Serendipity and it's place in science.
Some of the greatest inventions and discoveries of the modern, and not so modern, age have arisen purely by chance. More often than not, these chance discoveries were the happy result of a mistake made in pursuit of another, different, happy result. The microwave oven, the post-it note, X-rays and cornflakes are examples of a few such mistakes.
Occasionally, something that should have been discovered or invented goes undiscovered because of just such a mistake. Take, for instance, time travel. It’s so easy, or at least it will be, once someone notices a mistake made in a certain equation on a specific chalkboard.
Not very many years from now a young man, approaching the end of his time at University, will be tasked with the job of editing the physics department’s website. He’ll spend a week or two flicking through dusty old tomes and rummaging through boxes of photographs and, at some point late one evening after returning from a family gathering up north that he just hadn't been able to get out of, he will roll and smoke a joint. He’ll put some music on and, as he floats away on a THC induced wave of euphoria, he will spill a cup of hot coffee on an aging, black and white image of a stern looking Edwardian chap stood proudly before a chalkboard. The chalkboard in the image will contain a blurry but legible equation, the life’s work of the stern chap. An equation that the Edwardian thought solved and that led to nought.
The equation contained what would later be described, by the chap currently stoned and struggling to mop up coffee with the cuff of his jersey, as a “schoolboy error” whilst proudly beaming as he is being interviewed on BBC Breakfast. A schoolboy error that had remained unnoticed for a century. An error upon which many later theories would be based, all of which would lead fruitlessly down the same wrong avenue as the Edwardian equation had. A ghost in a long dead machine.
The camera wasn't invented by accident. A lot of work went into giving us the ability to record, indefinitely, a moment in time. In a way, old photographs are, themselves, a time machine. Or, at very least, a time portal that gives us the ability to peer back through the mists of time and to see a split second frozen for posterity, a window on a universe that existed once but exists no more. We take the ability to record events in such a way for granted now, almost everyone is almost always equipped with a camera, but once upon a time the process seemed almost magical.
Ever so gently, the university student will dab the coffee from the aging print. He will, in his inebriation, become fascinated by the symbols on the chalkboard. Slowly, almost as magically as recording an instant, the symbols will dance around inside his head, banging into one and other, creating an image of our universe no one has ever imagined before, spinning in infinity and seeming to shout the answer to the question that many since the Edwardian had asked, “How can we turn back the clock?”
It was so simple. So perfect. Once seen, once understood, no one could imagine why we hadn’t all realised it before. Time wasn’t a thing, time wasn’t even what we had to traverse to travel back. All that was required was a bit of imagination, some spectacles, a currant bun and an uninterrupted train journey of at least an hour. The spectacles required weren’t even special, time-machine goggles, just spectacles. Sunglasses would do. Your dad’s readers, pound-shop Aviators, anything. And a bun with currants in it. The biggest expense with travelling back in time was the train fare, but that got cheaper, relatively, the further back you went.
It was a slow process. Faster than the journey forward, but not the whooshing rush of special effects you might imagine. An hour on a train, munching buns as your pocket fills up with spectacles, will get you about ten hours into the past. During the journey you will feel nauseated, may become confused and will experience some events before the events that came earlier. In a small number of cases time travellers may be aware of an increase in perspiration or some mild-to-explosive double incontinence upon stepping from the carriage and into the past. This goes some way to explaining the condition of many of the toilets found in and around train stations.
It was also a one way trip, sort of. You could come back, but only at the speed of time. You would have to live in a world with your younger self until that point in time when you began travelling back. Once your younger self was weaving his merry way back through time you were unique again. Of course, you could travel beyond your own existence, but that took such a long time that few could be bothered.
The powers that be were very excited to be given the secret to cheap and easy time travel. They weren’t so happy, however, with everyone else having been given the secret at the same time. The stoned university student had, as stoned university students are prone to do, Tweeted it. So simple was the process he managed to fit it into one Tweet and still have space left for the hash tag “enjoythelittlethings”.
Every Government on Earth immediately set about attempting to seize control of time travel. They set up departments and spent billions of Dollars, Pounds, Yen and Euro on stationary and laptops. Their first attempt was to ban the bun, which led to bakers changing the recipe ever so slightly and calling them something else. It was the bun that was needed, not something called a bun. A bun by any other name would do as well. They held spectacle amnesties, Specs' Appeals. They didn’t receive many spectacles.
As time passed (Ordinary, forward time, not that spectacle and bun induced anti-time thing) the world changed dramatically. People travelling back in time to alter past events soon became problematic. At first, it hadn’t really mattered very much. The effects were instantaneous and our whole history was altered without our noticing. The only effect a person felt was a brief moment of déjà vu whenever something that directly affected their own future was changed. At that point, even if they realised someone had altered their timeline, not only did they not know what they’d potentially gained or lost, they’d likewise not be sure it wasn’t future-them doing something to correct an enormous mistake current-them was about to make. In reality, more often than not it was someone pissing about with lottery numbers that sent the DV’s rippling through space and time.
We all would, wouldn't we?
Eventually, society disintegrated and anarchy spread. The ability to slip back in time and alter things in one‘s own favour being impossible to resist for the greedy and the avaricious, a sort of Darwinian process began to take place. Survival of the fittest replaced with survival of the meanest, the most selfish, the most spiteful.
Then came the Grape War, the war to end all wars. A brief war which escalated rapidly from the outset, culminating in the most glorious firework display ever seen as the Earth burned beneath the sky of flame that followed in the wake of the worlds first, and only, truly atomic war.
Those that still had access to a bag or two of currant buns fled back through time as the warheads exploded, not to alter their fate but to escape it. These refugees from a bleak future, the oddly dressed individuals sitting on trains and smiling to themselves as they rewind the tape of time, don’t live amongst us yet (Data correct at time of publication), but they will, one day. And when they do, you‘ll suddenly remember having seen them before, sitting silently, sometimes hiding behind the cover of a book or a magazine so as to not be required to interact with the world around them, a task made incredibly difficult given their disjointed and jumpy perception of reality as they pass on by. They’re journeying back from a far more distant future than that of the temporal-tourists we all encounter every time we use public transport. To knock a year off the calendar would take you a day shy of three weeks even if you could travel none stop. Which you can’t. There are only so many currant buns a man can eat on a train without feeling the urge to get off that train and never eat a currant bun again. None of the time travellers you meet will be refugees, they’ll just be chancers from the early years of time travel, before the bad times came, and up to no good. And you can be sure they’ll be carrying a Lotto ticket.
Those that had lost loved ones before they escaped had a priority other than survival. They sought out their younger selves and their husbands, wives, sons and daughters and they told them what lay ahead. They urged them to flee before the day of their deaths and to make their own way back to this day upon which they were being warned of the doom the later days would bring, whereupon they could be reunited and live happily ever after, albeit sharing their spouses with their younger selves. Once agreed upon, the younger-them-than-the-future-them-they-now-were would appear almost instantaneously and, together, they could all face death from the famine brought about by the world suddenly becoming home to hundreds of millions of doppelgangers.
The Earth became Hell earlier than it had last time, and for different reasons. No fireworks this time, just a frantic struggle for resources that were already scarce and the complete breakdown of society, law and order. So the fleers fled further back. Back to save their younger, younger selves and their younger, younger loved ones, compounding the problem in the process.
Man’s ultimate and inevitable self-destruction began to ripple backwards throughout our future history, occurring earlier and earlier with each new influx of temporal immigrants selfishly fleeing Armageddon. Something needed to be done. Someone needed to save the Earth, to get ahead of the game.
So a woman set off, alone on a journey. No discussion with her fellow refugees, just a decision made unilaterally after the slow, dawning realisation that someone had to do something to end this eternal suffering. A suffering that now fell on people who had, once, lived happy lives, erasing their accomplishments and their joy, their love and laughter, replacing it with poverty, hunger, pain, despair and disease. Children who had already grown into adults, who had once lived a life and died a death in a future history now re-written, never stood a chance.
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