“When I was a kid I wanted to invent a time machine. Read all the science fiction. Asimov, Heinlein, Wells. How was it going to work? Many Worlds Hypothesis maybe? Straight Back to the Future-style paradoxes? I didn’t know. So I went to the best university I could get into, which should have been the first red flag, and made my first discovery: I was really bad at math and physics.
In the course of my studies I couldn’t help running across Stephen Hawking’s famous question: “If time travel is possible, why aren’t we inundated by tourists from the future?” That got to me. Why aren’t we? Why haven’t we…wait a minute, Stephen Hawking isn’t an historian or a sociologist or an artist. He knows physics and cosmology, and expertise is always specific, not general. Maybe time tourists or scholars are all around and it takes the right kind of expertise to find them.
I switched my major to History forthwith, although what I was hoping for was something more along the lines of Asimov’s psychohistory than the tweed-soaked visions of academia that sprang to most minds. I wanted to look for foci of events, outliers, people who were in such a great place at the best possible time that they had to have had some foreknowledge.
In a word, I was looking for anachronisms.
Of course I looked at all the usual suspects. Da Vinci, Tesla, Edison, Franklin, Avicenna. They all checked out…”
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