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Fiction. © Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
I was once a time traveler. This is the story of my adventure. You may enjoy it.
I am not a paleontologist, nor am I a historian. I am a mathematician. When I was a young man, I was doing research for a biography of the famous mathematician, Dr. Adolf Berger. There is a joke, among mathematicians, that Dr. Berger was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Mathematics. Of course there is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics. But, Dr. Berger actually won a Nobel Prize for Physics, perhaps he was the first pure mathematician to do so. But, that is a different story, which I may tell some day, if I ever finish the biography. I originally had no interest in time travel. But, I live in a time when time travel is rather common. And, in a project such as a biography, it would be pure foolishness to fail to use time travel as part of the research. Besides, Dr. Berger was known as the best mathematics lecturer in history. And I wanted to see him in action.
I traveled back into the twenty-first century, and was able to sit in on one of Dr. Berger's lectures. And I saw that he was not a lecturer, but a great story teller. In that lecture, he told a story about Archimedes. And I was no longer conscious of the story teller. I was only aware of the story itself. And I saw that Archimedes was not a man, but a god. Here was a mathematical mind that was more than 1900 years ahead of its time. Archimedes used limits, long before they were invented, in a kind of differential calculus, more than 1900 years before Newton and Leibniz invented differential calculus. And, Archimedes used infinite sums of areas, an integral calculus, more than 1900 years before Newton and Leibniz invented integral calculus.
Was any other person in history 1900 years ahead of his/her time, in any field?
I forgot about Dr. Berger. I never finished my book. I had to learn more about Archimedes, a man who was much more interesting and amazing than all of the kings who ever lived, all of the scientists, all of the explorers and philosophers.
How could Archimedes be 1900 years ahead of his time, and still be human?
For the next few years, I studied Archimedes, his contemporaries, his predecessors, the ancient Greek language. I nearly memorized all of his known works. And, I planned to travel back in time, and study the great man, study under the great man, and read his lost works.
I traveled back to about 260 BC, which I hoped was a few years before Archimedes published his first book. The place was Syracuse, on the island of Sicily. I rented a room. And I started looking for Archimedes. I could not find him. No one had ever heard of him. Something was wrong.
What was going on? Had I changed history? All I had done was arrive and ask about Archimedes. Had some other time traveler changed history, perhaps killing Archimedes when he was a child, or even killing one of his ancestors?
History is supposed to be resilient. If you go back in time and kill Hitler (a notoriously evil man of the twentieth century), some other Hitler will rise up and repeat the same events that the original Hitler did. Or so I had been told.
But here, there was no Archimedes.
One day a man came to ask me for help. He had heard that I was a great mathematician. And he seemed to think that my name was Archimedes. Since I couldn't send him to the real Archimedes, I decided to try to help him, myself. He had a boundary dispute with his neighbor. It was just a simple application of the Pythagorean theorem. I solved it for him. And the fame of Archimedes began to spread. I became Archimedes, at least until the real one showed up.
After a few years, I decided that it was probably past time for Archimedes to publish his first book. So, I wrote it, from memory.
I became the most famous citizen of Syracuse. I became the friend of royalty. My fame spread throughout the known world. I acquired students, disciples even. I did not run naked through the streets when I discovered (rediscovered) the principle of buoyancy. I wrote books on various sciences (levers and other machines) and on mathematics (circles, cylinders, cones, spheres, etc.). I assumed that many of these books would be lost, as most were not known in later millennia. I lived in Syracuse (and in Alexandria) for 48 years.
Then we went to war against Rome. We had foolishly supported Carthage against Rome. Syracuse was attacked by the Roman fleet. I invented catapults, and cranes, and flaming liquids, and underwater obstacles. The Romans would sometimes abandon ship if I swung a rope in their direction. There were rumors that I had single-handedly defeated the Roman fleet.
But I knew that my days were numbered. My students and I devised a plan of faking my own death. They would spread the rumor that a Roman soldier had killed me.
One night someone (not one of us) opened the gates to the Romans. And I fled, in my time machine.
Now I know why Archimedes was 1900 years ahead of his time.
Author's note: There is more than one paradox of time travel, or more than one version of the same one. This story illustrates a paradox of simple cause and effect. The time traveler reads works by Archimedes, and then goes back and "creates" the originals from memory. The situation is circular.
I thought of the idea for this story, several years ago. I thought, "Who was the most likely historical figure to have been a time traveler?" And a story began to form. Shortly thereafter, I saw a headline on a supermarket tabloid, that someone had suggested that Archimedes was a visitor from outer space. When I have a bizarre idea, it becomes fiction. When some other person has a bizarre idea, it becomes "fact."