Very interesting. If I understand correctly, does this mean cloning is a functionally impossible task? I've always been entertained by the paradoxes where someone is teleported ala Michael Crichton's Timeline, and is then (due to some glitch) "duplicated", leading to interesting quandaries about "who is who". If Penrose is right about consciousness [0], this means all these fantastical paradoxes are just fantasy, right? [0]: https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/why-a-genius-scientist-thin...
I enjoyed the first half of Timeline, and like I said, it was my first exposure to the quantum physics presented there. The second half (after everyone was trapped in the past) seemed kind of cliche. I didn't find Prey too interesting though. I'd already known about nanobots and at that point was a professional software developer, so the programming aspect didn't have the same "magical" appeal as the others. Perhaps if you're already familiar with the area he covered, it doesn't hold as much of an appeal?
Timeline wasn't about the mechanisms of time travel, it was about the past. He may have gotten some physics wrong, but it was the historical stuff that stuck with me. While I agree that some of his newer stuff wasn't so good, his older stuff really turned me on to certain fields like archeology, physics, nanotechnology etc. My mouth literally dropped open when I saw the headline. I wish his family well. :(
Undoubtedly. The reason Timeline held (and does hold) such an attraction for me is that it helped me realize that the people in the past weren't stupid or maybe even misguided compared to our current selves. They were just working with different sets of information. A professional historian would not find something like this new at all, so your perspective does matter.
Timeline was the last book of Crichton's I read. It really turned me off. I had been a fan from a young age, but that was it. He ignored or twisted science, reason, and logic just for "cool" plot points, far more so than in any previous book.
People slag on him for his more recent work and speeches, but at least for me, his books really made me interested in the science presented in them. Even stuff like Timeline, which piqued my curiosity in everything it talked about.
There may or may not be a new revisionism, but the idea has been around a while. I first remember coming across this idea in Timeline by Michael Crichton: http://www.amazon.com/Timeline-Michael-Crichton/dp/034541762... And I doubt he came up with the idea. I also think I heard that this debate has been going on in medieval scholarship for a while. That said, the debate is unlikely to be a strawman that glosses over the very real collapse in certain types of knowledge. I doubt the scholarly debate explains whatever is currently happening on the popular level.
If Michael Crichton's Timeline is to be believed, I should be worried about disease, at least for the past... although there's no reason I couldn't contract COVID-2519 and die...