Timeline

by Michael Crichton

“All the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.” WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1953

“If you don’t know history, you don’t know anything.” EDWARD JOHNSTON, 1990

“By the end of the nineteenth century it seemed that the basic fundamental principles governing the behavior of the physical universe were known.”

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it.” NIELS BOHR, 1927

“Nobody understands quantum theory.” RICHARD FEYNMAN, 1967

Muzak

“The glory of the past is an illusion. So is the glory of the present.” EDWARD JOHNSTON

“I pray God look with favor upon your journey and deliver you safe back.”

He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it. Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored.

Yet the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation-states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love had first been established in medieval times.

Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

What kind of an idiot had a name like Nigel?

😂

At most excavation sites, no one bothered with masks, but they were required here, because plague had come several times in the fourteenth century, killing a third of the population. Although one form of the epidemic was originally transmitted by infected rats, another form was transmitted through the air, through coughs and sneezes, and so anybody who went into an old, sealed space had to worry about—

“The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn’t flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems—of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren’t separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn’t a location, you can’t travel to it.”

“Escolie? Esne discipulus? Studesne sub magistro?”

“In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.

“The purpose of history is to explain the present—to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us why the things we value are the things we should value. And it tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power—profound power. The power to define a whole society.