When I saw my dad pull into the neighborhood, I decided to cross the street to meet him. I stepped into the road and was immediately struck by a car. I was sent somersaulting back through the air and landed on my back on the sidewalk that I had just left. Blake knelt down beside me and I remember staring into his face for what felt like an eternity while I was being surrounded by more and more people. When the EMTs arrived, the first thing they did was cut open my jeans to appraise my broken leg. I remember a flash of distress over the fact that my brand new jeans were now ruined.* All of this happened; I'm quite certain of it. It is one of my most vivid memories and I imagine that it will be with me for the rest of my life.
In hindsight, I wish I had not stepped out in front of that car. I spent nearly six weeks in a wheelchair as a result of my injuries. That was followed by months of physical therapy. Today, my leg is healed, but I can still feel a dull soreness in it when I run and I have a large scar on the underside of my right calf that tingles every time it is touched. If I could go back in time, I would prevent myself from being hit by that car, but that's never going to happen because time travel is impossible and one cannot change events that have already occurred.
Six Octobers later to the day, the University of Alabama's football team was preparing to travel to Starkville, Mississippi to play the football team from Mississsippi State University. Alabama was undefeated at the time and ranked #4 in the country. The game marked Alabama's sixth of eight SEC contests. Were they to win this game, they would be in complete control of their own destiny for the rest of the season. They had remaining SEC games against LSU and Auburn that would decide who would represent the western division in the SEC championship. Were they to win this title, a spot in the national championship game was all but assured. By all accounts, this was an important game.
Well, Alabama went to Starkville and took care of business, winning the game 17-0. Spirits were high in Tuscaloosa as the team climbed to third in the national rankings following their victory. Alabama would go on to lose their final two games, forcing them to settle for a birth in that year's Cotton Bowl. Still, nobody can ever take away that victory against Mississippi State and the joyous feelings that the team's fans felt when their beloved Crimson Tide were riding high on a 9-0 record and all of the possibilities contained therein.
Or can they? This summer, the NCAA identified seven University of Alabama football players who "improperly obtained" textbooks during their time at school. As a result, Alabama is being forced to "vacate" their wins in 21 football games from the 2005-2007 seasons in which the seven athletes in question participated. Their October 29th, 2005 contest against Mississippi State is one such game.
Vacating a win is somewhat of a slippery concept to pin down. It basically means that, for record keeping purposes, Alabama did not win that football game on October 29th, 2005. "Vacating" a win is different from "forfeiting" a win (another possible NCAA punishment) in that Mississippi State will not be credited with a victory on that same date. The Bulldogs still have a loss on their record, but Alabama has neither a win nor a loss; the game does not affect their record at all. Additionally, all of the players who played in the game still own the statistics that they generated during the game. Basically what the NCAA is saying is that a game took place between Alabama and Mississippi State on October 29th, 2005. During this game, plays were made, statistics were accumulated, and points were scored. The game resulted in a loss for Mississippi State and no decision for Alabama.
You may be tempted to argue that this is just a symbolic slap on the wrist that carries no actual, practical meaning in today's world. I imagine that you would have a hard time making that case to Bobby Bowden, the coach of Florida State University's football team. As anyone with even a passing interest in college football knows, Bowden is locked in a struggle with Penn State University's Joe Paterno to see who will retire with the most coaching wins in the history of college football. Earlier this summer, the NCAA told Florida State that they would have to vacate 14 wins from some of Bowden's previous seasons for infractions similar to those that plagued Alabama. Prior to this decision, Bowden was merely two victories behind Paterno in the race. If the decision stands, it will all but ensure that he will never eclipse his northern rival. Sixteen wins is a near-impossible gap to bridge when there are at most only 14 games in a college football season. Paterno merely needs to wait until Bowden retires and the record is his. Right now, the president of Florida State University is fighting the NCAA's decision tooth and nail while scores of boosters have been mobilized to donate money for the inevitable legal battle that will ensue.
