There are two very important factors which make the reveal in this post possible:
- You won’t believe me
- You won’t think that I believe it myself
If it weren’t for these things, this blog post would not be here.
Of course we are all familiar with Asimov’s classic novella, widely acclaimed as the best time travel story of all time.
Long story short: the secret society of “eternals” who are capable of time travel which Asimov presents in his classic book “The End of Eternity) (pdf) (epub) is actually a real thing, with some modifications.
The real time travellers themselves are known in the society of eternals as “grandmasters” and have learned through intense study how to spread their consciousness over many variable timelines, enabling the use of other chess matches in other times as endpoints for a projection time travel technique. These guys are really travelling in time.
Unlike in Azimov’s story, it doesn’t appear that these time travellers can move physical goods from one century to another in arbitrage, however the ability to observe and even affect at reality in another time is already quite a shock.
Don’t believe me? Lets start with some incontrovertible facts:
- Paul Morphy was able to travel to the future and learn chess from Alpha Zero.
- Technicians in Azimov’s story of the eternal can make small minimal “adjustments” to timelines; Chess masters are told only to make minimal changes to the board without touching anything, unless they are technicians who announce “j’adoube”.
- Historical scenes which have been “adjusted” are often seen with a chess board in the background.
- Chess rules seem oddly stubborn to changes over millenia.
- Timers stuck in predestined timelines are just pawns for the use of masters.
- The mental projection of a single chess master can spread to allow an entire room or even those in a distant future to participate in the moment of time travel.
- En Passant. Ok this doesn’t really prove anything but still, it’s kinda time travelly.
Another insight into the workings of this ultrasecretive society of time travellers (described as “eternals” in the Azimov book) comes from the gender inequality in chess masters. As Asimov puts it:
” Could he tell her that women almost never qualified for Eternity because, for some reason he did not understand (Computers might, but he himself certainly did not), their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times as likely to distort Reality as was the abstraction of a man.”
Women are often simply too important in their influence on the future to be taken out of time to join the eternals and their chess time travel.
So that’s about the size of it. Look at some of the pictures of men standing around watching the highest level chess games… you will see it. Why are they there? Why the intensity? The threads of time are being smeared in that location and in effect, a certain kind of time travel I don’t understand is being enabled. The inaction in the present moment enables a smearing of Hamiltonians such the the wavefunctions can tunnel into the less probable tachyonic pathways.
Those who wish to understand further the method of time shifting via multiple lines of game progress are also advised to read Anathem by Neal Stephenson. The Mandela Effect is also relevant in the case of real timeline adjustments. (Since we’re there, lets promote this album.)
For those of you who are interested in more conventional time travelling methods, there is always the option of visiting China to see the future.