As a die hard Antiques Roadshow fan, I’m going to every baseball game possible, saving all the programs and tickets, getting balls and bats signed, then stashing them away neatly so my grandkids can be bazillionaires.
I’m going to assume we can’t do things like kill Hitler or Trump babies or their parents without causing majorly bad disruptions to the timeline, so things like those aside…I would go back and go see Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Austin City Limits performance live. Or maybe his performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival. One of the two.
Can we do something about the Bosnian war next?!? Or maybe we can not let Milosevic get into office? Or maybe… not like Tito change the constitution to give the regional parties more power in the 60s?
There is no way of knowing whether this is actually happening right now or not.
And if it does, it has been happening, is happening, and will be happening all the time and simultaneously.
Maybe someone can help me remember? I read a short story or novella that was the best time travel thing I’d ever read but I can’t recall the title or author. A guy finds a time travel machine (I want to say it was a belt but that might be a different story) and he tries over numerous trips to improve the world but it never works out (I distinctly remember he killed Jesus and came back to find slavery still a thing in the modern age). All the trips result in numerous iterations of himself and they spend time hanging out together in the far future? Ring any bells?
Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps and ’-All You Zombies-‘ are my favorites besides the one above I can’t remember the title of. Zombies was adapted to the fantastic film Predestination staring Ethan Hawk and Sadie Snook.
Alfred Bester’s The Men Who Murdered Mohammed is good, but I doubt it’s the one you’re thinking of. (Changing the past doesn’t work, but no multiple iterations.)
Sadly, time going forward may be a simple, algebraic fact of life and be utterly irreversible.
Cole Furey’s (friend of a friend) Ph.d. thesis works with the system of those algebras where addition, multiplication, subtraction and division exist. There are only four such number systems, starting with the familiar real numbers, and the complex numbers you learned about in high school. She works towards recasting physics in terms of particles that use these simple operations on 8, 4, 2 and 1 dimensional numbers. That, in turn, explains why time goes “forward”:
Addition and multiplication are examples of uninvertible binary operations. Therefore,
an event can be seen to be irreversible, it cannot ‘unhappen’. For example, if we are given
only the output of 9, it is impossible to tell if 9 came from the inputs of 6+3, or 8+1, or
4+5, etc.
Time, then, is simply a sequence of calculations, and is clearly irreversible. The related
notion of ‘now’ can be seen to be an entirely local concept within the causal set.
Furthermore, her work suggests that even space itself might not be a fundamental requirement for our universe:
The question we are then asking here is whether or not space-time can be seen to be as
surprisingly unnecessary as was the luminiferous aether from one hundred years ago. Can particles exist independently, without the crutch of a fundamental space-time to support
them?
Yeah this is going to drive me crazy now. I feel like it was written in the late 60’s/early 70’s (but I could be wrong). In a far far future time he hooks up with a female version of himself.