In Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer, the protagonist about to depart for the past is momentarily worried about that, but it turns out the machine “follows the world-line” – I don’t understand it either, but it means you automatically come out on the same physical spot on the Earth’s surface as that from which you departed.
Instead of taking text books back, how about giving critical tools to critical thinkers at key points (Give Newton a solar powered scientific calculator, or Leonardo Davinci a life time supply of “Sharpie” markers (imagine how much time he wasted, how many trains of thought he lost “dipping his quill in ink”…
just a thought
Regards
FML
Another fictional example : I recall a short story where a scientist traveled back to ancient Greece, and posed as a scholar from India to impart as much modern knowledge ( mostly mathematics ) as he thought they could handle. When he returned to his own time, expecting a more advanced world, he found himself trapped in a medeviel technology world. It turned out that he’d basically crushed their spirits; when confronted with how little they actually knew, and how far they were “behind India”, they just gave mathematics and abstract knowledge in general up as not worth trying for.
Well, there’s they Niven story Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation where the laws of physics allow time travel, but the universe always stops any attempt to do so. Some sort of disaster always causes the collapse or destruction of those who attempt it.
Some other versions of time travel :
1 : Only unrecorded/unknown details can be changed. I recall a time traveller who arranged that his life in the past be recorded, so it was impossible to kill him - that would change history. Someone tried to shoot him, and the bullet slowed . . . stopped, and fell, glowing white hot as the bullet’s kinetic energy “spontaneously” turned into heat.
2 : You can change the past, but only a small region surrounding the traveller changes. You could travel back in time and shoot someone, and as soon as you travelled far enough away from the murder the change would be erased. It was mainly used as a form of sociopathic entertainment; you could run around raping and torturing and murdering people, and all evidence of your crimes would vanish when you left.
3a : Time travel is possible, but the past you reach won’t be our past. Basically, you have a universe constantly flowing “forward” from the Big Bang, with each moment being in effect a seperate world, So you travel back a thousand years, and you end up in a what amounts to an alternate universe ( but not a seperate time line; sequential, not parallel ) that’s a thousand years younger. Any changes you make won’t affect us, because the changes only travel forward at one second per second.
3b : You can change the past, but since the change only flows at the normal time rate it never reaches us. Another version of serial alternate universes, but in this one you can change “our” past, more or less.
4 : You can travel into the past or future, but nothing’s there. The present has moved on, and the past and future don’t exist.
5 : You can only travel into the future.
Give him pencils instead. Leonardo did a lot of work in silverpoint and other pencil-like media. I;m notr sure how well sharpies will stand the test of time. And they’ll bleed through to the sheet below,
See post #18. (No, I don’t remember the title or author.)
This page from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists every book in which “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” has ever been published; the one you’re thinking of is bound to be on there. Good luck!
There was a very short SF story about a cruise missile landing in the 60’s. It makes a great job of conveying (oops, sorry for that word, don’t belt me) the disbelief of the top scientist of the time dealing with stuff as simple as capacitors and ceramic resistors.
Valley of the Dinosaurs, anyone? These guys “invented” something really earthshaking on every episode to solve some minor emergency but the cavepeople never really caught up to incorporating all that tech into becoming the Flintstones.