Friday Seminar Series: The Laws of Physics (or, "The End of Anachronism")

Dear Readers,

  As usual, on your Friday I post a short seminar that is taken from lectures from my introductory class, CHRN/AUG 100.  This edition covers limitations to my work.

   Specifically, I am talking about time streams that are impossible for me to study because of a variety of physical limitations.

  The realm of possibility is a big one.  Let's think back to physics classes for a minute: the universe, as your time stream has it, was created at a specific moment in a specific way.  That time is Time = Zero for the entire Universe.  From there, all physical choices happened using your kind of physics.

  Before Time = Zero, at, let's say, Time = Negative One, the laws of physics as you conceive them break down.  That is because the laws of physics as you conceive of them do not exist.  I cannot go into too much detail for fear of preempting the entire scientific community of your time stream, but suffice it to say that there is a sort of shuffling event of physical laws that occurs/occured/will occur in the infinitesimal time period just before Time = Zero.

Image via Wikipedia

  It just so happens that the laws of physics that you are used to, and thereby the chemistry, astronomy, and biology you take for granted, came out of one such shuffling event.

   Ergo, if that reshuffle happened a little differently, the equations that sit to the left of this paragraph might have come up a lot differently.  Basic things about life, the universe, and everything would be off the charts in terms of their differences.  Life might not be possible, and certainly life would not be as you know it.

   That means there are a lot of time streams where we get an utterly nonsensical signal from the Department of Augury.  The time stream might have totally unreasonable physical laws, or it might be that any sentient life there has absolutely no means to to communicate that we are familiar with.  It's possible that their only means of communication are in a medium that augury cannot reveal.  There are a lot of different explanations for gibberish data, and you will encounter such gibberish data as an Anachronist.

  The reason for the seminar, however, is to convince you that it's not a good idea to just skip gibberish.  Yes, it is a good idea to work on the more understandable time streams and yes, you should have a career based on the perceptible.  But it's easy to just discard a bunch of data that does not make sense to you, and far less easy to explore that data from time to time in hopes you might see patterns and make a major breakthrough in translation.

  To sum up, what I say here is that there are limits to what our study can do.  We can't see everywhere and everywhen because there are some places that just look like nonsense.  I also say that it's important to avoid using nonsense as a catchall term that protects you from having to work too hard.  Just because something looks like nonsense to you does not mean it is nonsense indeed.  This is a vital lesson for the Anachronist who wishes his or her career to get off the ground.


Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople