Re: Worst Hugos Ever?

On Mar 15, 10:54 pm, "Michael S. Schiffer"
<mschi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
thro...@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop) wrote innews:1205635952@xxxxxxxxx:

: "Michael S. Schiffer" <mschi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
: That's why I specified "where they allow changing the past".
: Branching off a new timeline doesn't change the past of the
: original timeline, and obviously neither does the pre-ordained
: model.
Why not "change the past" in the way Gerrold's "The Man Who
Folded Himself" allows?

It's been a while since I read that one, and I don't remember if he
was able to change the past or if he just kept encountering himself
at different points on his own timeline.

Or doesn't that count, either? Or how

about "you can change the past, but you can only perceive stable
states" as in "The Chronoiths"?

I thought "The Chronoliths" was a stable, foreordained loop. Did I
misunderstand the book? (Certainly possible.)

: I still like, e.g., Anderson's Time Patrol stories, and for
: that matter "Back to the Future", even if they require
: swallowing a camel or two to allow the story to happen.
By what mechanism did the photograph fade out, do you suppose?
And what happened to the Marty who grew up in the altered
universe? Seems more like a herd of camels more numerous than
fermions in the universe.

Did you dislike the movie?

I liked it, myself, and don't think that the world would be a
better place if it hadn't been made due to the creators' shame over
its internal contradictions. (At least, that's how I'm
interpreting "Using the impossible even in principle goes too
far"-- that things would be better if people didn't go too far in
that manner.) I've been known to spend an afternoon *discussing*
those contradictions-- in particular what happened to "Lucky
Marty", as we called him-- but I demonstrably don't think that they
represent a line that shouldn't have been crossed.

Mike

There are other models where the past is change, but it isn't, and
there is only one timeline. I think the best way to visulize it is as
stacked boards of Life style cellular automata, with the twist that
changes in state aren't applied to the same board over and over, but
to an immediately adjacent board in the 'future'. So you can
visualize the normal situation as a long stack of boards that change
exactly once, with a wave of propagation going 'foward' into the third
dimension of 'time'. Time travel in this model would be to have a
situation where there was a connection between board n and board n+k
such that changes in state in a region of the board n+k are applied to
a region of board n instead of a region of board n+k+1.

In this model, there are no time travel paradoxes, not even of the
'shoot your wife's mother' kind. Think of the canonical message to
the past, "You will pick option one." If instead, at the proper time,
you pick option two and send back the truthful message "You will pick
option two", you've set up a situation where k boards ahead of you,
option one plays out, option two plays out along your personal
timeline, and option one plays out again k boards behind you. And
between boards n and n+k the situation flip-flops between the state of
having received message one or message two.

So, there's no contradictions, no matter how convoluted the
interconnections between the boards become (think of a network of
bistable R/S flip-flops). But editing the past to achieve a desirable
present becomes progressively harder to undo.

Note that this model invokes an extra concept, the propagating
wavefront of the present, which we don't see in real life (though we
certainly experience it!)
.

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