I’ve been working on a time machine but apparently I’m rather quite incompetent and screwed up the flux capacitor.
So, instead of sending back a person it can only send back a relatively small, paper based object. Ie: a book (like I said, I really screwed up the flux capacitor).
What book, where, and when would change history the most? The book doesn’t have magical capabilities so it can’t convince the receiver to believe it. Whatever language the book is you send back it will stay that language when it arrives. So if you want to send a book about the Conquest to Atahualpa it better be in Quechua.
Do you send “The Glorious Cause” to King George III in 1770? “Postwar” to Roosevelt in 1944? The German version of “The Guns of August” to the Kaiser? Maybe a microbiology book to Fleming?
I was thinking similarly, but I imagined getting a copy of the New Testament into the hands of Jesus. I can picture him saying, “What is this mess? I can write the whole thing down in a couple hundred words!”
The problem with works of history would be IMO that (1) you cannot convince the actors of their future history’s lessons until after that history has alread happened, and (2) once someone acts on the book in a significant way the timeline gets derailed which discredits the work (the first instance where it got it right gets dismissed as a fluke).
What would have a great influence would be a very detailed atlas of mineral deposits IMO.
Or maybe a “brief history of the West” book so that way, when people are writing everything down, they can put, “And Jesus said, 'Seriously: slavery is bad. Black people have souls Stop killing Muslims and Indians should not be enslaved (you’ll get this later).”
Isn’t this pretty insurmountable? There probably exists a text that follows the development of the calculus from ancient times through the medieval to Newton and Leibnitz, say, but does it exist in a form that someone like Archimedes would be able to read it?
If you were to translate it into Attic Greek before sending it back he would. OTOH some books require no common language to be understood, like an atlas.
Sending back an atlas to Augustus might have interesting consequences.
Yes, we could all be ignorant, naked children wandering aimlessly in the Garden of Eden.
My vote would be Euler’s Institutiones calculi differentialis cum eius usu in analysi finitorum ac doctrina serierum, which gives all of the foundations of modern calculus. I know the more common answer would be Netwon’s * Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica* (despite the lack of rigor), or perhaps, Leibniz’s * Nova methodus pro maximis et minimis, itemque tangentibus, quae nec fractas nec irrationales quantitates moratur, et singulare pro illi calculi genus* (which at least uses mostly modern notation), but Euler really tied integral and differential calculus and many of the supporting functional and power expansion methods into a practical working system of calculus as we know it today. Sent back to the time of, say, Archimedes or Archytas, this could have advanced science and engineering centuries ahead of the then current state of the art.
Neither would Newton, as the book is almost exclusively about astronomy, cosmology, and thermodynamics that relies on a 20th century context of the fields.
Neither would Newton. It seems we are allowed to commission translations to go back in time, so Stranger’s picks in old Greek are what would make the most difference, I think.
I wonder what fun could be had by providing a suitably translated copy of Wealth of Nations or Capital to Thucydides, or any other number of folk actually
Why Hitler in particular? In terms of total volume, Stalin and Mao were both responsible for more deaths under their respective reigns, and it was the Napoleonic wars that established the precident for mass conscription and modern industrial warfare as well as the rise of nationalist sentiment that directly led to the formation of Italy and Germany as new superpowers which, coming lately to the world stage and colonialism, decided to prove themselves by attempting to conqueor the rest of Europe. If your metric is based upon removing a single figure responsible for the most mass death, Napoleon or Karl Marx is probably a substantially better target.
Another vote for sending back an atlas. It’s a book any relatively literate society is going to be able to figure out regardless of language issues.
So who to send it back to? Augustus was already mentioned. Alternately, I’d suggest Alexander. But probably the best person would be Prince Henry of Portugal.
I shouldn’t have to point this out to somebody named RandMcnally.
Really? Certainly sending it back 100 years would do nothing; it’s already available. If you sent the King James version back to 1000 AD it would be considered an invalid translation from Latin, I assume. In any case, it is hard to imagine the Bible could have any more influence on … let’s call it the Western World … than it already does.
If you sent it back to say India, why do you think it would have more influence than Hinduism. Yes it might have made some converts earlier, but would it have had more more effect than it does now? If you sent it back to around 600 AD to try to influence Islam, would it have any effect? Islam already accepts the Bible as pretty much true except for the divinity of Jesus. Would it change minds? Personally I doubt it.