Hindsight: The End of Deception

by Peter Wright

In Southampton, near Stonehenge on the south coast of England, some of the world's greatest minds in physics meet for their annual symposium. Philip Blackmore, a professor from Cambridge University is well prepared for the meeting, but not for the proposition that he receives from a group of American colleagues. They want him to join a team that will build a machine that can see into the past. Not a time machine, beloved of science fiction, but outside the laws of physics, but a machine that can recover images of past events.Philip's initial reservations are overcome by Carol Dunning, a brilliant young graduate student from Cal. Tech. who returns with Philip briefly to Cambridge. The College agrees to grant him a sabbatical and he leaves with Carol and a graduate student to join the team at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. Project funding is provided by a mysterious philanthropic scientific foundation that is very generous, but swears them to secrecy.Even before the project starts, however, a string of mysterious accidents begin to plague the physicists and it quickly becomes apparent that someone is determined to stop the project at all costs. But who? And why?

280 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2005

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for an unusual reason--one of the characters shares my unusual last name (it came up when I did a search on Amazon). Fortunately, the subject-matter is not entirely outside of what I read for pleasure in any case.

The premise of the book is that some temporal physicists have been commissioned to design/build a machine that will allow them to view the past (the idea being that light can move temporally without too much energy, while moving matter would be prohibitively energy-intensive). The sponsor of the project is an extreme humanist/rationalist and the opponents of the project are extreme religious zealots. Along the way, self-serving politicians and intelligence operatives get into the mix as well.

Overall, the book has a plausible premise (at least to a lay person), though no one ever explained how/if the scientists took into account the revolution of the Earth around the Sun (not to mention the expansion of the universe). Even though there is some very good description of scientific trouble-shooting early in the book, the assumption throughout is that places on Earth are fixed; thus the characters can initially view their own lab in the machine and later can view historical events (for purposes of calibration) by going to the site of the battle, etc. There is apparently no danger that by going in March to a battle that took place in September, that the researchers will end up viewing an empty bit of space while the Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun. The choice of historical events to view is partly dictated by the location of the research (MIT), which means that datable events tend to be from the Revolutionary War and Colonial periods of American History. (The scientists, though depicted as history buffs, aren't even slightly curious about anything other than battles, with the exception of the Salem Witch Trials. The rationale is that they need events that are precisely datable for calibration purposes, but there's never any effort, despite a goal of 2000 years ago, to see what happens when they try to look earlier than the 1600s, nor to look at other datable events, such as laying of a foundation stone of a building, for example.)

The treatment of religion in the work is simplistic in the extreme. The two camps are an extreme humanist (and his rationalist churches) who believes that everyone can be freed from the superstition of religion by going back in time and seeing that miraculous occurrences at the heart of religion (including those from the life of Jesus) aren't real). On the other hand, there are extreme religious zealots, represented by the Opus Dei (really?? I've read up a little on this group, and although there are good reasons to find them troubling, they are not a secret organization provided with superhuman hit men--I guess we have Dan Brown to thank for this). All discussion of religion is intensely cynical, and even true believers are more interested in protecting clerics and institutions than in seeking truth. Even the humanists don't come off too well (though the sympathy clearly tilts in their direction); the lead humanist is arrogant to the point of hubris and extremely naïve as well. On the other hand, the early discussion of practicalities (funding, scientific obstacles, lab set-up, etc.) reads very much like the way academics I know talk.

The writing is adequate, though plot lines and dialogue could be edited a bit more. (And speaking of editing, the publisher/editor's choice of how to place line breaks in direct quotation often leaves the reader unsure of who is speaking.) The pacing and the character development are a little uneven, but overall this book is a good escapist read.

[Loucindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing idea, but hard to get through due to the writing.