“Indulge the hypothesis.”
He huffed furiously, then exclaimed, “Three possible outcomes! One: at the very instant that he makes the decision to send himself the winning numbers, he remembers receiving them and his personal timeline changes, thus he self-perpetuates his own existence as without the winning numbers he could not have built his time machine. Paradox within that being that nothing can come from nothing, and his initiative, his causal event, is in fact an effect, effect preceding cause, but I don’t suppose we’re dealing with logic in this scenario. Two: the whole universe collapses. Rather melodramatic, I know, but if we consider time as a scalar concept with no negative value then I really see no other way, which seems a shame if all we’re discussing here is a little bet at Newmarket. Three: at the very instant he makes the decision to send himself the numbers, a parallel universe is created. In his universe, his linear timeline, he returns home having not won anything at Newmarket in his life, while in a parallel universe his younger self is rather surprised to discover that he’s a millionaire and carries on quite happily thank you. Implications?”
“I have no idea,” I replied brightly. “I merely wished to see if you were capable of lateral thinking.”
He gave another great huff of exasperation and stared fuming into the fire. Then, “I enjoyed your paper. Ignoring the wishy-washy, namby-pamby philosophical stuff, which, I personally thought, verged on the almost theological, I thought your paper was marginally more interesting than the usual journal matter. That’s what I wished to say.”
“I am honoured. But if your complaint is that ethics have no place in pure science, I’m afraid I must be forced to disagree with you.”
“Of course they don’t! Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers.”
“Would you shoot Hitler?” I asked.
He scowled. “I thought we had just determined a likelihood of the universe being destroyed by such temporal tampering.”
“We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the trials of war,” I replied. “We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself could experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside.”
He drummed his fingers along the edge of his chair then blurted, “There are socio-economic forces that must be considered too. Was Hitler the sole cause of war? I would argue no.”
“But the direction the war took…?”
“But there’s the thing!” he exclaimed, the eyebrows back into full swing. “If I make the decision to shoot Hitler, how do I not know that someone less willing to fight in Russia in the dead of winter, or to besiege cities with minimal strategic value at the cost of hundreds of thousands of men, or start bombing London and not her airfields–how do I know that this other, saner warmonger will not emerge from the conditions already in place?”
“You argue complexity as an excuse for inaction?”
“I argue… I argue…” He groaned, throwing his hands off the arms of his chair in frustration. “I argue that it is precisely these hypothetical dabblings with philosophy that undermined the otherwise sound integrity of your paper!”
He fell silent and I, already tired before he came, enjoyed it a while. He stared into the fire and looked for all the world like he had been in my armchair his whole life, as much a piece of furniture as it. “Would you like a drink?” I asked at last.
“What are you drinking?”
“Scotch.”
“I’ve already had a bit much…”
“I won’t tell the beadle.”
A brief hesitation then, “Thank you.”
I poured him a glass, and as he took it I said, “So tell me, Mr Rankis, what brings you to our hallowed halls?”
“Answers,” he replied firmly. “Measurable, objective. What lies beneath this reality, what is going on in the world we cannot perceive, deeper than protons and neutrons, bigger than galaxies and suns. If time is relative then light speed has become the measuring stick of the universe, but is that all time is? An inconstant factor in the equations of speed?”
“And here I thought the young were only interested in sex and music.”
He grinned, the first genuine flash of humour I’d seen. Then, “I hear you’re up for a professorship.”
“I won’t get it.”
“Of course not,” he answered amiably. “You’re far too young. It wouldn’t be just.”
“Thank you for your vote of confidence.”
“You can’t say you’re not expecting to achieve a thing, then express resentment that others agree with you.”