My three favourite authors at this very moment are Michio Kaku, MJ Harper, and Ronald Brech. Kaku appeared on BBC 4 to tell us all about how the future of technology was going to shape the directions of change looking forward. Harper recently (2006) wrote a book entitled 'The History of Britain Revealed - The shocking truth about the English language'. Paperback or Hardcopy Ronald Brech in the 1960's wrote a book entitled 'Britain 1984 - The History of the Future' I tried to find a copy of it on Amazon, but could not find one. It would appear that the history of the future 1984 is now known and no book need predict it.
Are you sure? Last year, I debated with my brother whether or not time existed as a dimension. His argument was that I was an idiot. There was no real debate over whether time existed or not. It seemed to him that it was obvious that the whole question was a stupid question. Of course, time exists. I should listen to my brother because he was trained as an astra physicist in Massachusetts. I think he helped find a super nova.
Ooops, I must have made a mistake because time does not exist. I am sure that you believe it does, but I am equally sure that that you are wrong. This is because I am a student of time and have researched it thoroughly for many decades and could not find it anywhere. Everywhere I looked I saw motion and change but no where could I find time. No time does not exist. Time is a figment of the human mind. It simply is not there. I am mistaken, you say. No I am not, say I.
The problem that I have with time is that it suggests that a unique future exists, but having read Ronald Brech's book, we know that it does not exist and no matter how hard we try to predict it, we will fail. The problem is mathematical in that there are more things moving around than things to stop them or control them moving around. Even things that move backward in our illusion of time, such as positrons, cannot be uniquely controlled. This means that the past is not determined any more than the future.
It is said that if you were able to go back in time you would be able to kill your parent and then you would not be born. The problem with this silly argument is that it insults the intelligence of the mathematics I have just described that doesn't allow for a single solution of existence of anything.
What I mean to say is that obviously and mathematically we have a world that has more than one pathway that we would call time if we thought time exists, which suggests that there are obviously multiple paths of time. Ok, you might say, but how many paths of time are there? The answer is that we simply do not know, but the number could be very large as I have not seen any future people saying hello to me recently.
Remarkably, when we examine the past in the way that MJ Harper does, we find that there are many anomalies as he describes them. It would appear that we are not really in a position to say definitively that the English language was originally an Anglo Saxon language or that it had much to do with Anglo Saxon. All we really know is that the people of Britain in the time of the early Romans spoke a language very similar to that spoken in the rest of early Europe. No one to my knowledge wrote the language down in such a way that one in modern times could see, read or hear it.
MJ harper in his fascinating book claims that it is more likely that the sounds of the English language were already part of the vernacular in Briton well before the arrival of the Romans. Its just strange that no one seems to know what the early Britons sounded like. When I wrote my book about the amazing life of Wuh Lax in 50 AD See I took great care in deciding to have my characters speak English. This seemed logical given that the people of the day probably sounded like they spoke English.
Harper is also very good at revealing the pit falls of accepted truths of sciences such as evolution. He shows that the history of the past may be very different from what we would like to think because we only see it in a causal way. We tend to look at things as causal. Some thing causes something else therefore it must have preceding the thing it caused.
I have a very different twist on this idea of causation because if time does not exist as I say it does not exist, who is to say that past times cause future times. It could be the other way around. Suppose that in earthly past a group had uncovered a cold fusion energy machine and had discovered a way to travel very very fast using this machine. This is only fiction since I have no evidence for it, but they could travel slower in time relative to people on earth. I am not sure what technology they would need to travel backward in time, but I think it would have to do with light.
Now what does this all have to do with Michio Kaku and the BBC program on future technologies? The big question in my mind is whether we need to go back in time in order to change the past. Maybe the answer is that we can never go back in time because time does not exist and so the question is irrelevant, or is it. Could a future technology presently being research help me to answer my question about travelling somewhere that does not exist. Michio describes superconductors, metamaterials, invisible cloaks, nanotubes, highways into space, abundant energy sources, nano materials, swarms of nano robots or nanobots, disassembly technologies reassembly technologies, digital fabrication, personal fabricators, teleportation systems, the synergy of technology revolutions, the mastery of matter and life, but he fails to answer my simple question. Do we need to go back in time to change the past? What is the past? For that matter, what is the future?