None of the speculations here seem convincing to me. I’d expect there to be a simple “key” that “unlocks” the story and clearly makes its overall meaning clear (see Suzanne Delage), and none of this feels like it fits.
One element that struck with me, which you don’t mention, is:
[T]he Institute attempts a radical re-centering of the human condition upon this pataphysical temporal locus, an eternal September. Everything is coming to be, or has become, through the 30th of September, 1939. There is no camel which, followed for long enough through the desert of the real, with honesty and integrity, does not go through the eye of that needle.
To me, that evokes Laplace’s demon, the idea that precisely learning the state of the universe at one moment would let you run it forwards or backwards arbitrarily[1]. Perhaps it’d make sense to take the Institute’s mission seriously, and try to figure out what it is they’re actually trying to do?
(Though the Laplace’s-demon angle on things makes the “too late” idea even less sensible: it’s never too late, collecting the full knowledge of the state at any moment would let you unlock/anchor the whole history. So if something like this were the goal, re-centering the temporal locus on a day in a more information-rich era would be a much better approach.)
This doesn’t actually work under QM. Or, at least, doesn’t work from inside an Everett branch, since the information needed to exactly calculate forward evolution is spread throughout the whole amplitude distribution.
Kudos for going so in-depth on this.
None of the speculations here seem convincing to me. I’d expect there to be a simple “key” that “unlocks” the story and clearly makes its overall meaning clear (see Suzanne Delage), and none of this feels like it fits.
One element that struck with me, which you don’t mention, is:
To me, that evokes Laplace’s demon, the idea that precisely learning the state of the universe at one moment would let you run it forwards or backwards arbitrarily[1]. Perhaps it’d make sense to take the Institute’s mission seriously, and try to figure out what it is they’re actually trying to do?
(Though the Laplace’s-demon angle on things makes the “too late” idea even less sensible: it’s never too late, collecting the full knowledge of the state at any moment would let you unlock/anchor the whole history. So if something like this were the goal, re-centering the temporal locus on a day in a more information-rich era would be a much better approach.)
This doesn’t actually work under QM. Or, at least, doesn’t work from inside an Everett branch, since the information needed to exactly calculate forward evolution is spread throughout the whole amplitude distribution.