Re: Worse than death

On 5 Aug 2005 23:03:45 GMT, Troels Forchhammer
<Troels@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>In message <news:u1p7f19m84j3ok42ohpuf4uju1hi17971j@xxxxxxx> gjw
><gjw@xxxxxxxxxxx> enriched us with:
>>
>
><snip>
>
>> One of my regrets after reading book six was that it appears that
>> our old Time Turner question (whether Rowling intended for the
>> past to be changeable) will never be answered. I took the
>> destruction of the time turners as an indication that JKR isn't
>> going to touch it with a stick. While I'm glad that she won't
>> resort to using a time turner again to solve plot problems, it
>> would have been nice if she had first answered the question about
>> how they work... ;)
>
>I do agree entirely with all of this.
>
>And if you promise not to tell anyone . . . ? ;-)
>
>I've been talking myself into a model using Alternative Histories as
>the best possible model for me. Not that I think Rowling has ever
>considered it in the details I have (she has certainly not been poring
>over Time-Travel papers as www.arxiv.org), I merely think it to be the
>model that works best for myself, given my strong weight on consistency
>and the avoidance of paradoxes.


For some reason, I've always been put off my the notion of an infinite
number of actual worlds being conjured up every time someone makes a
decision or time travels to change things. It seems such a radical
way of trying to explain away paradoxes - it almost seems worse than
the paradox itself. ;)

Which reminds me. I was thinking about the old "grandfather paradox"
the other day. You know, the one where a time traveler travels back in
time and murders his own grandfather. The obvious paradox is that by
doing this, he would never be born, and if he were never born, how
could he travel back in time and kill him?

A thought crossed my mind, which probably doesn't make much sense from
a scientific standpoint, but I thought I'd throw it out there, anyway.
You have my permission to shoot it down, or run with it, as you see
fit. (Just give me credit if you win the Nobel Prize. ;) Anyway, for
what it's worth, here it is:

What if a time traveler, by traveling back in time, became divorced
from the usual cause and effect as we understand it - what if he
became a "free-floating agent" (if you will), where his existence, his
physical reality, is "locked in" the moment he steps into the past.
What if his actions in the past could affect what happens in the new
"future" (as seen from the past he travels to), but could never
prevent his own current existence?

What if there are (in this way of looking at things) two distinct
types of beings - people who live normal timespans (who exist at that
moment in time because they were born in the usual way), and people
who step outside of the normal time flow and travel back in time (and
who exist there because of the act of time travel, even though they
technically haven't been born yet). What if the same rules of cause &
effect do not apply to time travelers? What if, once they are divorced
from their own time, their existence is no longer influenced by what
happened in their former past? What if they continue to exist in the
past regardless of the whether the events that originally brought them
into being happen or do not happen? What if the "birth" date of a time
traveler, if you will (the date of their 'creation', which anchors
them into reality of that time), would no longer stem from their
previous physical birth, but from the time-traveling date when they
moved into the past. In short, what if the very act of time travel
created a new kind of person, a person which exists in the past solely
because he traveled to the past. Its reality is based on the simple
fact that it is already there, that it exists 'out of time', and
nothing that happens from that moment on can cause it never to have
existed in the first place.

In other words, when a 35-year-old man named John Doe from 2005
travels back in time to 1950 and kills his grandfather, his daughter
will never give birth to a John Doe in 1970, and there will be no
35-year-old John Doe alive in 2005. However, John Doe the time
traveler would continue to exist safely in the past, because he had
already stepped outside of the normal flow of time, and his existence
there is a reality which can't be erased because it has already
happened. From the standpoint of the victims in the changed past,
they would have been killed by a man who was 'never born'. He would
have no recorded history. But people would know him as the man who
appeared out of nowhere back in 1950. His reality would have been
"born" into 1950 life at the time he appeared there as a time
traveler, and he would continue to exist in 1950 as a concrete
reality, a person who was capable of actions (such as murder) which
would have a normal effect on future events. But the murder (of his
grandfather) could not be wiped out in the future by his not being
born in the way he was before, because even though his future self is
never born in 1970, his _present_ self is already anchored there in
1950 - because he time-traveled, and the rules of rules of time travel
do not allow him to be retroactively erased. To paraphrase Descarte,
"he is, therefore he is."

Whoa... Now that I typed that out, I'm _still_ not sure if it makes
any sense. ;)

It certainly defies normal logic. The question is whether the very
act of time travel could create a different kind of logic, a need to
view cause & effect from a different vantage point, so that the
seeming paradox isn't a paradox at all, it's just the way time travel
works.

On the other hand, maybe I should just avoid typing up these things at
1:30 AM... or just stay away from time travel in general. ;)


.

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