Shane Carruth is amazed at the life of Primer. Fans discussed its details for years. Theories were cruelly belittled and bitterly defended. Time after time, timeline theories were posted and edited. If you put up a statement and later edit your comment, Presto, you have yourself a virtual time machine. You can begin to reverse engineer your statements. Most fans believe only their personal theories or ones they have fallen for at Wikipedia.
Why had no one solved Primer before? Simply that they continued to repeat the errors of others that seemed very confident in their answers. Some people actually used a second identity to agree and congratulate themselves. I have researched these sites extensively to prove that I was the first to solve Primer. Once I started working on the book (no longer in print), I took down my answers from various sites. After the book's success, there were a lot of requests from other countries. So, I eventually had the book posted as blog pages, only in reverse order.
If the movie Primer led to this book, what will this book lead to? If there is nothing more to argue about will those boards die away? (Edit: Yes, they did. I had disagreed at the time.) Carruth took down the PrimerMovie.com site as "all of the answers are already out there." I agree that taking down the site eliminated a lot of wrong answers and needless discussion. But, the evolution and metamorphosis of Primer's understanding was very interesting. I would rather it was still standing. There are still fans born every month, looking for answers. I'm so glad to see so many new fans coming to Primer and this site. A beautiful resurgence of interest.
