Travelling back in time with today's knowledge

There must be some speculation on this idea…

I go back in time 20 years ago. I find a penny on the ground and pick it up. I walk around the block and wave to the mailman. I decide I don’t want the penny anymore and throw it into the grass. Oops… Time’s up on my wristwatch time machine… Zip! Back to my own time (nobody saw me disappear into thin air, either)

Will my actions cause a drastic change to the timeline? Or will they be “absorbed” and change nothing notable except the penny would not be picked up by someone else to just be tossed into a change jar?

This has been bothering me on and off for years (sadly).

-C_e

Just in case you don’t know, that’s called the butterfly effect, Clayton.

This exists a science fiction story that posits every possible outcome of time travel. For your case, you want The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury.

In which any minor change in the past, such as stepping on a butterfly in the Jurassic period, would have sweeping changes back in the future.

Ah, yeah, The Sound of Thunder… I havn’t thought of that story in years.

But is that what would happen?

Or is it more likely that those events would just be “absorbed”?

Is the butterfly effect even real? Or does a butterfly flapping its wings do jack all to the weather in NYC?

Oh, and the wiki article… the mathmatical portion is all greek to me. And is that just theory or, again, is that practice?

-C_e

Hm… I apologize, I appear to have hijacked this thread.

Go back to talking about the history/technology issues.

I have given the Butterfly Effect a great deal of thought and I believe it is real and has implications that most people don’t realize although it is built into the original idea.

You often hear a story like the following. A group of teenagers go to a party. They decide to leave but one opts to stay behind and get a ride later. The first group hits an 18 wheeler head-on and all are killed. The one that stays behind thanks God that he didn’t get into the car or he would have been killed as well. The kicker is that almost certainly isn’t true. The very act of an extra person getting loaded into a car let alone talking or helping make decisions dictates that the car would not have been where it was during that millisecond that caused it to get smashed. Everyone would have lived if the extra person had gone.

The key to the butterfly effect is that the effects start small and grow over time. You can imagine that slight actions can have profound consequences years down the line. Leaving work five minutes early will eventually change the entire traffic pattern for the local area and then spread over the city. If that causes someone rather than another to get into an accident, those effects ripple to car dealerships, repair people, and the lives of claims adjusters let alone the original person. If someone gets killed because of that alteration, all of human history will be altered if they were to have kids because millions of people would have had that person as an ancestor thousands of years from now.

To take a simpler example, each of us was conceived through the ultimate genetic lottery with our father’s sperm. The slightest change of position, timing, or anything else that fateful conception night would have resulted in a different person and, noting above, would likely change all of human history from that point forward.

[Ted Theodore Logan]Hey, it was me who stole my dad’s keys![/TTL]

As against the “Butterfly Effect” hypothesis, we have The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber, about two factions (the Snakes and the Spiders) fighting to change history so their own side can win their war. But in this universe, changing history, while possible, is hard. The course of history is resilient and fights to snap back to its prior shape. In one short story, the Snakes recruit a man who is about to be murdered for infidelity by his wife (just as he got news he had inherited a fortune). He tries to desert – i.e., sneaks into a time machine and tries to alter the events leading to his death. He tries several times and always ends up dying at exactly the same time (as he views events from outside the timestream). Finally he thinks he’s got it – he’s achieved a sequence of events where his wife is dead and he is alive – and a bullet-sized meteorite zips out of the sky and penetrates his forehead (just where the bullet hole would have gone). Finally he gives up – the universe would rather divert the course of a meteorite than let him live another day!

Then there’s the classic and hilarious “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester. Summary here.

I can’t imagine that most if any textbooks, or people with “today’s” knowledge would be of much use “back in time”.

IME, most textbooks are long on the “what is”, PV does = nRT. Uranium does exist. Calcium Carbide is composed of this. nmr works like this. But very little on how to prove any of this stuff.

Most people are like this too. Ask them why you stick to the moon, and they will say “heavy boots”. Ask them what the Earth Orbits, and they will say the sun. Ask them to explain disease, and they will say germs.

In order for any information you bring to the past to be accepted by the scientists of the time you must be able to prove why it is true. Otherwise all you have are a bunch of good pointers out of no where, but no way to show that they are true. No one would use calculus, or your information, unless they could independantly verify it. On the otherhand people do believe the Bible, so it might make a difference.

On a side note, if I ever go back in time (ie to the middle ages or later) it is my plan to open a brewery/pot ranch/fireworks stand. So if you are ever in the middle ages, and you see Der Olden Moonbeam Garden, stop in and I’ll give you a toke on the house.

