Friday Seminar Series: Continuity, Part 3

Dear Readers,

  As per usual, your Friday brings my Friday Seminar, where I introduce your time stream to some of the material from my introductory Anachronism course, CHRN/AUG 100.  Last week I talked about dating and temporal arrangements, which followed up on an article from earlier in this "course" on continuity.

  This week's seminar will expand on those topics via some examples and discussion of the markers that we use to develop a temporal continuity.  My supplementary post on Augury might also be useful, if only to give you a background into the kinds of sources that I'll be talking about in the rest of this seminar.  I apologize in advance for the more philosophical parts of this installment.  Francis helped me prepare it, and he really likes that sort of thing.  I've tried to include links where I think they will be useful.


  Now, first I want to caution you about this.  In your time stream, much is made of scientific and statistical certainty.  The idea of your science is that data should have one significant interpretation and others that are less likely, and thereby theories get developed.  With Anachronism, it isn't so.  There is no way to piece together a chronology from Augury data with high certainty, because time streams can separate based on extremely rapid lynchpin events.

  Here's an example.  Let's say that I have a photograph that is dated 1939, and that in this photograph I see Luftwaffe fighter planes lined up on a runway.  I can make a lot of conclusions from the imagery, where I might see the Iron Cross on the plane's tail, or other identifying marks.  I can also conclude that Aviation was invented in the time stream where this image originated.

  But I can't say that in that time stream, the Wright Brothers invented airplanes in the early 20th century.  Now, it's going to be true that they did in a whole lot of time streams where there are serious warplanes by 1939, but I can't be totally sure.  What if another inventor beat them to it, but other events went in essentially the same fashion?  It's always a possibility, unless I find a picture of the Wright Brothers' successful flight test, or another source confirming it, inside the same chunk of Augury data.  Even if I found the photo shown below, I couldn't draw a conclusion with good certainty.  I'd have to see the plane.

Image via Wikipedia

  Therefore, conclusions that Anachronists make can be somewhat handwavy for the tastes of more strictly scientific philosophers.  It comes with the territory that we need to be a little more postmodern than our positivist or utilitarian time-normal counterparts.  We talk a lot more about likelihood, usefulness, and possibility than we do about necessarily observed fact.

  Now, that might make you think what we do is an art rather than a science, but that's not really true either.  The burden of backing up our assertions does still lie with us, and the argument must be coherent and logical.  Anachronists don't make emotional appeals, but reasoned arguments.

  With that first example down, I want to move on to something a little bit more practical to illustrate how I work.

Since I've just noted how frequently I make assertions that could easily be wrong, I think for this example I'll turn to your time stream's War on Terror.  I don't think your contemporaries know quite enough about it yet to determine for sure if any conclusions I make are right or wrong, and so my post will live in safety until more information is released.


Terrorism is an interesting topic, because it generates a lot of media, and in turn, a lot of anachronism data.  It's rare to get something as detailed as from the September 11th, 2001 attacks in your time stream.  It also happens to be their anniversary for you today, so I thought some analysis would serve a fitting memorial.  They were quite disastrous, tragic events.

Still, we do get quite a lot of different pieces of information.  Pictures from the aftermath, articles and opinion, radio shows, video, and all manner of other news.

As time goes on, though, these media begin to diverge.  I had the Augury department run a few special attempts to pull information from your time stream specifically so that I can illustrate what I'm talking about.

Take, for example, this article.  It discusses the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States tangentially to the main topic of the article.  Since these attacks were a pivotal point in your time stream's history, the journalist does not see fit to explain what these attacks were or when they were committed.  Sure, it does say 9/11, but is that November 9th or September 11th?  I remind you that in European tradition for your time stream, dates are written d/m/y, whereas in US tradition they are m/d/y.

I've hinted at another question: What year did the "9/11" attacks take place?  From that article, I can't know.  It doesn't give me a year.  I also don't know what was attacked.  These lynchpin events have a lot of variation.  Was the Pentagon successfully attacked?  Did the towers collapse?  Was the White House attacked?  Did the planes go down due to passenger action?  Did the government shoot them down?  Each possibility has a time stream based on the decisions made, and this article tells me nothing.

It's not the writer's fault; he's not writing for an academic outside of time who wants to piece the narrative back together.  Thankfully, the augury data contained another article, namely, this one, tells me the exact details for your time stream.  The WTC, and the Pentagon were attacked, but one plane went down in Penslyvania.  So now I've learned that a young boy was arrested in Canada for terrorism related to a war in Afghanistan caused by attacks on two places in the US in 2001, on a specific date.

Without the second article, I can't even be sure what war in Afghanistan the boy was protesting.  I can't know the year, the reason for his terrorism, or really even understand the motivations of either side.  Augury data, if it's sparse for a given time stream, can produce a lot of headaches, as you can see.

Those two examples should get across the basic challenges that I see in my work, and the kinds of things I need to watch out for.  I planned to cover markers, but this is already a bit long, so I will save that for another Friday Seminar.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople