The Temporal Atlas Volume I Nodes in Time (Paperback)

Paperback. THE MAP WE HAVE NEVER DRAWNSuppose history is not merely a line.Suppose that when we place certain events upon a sufficiently large map, we discover that some of them seem to gather around particular people, places, institutions, technologies, families, and periods of time.A physicist encounters an unusual idea.Decades later, another physicist discovers an old recording containing that idea.An astronaut conducts an experiment involving consciousness while traveling between Earth and the Moon.Researchers at a laboratory investigate whether information can somehow be perceived without the ordinary senses.Intelligence agencies quietly ask whether such an ability-if it exists-could have military value.Pilots and police officers report unexplained objects.Scientists investigate them.Documents disappear into government archives.Decades pass.The documents emerge again.A new generation reads them.New technologies make possible experiments that the original investigators could barely have imagined.And suddenly the past seems to be speaking to the future.This book begins with a simple question: What happens if we map all of it?Not merely UFO sightings.Not merely remote viewing.Not merely quantum mechanics.Not merely intelligence programs.Not merely stories about time travel.We will attempt something considerably larger.We will construct an atlas. WHAT IS A TEMPORAL ATLAS?An ordinary atlas maps geography.It tells us that a river passes through a valley, that a highway intersects another highway, that a city stands beside an ocean, or that mountains divide one region from another.But imagine another kind of atlas.Instead of latitude and longitude, its coordinates include: time, place, person, institution, technology, experiment, document, memory, relationship, and idea.Every important event becomes a node.Every connection becomes a line.Some lines will be strong.Others will be uncertain.Some will disappear entirely.And some may unexpectedly reconnect fifty years later.That is the territory we are going to explore. FIVE DIFFERENT MAPSAs this investigation develops, we must resist one enormous temptation.A connection does not automatically prove a cause.Two events separated by exactly twenty years may be interesting without one producing the other.Two researchers knowing the same person may reveal a social network rather than a secret program.A strange mathematical property of time does not prove that a legendary time machine actually existed.An intelligence agency investigating psychic phenomena does not prove that psychic phenomena worked reliably.And a government investigating UFO reports does not mean every reported UFO was extraterrestrial.Therefore our Temporal Atlas will contain several overlapping maps.THE DOCUMENTED MAPThese are events for which primary records exist: government documents, laboratory reports, scientific papers, patents, photographs, audio recordings, contemporary correspondence, and independently verifiable historical records.THE TESTIMONY MAPHere we place accounts from participants and witnesses.Testimony matters.But memory changes.People misunderstand events.Stories evolve.Therefore testimony will be preserved without automatically being treated as proof. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…