I hope it’s not a hijack, but…

If you zip back in time, wouldn’t you just pop out in space somewehere because the Earth wasn’t in the same spot at both moments in time? Wouldn’t you also need a time machine with something to regualte your physical coordinates as well?

BrainGlutton, as a child, I had a short story collection with that story in it, as well as others by Bester. IT may have been the first Science Fiction I read… I’ve been trying to find that book again for 20 years.

Other stories included one wherein a man and a woman are left in new york after some sort of EOTWAWKI event, and giant preying mantis’s appear to have taken over, as they discover that the Alice in Wonderland statue’s heads in Central Park have been replaced by giant Mantis Heads.

And the story of the a group of hedonists trying to kill themselves. Weird.

Any idea what the book may have been called?

Bearflag, the flux capacitor takes that into account.

Leaving aside the time travel aspect, I think the more interesting question is, what could say a 16th century civilization do if it had a load of 20th century science texts dumped on it?

Certainly it would accelerate development - time lost to blind alleys and failed theories. But it would still take a long, long time. Modern technology is built up on top of a myriad of enabling technologies, and each of those technologies has its own enabling technologies. It would take a long, long time to build that, and even a large collection of books would still leave so many holes in knowledge that a lot of re-discovery would still have to happen.

OK, whew! Had me worried.

The 1632 book series plays with this idea, FYI.

Sam Stone says it pretty well. Modern science is possible because ancient science did so much of the work for us. If I could bring books back to pre-scientific times, they would not have much theoretical material. Instead, they would be books on immediately useful applications, such as mechanical harvesters, practical metalurgy, construction and engineering, Math (it is the basis for so much later innovation), and distilling. That last one is important for creating a true antispetic substance. The drinking part would be a bonus and would demonstrate the value of the books.

Obviously, there has to be some minimal familiarity with what gets dumped or else it will all be wasted. Including textbooks on microprocessor design would be a complete waste, as would books about DNA sequencing (PCR and so on) and modern literary theory. So what’s left? Introductory textbooks in biology and physics and mathematics, especially if the science texts are heavy on experiment design. Mathematics might be a problem if notation has changed radically but I don’t think it has. They would be put off by our notions of rigor and proof (a 20th century invention) but calculus has enough practical use it would be welcome. (It also wouldn’t be entirely new. Every culture mathematical enough to grasp fractions seems to have reinvented an intuitive notion of limits and infinitesimals. Being able to do the math without drawing a huge number of really teensy polygons would be a relief.) I don’t know what a 16th century “natural philosopher” would make of abstract algebra or number theory, however.

A single good text on the history of cryptography would kill the entire field of “hidden writing” until the invention of the computer*: All practical pencil-and-paper cryptographic algorithms are fairly easy to break with modern mathematical methods, including obvious ones such as frequency analysis that eluded people for hundreds of years. Even the mighty Vigenère cipher, long believed to be unbreakable, is pretty easy to crack if you have enough ciphertext and an understanding of the fundamentals. “The Code Book” by Simon Singh would do the job wonderfully.

*(By computer I mean something about as complex as an adding machine, which is what they would invent out of desperation in a clockwork recapitulation of the Enigma and Purple mechanical ciphers. It would come to an arms race between people who otherwise would have been making the first practical clocks.)

Biology would be interesting. They still had hugely strong taboos against dissection or anything else we might regard as effective medical research. The first anatomists were graverobbers, or did business with them, and strolled around battlefields looking for interesting injuries. (The mighty Galen, the father of surgery and the hospital, learned what he knew by caring for Roman gladiators.) An anatomy textbook might be regarded as the product of unholy experimentation at best and outright witchcraft at worst. On the other hand, if it fell into the right hands it would be a respite from the illegal process of figuring it out for yourself.

A book about the germ theory as such would be regarded as blasphemous nonsense. A book about hygiene might get a warmer reception, especially if some disease-struck town tried it out of desperation and it helped. If it worked, it would change the face of Europe (Quite literally: Ever see someone who survived smallpox?) and put a strain on the land to support people who didn’t die of cholera, smallpox, plague, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, or any of the other diseases much in fashion.

That leads me to geography. A map with current political boundaries would be a source of blank stares. A map of the world with unknown landmasses would spark serious land-grabs. A map of the world with resources marked (coal, oil, gold, diamonds, etc.) would spark massive wars. It would also change the entire rest of the world.

That’s just to begin with. A good engineering text would keep them busy recreating guns and bridges and Bessemer furnaces and two-stroke engines, with consequences I can’t even dream of. Ditto chemistry. In fact, I would send back a single text that takes them from coal and oil to aniline dyes to Bakelite and gasoline to modern plastics.

I read “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” in Cosmic Laughter – could that be it? The other stories you describe, I do not recall from that anthology.