Timeline

4 Pages 1006 Words

You go back in time and kill your grandfather. As a result, you are never born so you can never go back in time to kill your grandfather. He lives and you are born. The grandfather complex is one of the many conundrums that come about when scientists theorize about time travel.
The question of time travel has been around for many years. It was first written about by Mark Twain in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court. Since then, scientists and philosophers all over the world have debated the ethics of time travel. One of the major questions that are debated is, what would happen if a person went back in time and changed something? Would it change the world as we know it or would time correct itself so that everything is as we know it when we return to our own time. In Timeline, Michael Crichton explores the first possibility as he sends four historians back in time to help rescue one of their own.
One of the major concepts introduced in Timeline, is the use of quantum mechanics to travel back in time. According to the scientists in the novel, time is like a book filled with pages. Each moment in time is a page and its possible to flip from one page to another and skip over the pages in between. As a result, they are able to use quantum mechanics to transport people between pages, or time. They use this to transport people back to twelfth century France into the midst of the Hundred Year War. One of the major themes of Crichtons novel is how these people will affect the future. Its his thought that they will have an adverse effect on the future. If they change some small thing while they are in the past, then everything in the future from that point on will change. Its the chaos theory seen in a major way. If they kill a butterfly in the past, then, somehow, President Franklin D. Roosevelt will never be born and the world as we know it would change.
If in twelfth century France, these historians change something, anything, ...