Doing and Undoing
June 23, 2011 in Blogs
Early this afternoon I was asked to drive across town to pick up some papers for disability for our injured household member. I did not anticipate that picking up those papers also meant driving to the other side of the next county to deliver them to a doctor’s office, nor that from there I would be making several more stops to acquire other items which are deemed necessary by someone other than me, such that when I returned home I had barely enough time to get to my rehearsal. I was barely out of the car when I got a message that lead guitarist Baxter would be at least late due to the mother of a friend being rushed to the emergency room, and I correctly guessed that he would not make it in time for the Collision practice at the end of the session. The drummer, too, was absent, but I had the opportunity to work with the pianist/vocalist, and think we made some progress.
Mercifully, I had managed to post today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article before all this started. A Sound of Thunder part 8: undone reduces the core of the movie to a vast grandfather paradox, in which Middleton stepping on a butterfly kills his own ancestor and that of every other human being, and so must undo his own action and every other human action, including that of stepping on the butterfly. So at least that part was finished.
It appears that Eric Ashley left one of his pieces undone himself, but then returned to finish it. First, though, I did read two other articles of his earlier in the week (might have been yesterday, but things get blurry when they get hectic around here, and yesterday my chain of errands ran about six hours). In Practise Bits: Exploring he meanders through ancient history a bit, putting his personal spin on history and pre-history. Practise Bits: Tenure is only nominally about a professor’s quest for job security, and more about an imagined future in which the human race has left isolated colonies on many planets who all believe they originated where they are. Practise Bits: Cold Steel is the brief beginning of a story that continues in Practise Bits: Cold Steel Again to tell of the fight which is barely introduced in the first.
So with my time consumed and my work stacked, I think I’d better head for other tasks.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on June 23, 2011
I still think you should apply for disability MJ. That’s all I’m going to say.
Tadeusz said on June 24, 2011
Most time travel stories accept illogic. I hope you succeed in your quest to banish this.
JohnA1nut said on June 24, 2011
Since time travel is kind of an illogical concept, that only stands to reason. As I understand it, MJ’s theory is kind of common sense, once you understand the common sense aspect of it.
M. J. Young said on June 24, 2011
I don’t think anything illogical about time travel–that is, I do not think that traveling to the past is more illogical than driving the wrong way on a one-way street: you can do it just fine, but it’s very dangerous.
But yeah, a lot of time travel stories seem to be saying, “Time travel must be inherently impossible, because if it were possible you could do this, and this has to be impossible.” But that’s a bit like saying “Splitting the atom must be inherently impossible, because if you could do it you could reduce all the matter in the universe to energy, and that has to be impossible.” It would be very difficult to do that, but it’s not impossible, and we have managed to split the atom, with significant consequences. I think the consequences of travel through time have potentially more serious consequences, but I think that just because you can’t figure out what would happen doesn’t mean that you can’t do it–only that you don’t know what would happen.
My theory attempts to reason through to what would happen.
JohnA1nut said on June 24, 2011
So would I be correct if I said you believe time travel is actually possible? I don’t think it would actually be possible.
M. J. Young said on June 26, 2011
What would be correct is that I consider time travel to be unlikely and I hope it proves to be impossible, but that I am quite aware that much that was long thought impossible proved to be possible after all, so I want to have the world prepared for the possibilities if time travel actually is successful.
JohnA1nut said on June 26, 2011
Your theory does make good common sense. That’s really all it is, once you understand how to apply said common sense. The problem that I have with your theory is this. I don’t think (or at least, I would like to hope) that a benevolent God would not allow us to create something which was that destructive. I’d like to hope that God would not allow the folly of one of His creations to trap them in a forever repeating time loop. If your theory is correct, God would break the infinity loop and save us, I guess is what I’m saying.
So I like it, but I don’t.
M. J. Young said on June 27, 2011
John, I know I’ve written this before, but I’ll do so again.
I certainly hope that God will not allow anyone, man or otherwise, to so destroy time. However, as a theologian with a sense of history, I know that it is very poor judgment to bet that God will not allow any specific event. According to various people at various times, He was not going to allow humans to fly; we were never going to split the atom; we would never escape Earth’s atmosphere. All of those events which God was supposed to prevent have occurred. The only event of which I am aware for which there is a correlation between some saying God would not permit it and it not happening is the total nuclear devastation of World War III; and I cannot be certain whether that did not happen because God did not permit it or because everyone was so frightened about it that we managed to avoid it ourselves.
So certainly I hope that God does not permit time travel, and I tend to think that is likely to be true, but ultimately I want to be prepared in case, as often seems to be the case, God decides to let us create our own disasters and leaves us to resolve them.
–M. J. Young