Michael Crichton is well known for researching his topic well before he puts pen to paper. Time travel on the other hand has been the topic of a lot of different discussions, novels and even scientific theories. When describing issues related to timeline and my personal opinion about it, I had rather start off with what is known and where the scientific community to a large extent stands regarding time travel.
Time travel or the idea of time as another dimension was prevalent since a long time. Newton spoke about this in his’’Principia’’ and so did a lot of other distinguished physicists. However it was not until Einstein that the idea of time travel took root. Essentially all this started with the Theory of General Relativity. The theory of relativity says that time and space constitute what is known as the space-time fabric. They are interconnected in ways far beyond the intuitive understanding.
In principle this could be understood from the fact that when you are moving at a constant velocity, there is no way in which you could say if you are at rest or in motion. General relativity includes even accelerated motion by simply converting this sense of acceleration into gravity as we feel it. This means that gravity could be interchaged into acceleration during motion or vice versa.
This goes on to say that unless you are travelling with respect to another person or atleast feeling some force (because of which there would be acceleration and hence more/less gravity) there is no way in which you could travel in time. Not in the way Crichton says.
Therefore the idea that one could simply travel in the way crichton shows is misleading. Even though the novel is fantastic, I believe he should have in some ways tried to explain in simple terms the basic tenets of relativity. There is another thing to be kept in mind. If you travel into the future, then there is absolutely no way in which you could go back to your initial state, or go back to the past.
Goin into the future is a one way journey. It never tunrs back. This is supported not only by the theory of relativity but also by the second law of thermodynamics which talks about the arrow of time. Therefore the fact that people in Crichton’s novel can actually travel back and forth in both directions of time is also misleading.
But since we live in an 11-dimensional world(courtesy String Theory), and since any of the other 7 unknown dimensions could potentially include another curled up dimension of time, it could be then possible to travel in this second dimension of time in both ways rather than this familiar one in which we live.
Having said so I will say that the novel in its face value has a very nice story though the movie was not so good. The whole idea of time travel though is not very nicely explained. In the way in which it IS explained, it can never take place. But for a reader who doesnt want to perform a postmortem of such a novel I would suggest you to go ahead and read this piece of work. Even though it suggests ideas far removed from science, it does open up your imagination which is important.