Aristotle and the Gun

 

One of the coolest things about reading science fiction, aside from the potentiality of falling in to a great tale, is that on occasion a “great idea” – crazy, weird, mind-altering, world-expanding, awe-inspiring – a great idea will pop up and sweep me off my feet. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. A couple times a year, I guess, for someone like me who reads science fiction about twenty, twenty-five percent of the time.

This just happened a few days ago.

You may know I am working my way through 18th century historian Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a 1,270-page bucket list item that’ll take me about four months to march through. Now, since I’m a hopper and I’m determined to finish this tome before Little One returns from Italy, I’m only going to allow myself two science fiction short stories for every hundred pages of Gibbon I milepost.

So I just read two stories from 1991’s Modern Classics of Science Fiction I picked up just for this occasion. It was in the second one, “Aristotle and the Gun,” by L. Sprague de Camp, that a small idea wormed itself into my mind and refuses to leave.

First, a word about Mr. de Camp. Or L. Sprague. I’m not sure how to refer to him. He was a writer from the pre-Golden Age of Science Fiction, primarily the 30s and 40s. This is only the third short story of his I’ve read (each one from a different sci fi omnibus read in a different decade), but I did read his novel Lest Darkness Falls way way back in 2005 and thoroughly enjoyed it (I graded it an A-). The essence of the tale is – what would you do, with your knowledge and know-how, if you were transported back to Rome c. AD 550, as the city falls to the barbarians and the world teeters on darkness. A meek, run-of-the-mill archaeologist finds himself mysteriously in such a situation, and what follows is, well, what he does, and what he does, simple at first, turns out quite remarkable.

“Aristotle and the Gun” (1956) is of a similar idea. In the far distant future a scientist teleports himself back in time in attempt to meet Aristotle and subtly influence the philosopher so that the scientific age can happen half a millennia sooner that it did in his timeline.

The main character mentions that classic nagging problem that pops up in every time travel story: How much effect will one teeny tiny change in the past alter the future? A.k.a., the butterfly effect. The nifty part is that he states that the extent of the butterfly effect is directly correlated to whether space-time has a negative or positive curvature. “If positive, any disturbance in the past tends to be ironed out in subsequent history, so that things become more and more nearly identical with what they would have been anyway. If negative, then events will diverge more and more from their original pattern with time.”

Now I never thought about the universe’s curvature relating to time. I always thought of it, way back in my physics days and since, in terms of space. After all, space is a physical thing, at least that can be curved. How can time curve? A positively curved universe can be imagined as a great sphere whereas a negatively curved universe is like a horse saddle. But since space and time are connected into one four-dimensional entity care of Einstein, spacetime, one must think of time as positively or negatively curved.

When reading the story I immediately thought of the difference between a closed and open universe, as in a universe which will eventually collapse upon itself as opposed to one which will continue to expand forever. Which fate is realized depends on the amount of mass in the universe, as mass works as a brake on expansion. Curvature itself, though, does not necessarily influence whether the universe is bounded or unbounded, closed or open. But wouldn’t it be cool if somehow mass also affected the flow of time? I mean, it must, right, since it’s right there in the term spacetime.

(And I think it must be in Einstein’s relativity equations, if I remember correctly. It’s been a while ... a long while ...)

I dunno; I think I just gave myself a headache. Someone give me a million dollars so I can quit my job and think about these things, okay?