Timeline

by Michael Crichton

Fiction
First published in November 1999
　

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it." Niels Bohr, 1927

I have decided to write a book review section since the first day I have published my own website in Oct 06.  When I was really doing it, I thought to myself, I hadn't really read books lately.  However, I really want to do it and I thought I might just do review on books I had read and liked a lot.

Timeline is my most favorite amongst all the fictions I have ever read so far.  I must have read this story a million times.  I saw the movie but it was really a waste.  The book is a billion times better than the movie.

When graduate students reconstructing a medieval site in France discover a 600-year-old note signed by their missing professor, they are convinced their equipment is giving them faulty readings. But quantum physics and a shadowy technology company in the desert of the Southwest send the students, woefully unprepared, back to fourteenth-century France to rescue their professor. And the trouble begins...

Crichton is a very serious writer.  Most of his books have in-depth explanation of the technology and science used in the story,  quantum theory (Timeline), DNA (Jurassic Park), nano technology (Prey), primates (Congo) and countless more.  In order to do that, he normally spends years in research and works with specialists, scientists and genres.

The author illustrated the medieval details vividly.  The costume, environment & customs etc.  It even has a map of the villages in the book.  The book is full of humor.  And you will easily fall in love with the characters, the humor of Chris, the bravery of Marek, the independent Kate etc.   The story is a stunning adventure which not just brings you thrill and fun but also science, history & knowledge.  In the end, you will not be surprised by the choice of Marek.  I may do the same if I were him.

Official web site crichton-official.com/timeline/

Read some excerpts of the book here.

PLOT HOLE  There is plot hole to the story.  Not that I have found it by reading, I read it somewhere on web.  If you can understand what it means.. here it is: The adventurers are not really traveling in time, they are traveling through the quantam foam of the "multiverse" to a parallel dimension that is identical to our world in the year 1357. However in the present day, the archeology students find Professor Johnston's eyeglasses and a note that he had left for them some 640 years earlier. If he was actually in a parallel dimension, and not in the past, there would be no way for them to find anything that Professor Johnston had left for them. Nor could they have found the tombstones of Claire and Andre after they returned to the present day. The only way out of this paradox is if there was a third dimension, with an identical set of adventurers, who traveled back to the timeline of "our" past and performed the same actions that our adventurers performed in the dimension that they traveled to. Also if the machines work by destroying the individual being sent back and relying on the fact that almost identical copies will be sent in their place from a universe that knows how to rebuild the travelers on the other end no one sent back should be able to return to the universe that the plot starts in but rather the universe that was able to rebuild them. However, people are sent back to the original universe even though it is not the same universe they originated from.