Inspired by “The Ghost Professor” by Craig Miller
Time travel has always intrigued authors and philosophers. It is not just the excitement of traveling to another age, encountering historical icons, or experiencing legendary events firsthand. Beyond that lies a question deeper than the surface: if given the opportunity to modify history, what responsibility do we bear? Craig Miller’s The Ghost Professor grapples with this conundrum through the lens of Dr. Gordon H. Kingman, a professor, historian, and unwilling time traveler whose adventures transport him from 1920s New York through to the tumultuous 1960s and beyond.
Kingman’s adventures are vivid, even enviable. He is present at Bob Dylan’s initial paid gig in 1961, meets Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and sees baseball heroes at the old Yankee Stadium. But these are not merely nostalgic sketches. They have the troubling possibility: by attending, am I altering what was supposed to happen?
The “butterfly effect” is shorthand for this worry, that one decision, however small, might ripple through history with disastrous results. Would dropping a fifty-dollar bill into Dylan’s tip jar change the course of American folk music? Could investing with information about future markets disrupt an economy decades in the future? Kingman faces these temptations, and his procrastination captures the essence of the ethical question.
On the one hand, the ability to avert catastrophes is tempting. Who would not warn President Kennedy prior to Dallas in 1963, or prevent Buddy Holly from getting on the plane in 1959? In The Ghost Professor, these kinds of moments plague the story. Time travel tantalizes with the promise of remaking history in the interest of good. But what is good for whom? And according to whom?
History is, after all, a tapestry of cause and effect. Changing one strand may save lives in the short term but unravel progress in the long term. Would civil rights have progressed without the tragedies that sparked the movement? Would medical breakthroughs exist without wars that necessitated them? The moral weight of the decision bears down, and Kingman knows that even kindly meant interference might dissolve into hubris, assuming one individual is wiser than the collective course of events.
The book also brings up the more private angle: regret. Suppose you could go back in time to moments in your own history, correct a wrong, make a different choice, and steer clear of a heartbreak? The allure is common. But Kingman’s narrative implies that even personal do-overs are problematic. Altering your past involves erasing the lessons, grit, and development that defined you in the present.
In the end, The Ghost Professor does not give readers a tidy solution. Rather, it teaches us that time travel ethics reflect everyday ethics. We cannot change yesterday, but we can decide how we behave today, with humility, with awareness, and with knowledge of how our decisions have a ripple effect.
Then, would you alter the past if you had the means? Or is the real moral dilemma learning to live completely, rather than rewriting the play?
