Hello, friends, and welcome back to the A to Z Challenge. For this year’s challenge, I’ve been telling you more about the universe of Tomorrow News Network, my upcoming Sci-Fi adventure series. In today’s post, W is for:
WATERLOO
Pro tip: if you ever meet a time traveler and want to learn more about how time travel works, ask who won the Battle of Waterloo. Among chronotheorists (scientists involved in the study and practice of time travel), Waterloo is one of the most famously “unstuck” events in history.
As Talie Tappler explains:
Time is time, right? It’s such a simple, self-evident thing, and yet time is one of the most difficult concepts to explain in words. But I can tell you this: time is an awful lot like a living thing. It’s constantly moving, constantly shifting and writhing like an angry snake. Every moment in time exists in a state of flux. All possibilities exist. All possibilities are real, even the mutually contradictory ones–especially the mutually contradictory ones!
Today, you can know for certain that Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo; tomorrow, you may find yourself equally certain that Napoleon lost. History changes and changes again, and you never even notice because, of course, as history changes your memory changes with it.
We chronotheorists call it the historical uncertainty principle, because you can never be certain about a historical event unless it is being observed. Observation! That’s the key! Observation forces all those mutually contradictory possibilities to collapse into one singular historical reality. And the more people who observe an event, the more certain it becomes, and the less likely it is to change later.
As I said in a previous post, the Tomorrow News Network has over 900 quadrillion viewers. It’s true that the Tomorrow News Network is a bit of a mystery to most citizens of the galaxy. In some corners, T.N.N. reporters are feared, even hated. But whatever else the Tomorrow News Network might be, whatever else they might represent, I think we can all agree that 900 quadrillion viewers is an awful lot of observers observing historical events.
Next time on Tomorrow News Network: A to Z, did you know space aliens have an alphabet too?
Planet Pailly 
I will come back tomorrow, because as I can read the future, I know I will learn the space aliens’ alphabet :))
W is for Women
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This post makes a lot of sense! I love that observation is key!
W is for Weak
https://thedreamgirlwrites.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/weak-2/
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Thanks! This was actually one of the hardest parts for me to write. I had a lot of talks with my editor about this, and I went through so many different versions of Talie’s uncertainty principle speech before I finally settled on this version.
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I’m glad you chose this!
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Hmmm. To maximize the superposition of possibilities, keep it hidden from the TNN. But does that involve keeping it hidden for all time? How far into the future does TNN go?
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Good question. Tomorrow News Network claims to be headquartered in the year twenty billion. They never say whose calendar that date is based on, though. In any case, if you’re trying to maintain a superposition (and yes, some people are trying to do just that), then you’re going to have to hide from T.N.N. for a long, loooong time.
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