect of ethics. The discussion that always got the most people involved was the infamous ‘Should we could go back and stop Hitler?’ debate, at the end of which he would have all but the most hard-headed students convinced that leaving Hitler to do what he has already done is the best course of action. Ironically, he was not sure if he believed it himself. Knowing that if anyone ever needed to make such decisions, it certainly wouldn’t be himself, gave him some comfort.
“Before we continue,” he projected his deep, loud voice into the depths of the lecture hall, which for some classes, like ‘Studies in Early Third Millennium Pop Culture’ holds as many as three hundred students. Some instructors needed microphones for these large halls, “does anyone have any questions about what we discussed before the break?”
A hand went up in the third row, and Craig pointed to the student in acknowledgement. This was not one of his younger students. This student was experienced. She looked about twenty-five, and was probably working on her master’s degree, meaning that she was going to have to write twice as many papers as the rest of the class, and he would be expecting those papers to be of a higher caliber. She would in turn be getting higher level credit for the course.
“Professor Richards,” she started, “According to Ferenzci’s 2027 paper on temporal paradox, human time travel is only theoretically possible, and can never be realized. What is your response to that as a Temporal Physicist?”
Some one always brought up Ferenzci’s theories, and usually on the first day. That being the case, he had a well rehearsed response, “Fersnzci’s paper is interesting, but it was not a novel idea. In the twenty years since the Temporal Tunnel was invented, there have been many theories as to why we have been unable in all that time to find a way to send solid matter thru the device. The theory Ferenczi put forward was a popular one. He stated that science could never develop human time travel because time travel itself would be a paradox.” Craig paused to look around at the student’s faces for their reaction to that, a few of them nodded as he spoke, and he wondered if they were agreeing with Ferenzci’s theory, or just recognizing the popularized postulation. “There are two camps among Temporal Physicists regarding Paradox. Some believe that a paradox creates a branching timeline, one in which the original sequence of events occur, which cause the paradox, and a second line in which the paradoxical events themselves occur.
“The second camp feels that the timeline cannot branch, it is continuous and infinite. In this case however, something would still have to happen to eliminate the paradoxical event. So, this camp believes that the timeline would correct itself by removing the offending event, possibly even some originating event, like the creation of the time machine itself.”
A student near the back of the class spoke up without being recognized, a young dark skinned man with an accent Craig couldn’t place, “You don’t sound convinced.”
Craig smiled, “I’m not. To me, the idea of a self-correcting timeline just sounds a little bit too…” he paused to search for the right word, “mystical. The timeline does not think. It does not plan or make decisions, it simply is. It’s a dimension of measurement, just like height and width.”
The dark skinned student spoke up again, “If the timeline cannot make decisions, then how would it split? That seems like something mystical as well, doesn’t it?”
“Excellent point. The truth is, the resolution of paradox is the most fundamental, yet the most difficult to theorize, aspect of Temporal Mechanics. The problem is that by all the laws we know, a paradoxical event simply cannot exist. It’s just as concrete as ‘No two bodies of mass may occupy the same space at the same time’. Asking ‘What happens if there is a paradoxical event?’ is like asking ‘What happens when two bodies of mass occupy the same space?’ The answer to that question is that the situation will never arise. It simply cannot happen.” Looking around, Craig could see that he was starting to lose a few of his students, but he plunged on, “Unfortunately, the only answer is that the paradoxical event cannot and will not occur. In some way, the event will not have been a paradox in the first place… It’s still a valid question, only because of human decision-making. A human time traveler could choose to initiate a paradoxical event. So, what would happen? The textbook gives us a classic example: If you go back through time to murder your own parents before your birth, what happens to you? The only real answer is simply that the event is not possible. Somehow, someway, it simply won’t happen. It cannot happen.” Craig felt the urge to re-explain the concept, to find a way to make it more clear, but he knew that he was getting into a territory that he did not understand… that no one really understood.
Craig took a deep breath, and looked around at the staring faces of the students, “Honestly, we will never know how a paradoxical event resolves, because we will never see one. Even if human time travel became possible, and we decided to cause one on purpose, we would never perceive the event as paradoxical, because that would mean that the paradox remained unresolved for some instant, which is not possible. For now, that’s really all you need to know about paradox. Let’s move on to the rest of today’s discussion.” He turned his attention back to the grad student in the third row, “Good question, however. Thank you.”
“Doctor Richards!”, a young man burst through the door and ran toward the podium at the front of the room. He was about the same age as the grad student, which Craig had only just turned away from. His lab coat billowed behind him as he ran. His excited face bore a bush-mustache, which was quickly becoming an unfortunate trend among younger academic men. Craig recognized him immediately.
“Jonathon?”, Craig forced himself to sound amused at the intrusion. Jonathon was an excitable researcher, working in an exciting field, Craig knew that egos could be fragile, and didn’t want to embarrass Jonathon if he could help it.
“Doctor Richards, you have to come over to my lab,” he said in electrified tones, “It works. I got it to work!”
“Doctor Zangski,” Craig began, taking a formal tone, “can whatever it is wait until after my class? It’s the first day, you know…”
Jonathon turned around to face the class as if seeing all of those people in the room for the first time. He took an awkward moment to come to what seemed a difficult decision. He ran his hand through a mop of jet-black hair as he scanned the lecture hall. Suddenly, he turned back to Craig with a smile. “Bring them with you,” he said almost playfully, then turned and ran back out of the room, his too large lab-coat trailing like a cape behind him.
Craig was stunned, but recovered quickly, “Well class,” he turned to face the hall of students, “I normally wait until the second week to bring everyone to visit the Quantum Research facility, but it seems that now would be just as good a time.”
He walked quickly, though not as quickly as Jonathon, over to the door of the hall. None of his students had moved. “That means you have to get up,” he said over his shoulder, as he pushed through the door. Behind him, he heard his students shuffling to follow.
Look for the next chapter of Zeta Disconnet: Part 2 next week on Short-Media. In the meantime, comment on this chapter in our forums.
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