Reliving History with Time Travel: Timeline by Michael Crichton

 



                    In this blog post I will be reviewing the book Timeline by (yes him again) Michael Crichton. This is the third book that I have read by the same author, and given the quality of the other two books I had no doubt that this one (although not from the same series) would not disappoint. I'm slightly more than halfway through the book and it definitely seems like something I look forward to finishing.


                    The book is about a group of graduate students at Yale studying medieval history, specifically that of England and France in the fourteenth century. They discover a bifocal lens buried in the ground, but quickly dismiss it as contamination from their own backpacks and move on. Then they find a mysterious note with a date, 4/7/1357, and only two words: HELP ME (Crichton, 91). The handwriting looks exactly like that of the students' professor, but it it once again brushed off as a forgery. However, the ink is carbon dated and is found to have originated around 1361 AD, consistent with the note (Crichton, 100). This is the start of a long and winding story involving time travel, alternate universes, quantum physics and the occasional medieval knight.


                    One of the reasons I like this book is its detailed graphic depictions that help the reader process information and grasp confusing concepts, these depictions are also found in the other books by Michael Crichton that I have reviewed. For example, while the students are learning about the physics behind the inter-universal transportation they are about to undergo, they learn about the double-slit experiment, its variants, and its consequences regarding reality. In the pages there are accompanying images depicting the setup and what was observed, starting with shining light through one slit and observing one bar on the screen, then with two slits and an interference pattern, then the image on the screen when two more slits are added, then a variant where the photons are not sent as a stream of light but instead one by one (Crichton, 111-113). These diagrams complement the textual explanations well and allow the reader to absorb much more information. Additionally, when the students first enter the 14th century, the book provides a convenient map of locations that they had previously been researching and will soon be exploring, including the English town of Castelgard and the French fortress of La Roque on the other side of the Dordogne River.


                    In conclusion, this book is a very promising read only halfway through and I am excited to see what comes later on. It ties together the disciplines of history and science and gives an interesting perspective to how technology based in advanced physics can be used to aid in the study of completely different subjects. I recommend this book to anyone that is interested in science and/or history, you will certainly finish the book having learned many new things.

-Shreyas Singh

Comments

  1. Grace W-KMarch 22, 2021 at 11:33 AM

    Although I’m not much of a science person, I’ve always found time travel and the idea of alternate universes really interesting, so this book sounds really good. I also like the time period the author chose, the medieval times, since those years in history were quite exciting. I hope I can read Timeline in the future.

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  2. Chloe JungMarch 25, 2021 at 9:33 PM

    Books about time travel kind of scare me but this book also sounds really cool. The whole relationship between their professor and time traveling is again, super scary to me, but I am interested to see what the note meant. I will definitely check this out!

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  3. Inniyew TesfawMarch 28, 2021 at 6:55 AM

    The time travel aspect of the novel sounds like it adds a complex twist to the plot line, I like it. The premise of the novel sounds very interesting, I'd like to check it out some time

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