{"quotes":[{"text":"That's one of our speculations, by the way. That the prior version of history that this one overwrote was horrible. Complete geopolitical mayhem; half of New York City is underwater. The United States is headed toward civil war, or ruled by an artificial-intelligence construct, or some such other thing. Real end-of-days stuff. That the instances of ourselves who existed in that history figured out what we have: that the invention of the causality violation device was the cause. That in that prior version of history, Rebecca did not die in a car accident. That she went back to the past on a mission, as a volunteer, well aware of her sacrifice.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["alternate-history","dexter-palmer","dystopian","science-fiction","time-travel","version-control"],"id":16024,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"But we think that if a human were to violate conventional causality—''By time traveli.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["blackout","dexter-palmer","lost-memories","lost-time","time-travel","version-control"],"id":23934,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"But who, in these modern times, slept well?","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["dexter-palmer","insomnia","modern-times","sleep","version-control"],"id":26959,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"But the hair on her arms did not stand on end; she did not experience any strange instances of déjà vu; she did not see the ghosts of future selves shimmering before her, shouting stock picks back through time.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["dexter-palmer","déjà-vu","time-travel","version-control"],"id":35204,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now.But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. It's infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: it's our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["dexter-palmer","metaphor","never-ending","physics","rewarding","science","simile","version-control","work"],"id":45592,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"First, the idea of the multiverse is essentially the fantasy of preserving perfect information. One of the hard things to deal with in life is the fact that you destroy potential information whenever you make a decision. You could even say that's essentially what regret is: a profound problem of incomplete information. If you select one thing on a diner's menu, you can't know what it would have been like to taste other things on it, right then, right there. When you marry one person, you give up the possibility of knowing what it would have been like to have married any number of others. But if the multiverse exists, you can at least imagine there's another version of you who's eating that other thing you thought about ordering, or who's married to that other man you only went on two dates with. Even if you'll never see all the information for yourself, at least you'll be able to tell yourself that it's. ","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["alternate-universes","dexter-palmer","multiverse","regret","science","scientific-theory","time-travel","version-control"],"id":55265,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"You could consider the idea of the multiverse, and think of it as something like a tree—that is, the universe we live in is one of an uncountable number of branches of possible universes, created by random chance and the decisions of sentient beings. So, for instance, when I rang you up in the morning, there was a possible future universe in which you answered the phone, and another in which you did not, and by answering the phone you put us in one universe and not the other. In that instance the time traveler doesn't just move from the future to the past and back to the future: he moves down one branch of the universe, toward the root that's back at the beginning of time, and back up another branch.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["alternate-universe","dexter-palmer","multiverse","scientific-theory","time-travel","version-control"],"id":78020,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was. ","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["butterfly-effect","dexter-palmer","ripple-effect","time-travel","version-control","what-if"],"id":81290,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"What we are proposing,' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.'Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any—''Purely hypothetical—''—time travelers.''So take our time traveler from the traditional story,' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["alternate-universe","dexter-palmer","physics","scientific-theory","time-travel","version-control"],"id":94357,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"And yet Rebecca felt that it was hard to tell whether the secret algorithms of Big Data did not so much reveal you to yourself as they tried to dictate to you what you were to be. To accept that the machines knew you better than you knew yourself involved a kind of silent assent: you liked the things Big Data told you you were likely to like, and you loved the people it said you were likely to love. To believe entirely in the data entailed a slight diminishment of the self, small but crucial and, perhaps, irreversible.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["big-data","dexter-palmer","identity","information-age","version-control"],"id":138731,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":28,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}