Re: Best Movies on Time Travel?

On Jun 11, 11:03 am, FishFood <d...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ignis Fatuus wrote:
On Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:45:24 +0100, FishFood <d...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ignis Fatuus wrote:

Relativistic ally speaking the Companion would 'lose' the Doctor as
well - the laws of physics being the same for all observers in all
frames of reference. This could give rise to a double helix plot in
which the Companion (s) seek to recover the Doctor as well - with each
inadvertently undermining the efforts of the other.

Love it!!

However if companion had never been born, there would be
no other frame of reference.

I'm probably digging a hole here, but I don't think it's quite that
simple. If the Master cancels Sarah Jane by murdering her parents, you
are admitting the possibility that The Doctor will still remember SJ
and be able to travel back and prevent M from committing the murder.
I'm suggesting that in the midst of all this there is also a SJ frame
of reference in which her realities are being 'altered' as Doctor and
Master slug it out. When she's canceled from the Doctor's time line,
the Doctor is effectively canceled from hers, but she doesn't cease to
exist in absolute terms because that would violate the laws of
physics.

If there's only one absolute history, then the Master can do nothing
to change it; but if histories can be altered, like points on a
railway track, then The Doctors 'present' is a convergence of a
multitude of possibilities which can be reconfigured from the 'past'.
According to Einstein the same must apply to SJ, in which case she can
also perceive the change. If she can gain access to time travel then
both she and the Doctor can act to restore their common history - with
potentially farcical results.

Of course you can just opt for the Bugs Bunny scenario - with two time
travelers each hell bent on canceling the other out.

No, actually i can see the validity in what you say. It has a touch
of Schrödinger's cat about, parallel time, with and without, where
every possible divergence exist whether we are aware of it or not.

"knowing all that is, and will be"  used to discribe the vortex,
[or was that the mind of the doctor?]

A universe in which every possible divergence simultaneously exists
was put forward under the heading of the "Many Worlds Theory". Ignored
for a long time as simply too fanciful, it is gathering popularity in
quantum mechanics as it's a quite elegant solution to some of the more
perplexing problems. Nobody knows if this is the correct model for
this universe or not, but I've put together a thought experiment of
how you might actually test the idea.

It's basically Schrodinger's Cat experiment, except that the
radioactive particle is in one box and the cat + poison is in another.
You link the two boxes with a wormhole. One of the boxes you put on a
plane traveling at high speed, so that the two boxes are no longer in
the same time frame. Let us say that the particle has exactly 50/50
probability of decaying, releasing the alpha particle which will
travel through the wormhole, break the vial and kill the cat.

Now, at the point in time at which the event could occur, the universe
(in the "Many Worlds Theory") would split. One universe would go down
one path, the other would go down the other. But both of these
universes are linked via wormholes to the box with the cat, because
that still exists in the past. The cat hasn't reached that division
yet in time. This means that BOTH futures will affect the cat. Since a
lack of particle from one universe should not affect the presence of a
particle from the other universe, the vial should always be broken and
the cat dead. The cat being alive is never a possibility.

If you then open the other box, there's one of two possibilities. The
first is that the particle will always decay - ie: you've prevented
the other universe from ever being a possibility. You've rigged the
odds. The other is that the particle doesn't always decay, which means
information from one universe can slide into another.

Assuming the first possibility, the Master wouldn't simply eliminate
SJS from one universe, he could attempt to preclude SJS from existing
in ANY universe. That would be much, much harder for The Doctor to
detect and overcome, particularly as he'd have to be careful to not
introduce SJS into those parallel universes she was never meant to
live in. Of course, that degree of care is usually not something The
Doctor bothers with, which means all kinds of interesting consequences
arising.
.

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