Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [91]
When Eckels departed, the country was in the midst of a political election in which the moderate candidate—Keith—was victorious. Had the extremist candidate—Deutscher—won, he would have established an oppressive dictatorship. Exiting the machine Eckels and the others notice that things are not quite the same. The wall advertisement now reads:
Tyme Sefari Inc.
Sefaris Tu Any Yeer En The Past
Yu Naim the Animall
Wee Taekyuthair
Yu Shoot Itt
In this alternate history, Deutscher won. Predating chaos theory by decades, Bradbury took the butterfly effect—the sensitive dependence on initial conditions—quite literally in his counterfactual denouement.
Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling “No, it can’t be. Not a little thing like that. No!” Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead. “Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!” cried Eckels. It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It couldn’t change things. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?
Could it? Not likely, but if it did it would alter the historical sequence down a radically different path, tweaking the future a lot more than just alternative spellings and election outcomes. A more likely result would have been no English at all as a language, or no democratic elections, or even no Homo sapiens. More likely, however, large-scale necessities would have washed over and averaged out such relatively insignificant contingencies. The flap of a butterfly’s wings, or that of ten billion butterfly wings, in most circumstances most of the time would have been overridden by a couple of thundering T. rexes.
History is a product of contingencies (what might have been) and necessities (what had to be), the effects of both dependent on the time and circumstances of the event in question and the particular historical path on which it falls. Because of this, historians should continue doing what they have always done—write narratives with all their unique details, contingent events, and necessitating social and historical forces, blended into a complex story with plot and characters.
But historians can and should (if we want history to be a science) formulate models, metaphors, and (some day) perhaps even mathematical equations to explain not only why things happened as they did, but why they seem to happen over and over in their own contingently unique but necessarily similar fashion. Can we learn something about the past, and even the present (for which history is written), from considering alternate historical time lines? Can we play “What if?” games of history to any benefit beyond cocktail party ruminations? We can. In fact, we already do.
Counterfactual “What If?” History
One mode of humor employs a ridiculous exaggeration of a mundane or prosaic idea. Of the many humorous skits in this genre written by the original Saturday Night Live crew from the 1970s, one of the funniest was to take the parlor game of “What if?” history to its reductio ad absurdum, such as “What if Napoleon had the atom bomb?” Well, what if he did? Presumably he would have dropped one on Blücher as he rallied his troops at Waterloo. We know this is ridiculous,