The NCAA can change the results of old football games. So what? In my view, time travel into the past requires only two elements: 1) an event in the past needs to be changed in some measurable way; 2) that change must affect additional measurable changes in the present. The NCAA is not capable of time travel in this sense because they did not literally change what happened in Starkville that day. But there is another sort of time travel that I will call "de facto time travel" in which only present-day man's perception of a past event needs to be changed and this change in perception affects measurable change in present reality. The NCAA meets both of these requirements and is thus capable of de facto time travel by my definition within the realms of the various sports that they govern.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, the NCAA's ability to change the outcomes of past games is not all that important. It is certainly deeply important to Bobby Bowden and the people that care about him, but outside of that relatively small group, it is not extremely significant. This is why the NCAA is allowed by the world at large to possess their de facto time traveling powers; they lord over a frivolous game that affects a relatively small group of people. No real harm done.
If de facto time travel powers fall into the wrong hands however, the harm created can be very real indeed. Consider the historic practice of conquering nations burning the history books of the conquered in order to better assimilate these conquered people into their civilization. Who knows how many cultures were completely eradicated by this practice throughout the world's history? Maybe zero. Maybe thousands. It's impossible to tell, and that's the point.
Even today, the history of the world depends largely on which country produced the history book. People alive today can argue for a lifetime about why a historical event occurred, or who was responsible, or even if it ever occurred at all, but we will never know for sure because we weren't there to experience it. I would argue that the whole of a human being's knowledge is founded on experience. Either your own experience of that of another. Consider the football example from earlier. No matter what the NCAA says, we all know that Alabama actually won that game because it happened four years ago. We were there; we experienced it. 200 years from now, nobody will have been alive for the game, but they can rely on the historical record created by humans who were. While the NCAA is the only official record keeper for college football, it's not the only organization keeping track of things, so there will be dissenting views and people will most likely be able to weed out the truth. But what about 500 years from now? What about 1,000? As time goes on, it will be harder and harder to discern what actually happened and people will increasingly rely on the official record for truth.
When you are considering any event that happened in the past that you did not directly experience, then you must rely 100% on the opinions of others. If one of these "others" is someone you know and/or trust (like the official record keeping body of college football), you may be content to accept his version of the events in the absence of consensus, but if such a person does not exist, then you must rely on one of a variety of group consensus views that can be offered by anybody. The more people believe a view, the more objectively truthful one is inclined to consider it. Because we live in a huge world with billions of people in it, we are able to compare and contrast group consensus views to form a personal world view that feels more accurate to us.
But what if our world got smaller? What if there was only one consensus group view? Let's return to October 28th, 1999. What if some organization like the NCAA had the power of de facto time travel and used it to alter the record of events to say that I was never actually hit by that car? Maybe the group consensus is so convincing and so strong that it is shared by every single person in the world besides me. I could either continue in my belief that I was hit by the car and be considered insane by the rest of society or I could arrive at the perfectly reasonable conclusion that my mind had played some sort of trick on me and I had not in fact been hit by that car. Then, 100% of the world's population would believe that I was never hit by a car. At that point, it would be impossible to argue that it ever actually happened.
In such a world, de facto time travel would be very dangerous. You can make the argument that you can never erase an event that happened in the past (that would be literal time travel), but humans cannot operate outside of their own heads, so whether or not it ever literally happened is meaningless. "The past" is an idea constructed by human beings. It exists entirely within our minds. We rely on consensus and historical record to validate our experiences which transpire in "the past" within our minds. If those two things were erased or altered in such a powerful way that it shook our belief in our experience, then the event never happened in "the past" because (again) the past is a construct created by our mind. Present day 1999 me was hit by the car, but present day 1999 me doesn't exist. Past 1999 me exists in the brains of the people alive in 2009, but that's it. If past 1999 me was changed in some way and everyone alive in 2009 agreed on the change, then it wouldn't matter what happened to present day 1999 me. There would be no reason for anyone alive in 2009 to even conceive of me being hit by a car and that would be that. Maybe the events never actually changed, but you couldn't say so for sure because it now happened outside the realm of human reality and anything outside the realm of human reality isn't real and doesn't exist. Perhaps there is another observer who has a better vantage point at reality than humans, but as of now, we don't have access to that viewpoint, so it's irrelevant (even if it does exist, which it may not).
Luckily, we do not live in such a small world with only one consensus. Yet.
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*Yeah, that's right. My new Old Navy jeans. Laugh it up.
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