Questions Answered
August 29, 2011 in Blogs
As promised, I have completed the drafts of an entire temporal analysis of the movie Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which began running today at The Examiner with the appropriately entitled first part, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel part 1: a movie. I outline the entire plot of the movie as we see it, so if you haven’t seen or can’t find it you’re not going to be totally out of the loop. I can’t promise that reading my pages will be as enjoyable as watching the movie, but hopefully some of the fun of the film will come through over the course of the series. For my next trick, I hope to start work on Source Code, but I’m not sure when.
I think that my Friday super-rehearsal went well. Nick was late. Honestly, Baxter and I were also late, but Jonathan was practicing when we arrived and we weren’t that late. We worked with vocals for something around two hours, then took a break to await the arrival of the pizza and Nick, and then returned to work each song several times until it was nearly three in the morning and we had done them all, including a quick run-through of the praise choruses we plan to have as the sing-along set we were asked to lead. By the time we finished, my right hand plucking fingers were starting to blister, a thirty-year-old fuse blew on my Ampeg B-15 bass amp, and my left hand index finger was doing something it had never done before–I’m still not certain whether I exhausted all the acetylcholinesterase required to relax the muscles that flex that finger, or all the acetylcholine required to contract the muscles that straighten it. I figure it was not a potassium problem because it did not feel cramped, as happens when the potassium is not there to replace the calcium and shift the muscle from contracted to relaxed, so it had to be in the neurotransmitters that cause the minerals to be released, and probably in the process that should have contracted the straightening muscles. You don’t care about that, but maybe you learned something from it.
Incidentally, I have confirmed that the outdoor ice cream social at which we will be playing is an open event, in the sense that the community is invited. It is scheduled for Saturday, September 10, from six to seven-thirty, outside behind the Silver Lake Community Church on Silver Lake Road near the corner of Dubois in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey. So if you’re in the area and would like to hear how bad we are at our new debut, you’re welcome to come.
I have been reading what Eric Ashley has been writing. I could quibble with Practise Bits:&nbps; Temporal and Practise Bits: Temporal 2, particularly in that I coined the term “sawtooth snap” and he does not seem to use it the way I define it, but then, it’s his fiction and if he wants it not to make sense that’s his choice. Practise Bits: Friend was an interesting bit of politicking in a corrupt universe. Finally, Practise Bits: Journeys took us on a rough sea voyage made the rougher by the pessimistic prognostications of some wizards who seemed to get the wrong message from their auguries.
–M. J. Young
Tadeusz said on August 29, 2011
I do want my fiction to make sense, usually. The sawtooth snap is the alternation between two modes of time loops, I think. In any case, that is what I tried to say.
But I shall check your link.
Tadeusz said on August 29, 2011
My apologies, it is a cycling causality that I am referring too.
Tadeusz said on August 29, 2011
Temporal is the only way I’ve seen to avoid time loops and allow effective time travel. It requires an entity that is rooted in Eternity and is equally aware of Past and Future events; my Archangel of Time, Chronos seems to fit the bill.
I did not clarify that he was aware of the whole of time at once, and left that somewhat undecided.
Tadeusz said on August 29, 2011
Well, there is another way. The author rules that Effect can exist without Cause.
Tadeusz said on August 29, 2011
And ‘Journeys’ was written in honor of ‘Hurricane’ Irene. Put in smiley face here because you don’t like emoticons so I put in this sentence instead.
JohnA1nut said on August 29, 2011
The sawtooth snap is the alternation between two modes of time loops, I think.
No Eric, that’s an infinity loop. You go back to kill Hitler, so you never read about him, so you don’t go back to kill him, so you do, so you don’t, so you do, so you don’t. I’ve never really been certain how to properly explain a sawtooth snap, so I’ll let MJ field that one.
MJ, is the movie going to be made available to watch online? How can that be viewed by your loving friends and colleagues on the Internetwork?
JohnA1nut said on August 29, 2011
Don’t get me wrong, I perfectly understand a sawtooth snap. I think I finally got the timeline 1a, 1b, 1c, concept down. I’m just not sure how to explain it so that someone else can understand it.
JohnA1nut said on August 29, 2011
Ya know, I keep thinking, you think your own life is insignificant, but it’s not. When I die, that will mean that one of the three people in the world who best understands that temporal theory will be gone forever. One of three in the world. That almost makes me feel important. Almost.
Tadeusz said on August 30, 2011
I doubt I’d use the sawtooth snap any time soon in a story. So please don’t bother.
Now, am I right that its a Cycling Causality, or is that just a form of an Infinity Loop?
I do rather think the Temporal Theory put forth in Multiverser is going to make an impact. You’re going to see a breakdown of theories of Time Travel into MJ’s and into Effectless Cause just as Paganism broke down into Christianity and Atheism, and for similar reasons.
JohnA1nut said on August 30, 2011
Now, am I right that its a Cycling Causality, or is that just a form of an Infinity Loop?
I’m not certain. There was a sawtooth snap that ended in an N jump, and one that turned back into an infinity loop. It’s a REEEEAAALLLLLLY long infinity loop. That might be a Cycling Casualty. You don’t have to know what it’s called to understand how it operates.
Tadeusz said on August 30, 2011
I need to know what to call it because I offended MJ by an inaccurate term in my story.
JohnA1nut said on August 30, 2011
I should clarify. I know how it operates, even if I’m not certain what to call it. I’m pretty sure the Cycling Casualty is the long infinity loop, but MJ will have to clear that up.
M. J. Young said on August 30, 2011
O.K., let me see how much I can clarify.
The article http://www.examiner.com/time-travel-movies-in-national/temporal-theory-101-nbsp-what-is-a-sawtooth-snap-or-cycling-causality at The Examiner has a diagram that distinguishes the N-jump, Infinity Loop, and Sawtooth Snap; it’s the one that appears in the Temporal Anomalies appendix in the Referee’s Rules, if that’s more convenient. The problem with the image is that it fails to clarify that there are in one sense three “kinds” of Sawtooth Snaps; and it predates the term “Cycling Causality”, for which I am indebted to someone whose name I can never remember but who I did cite in the article somewhere.
What all sawtooth snaps have in common is that they involve changes to history that change the nature of the time travel event without undoing it, such that there are at least three different histories of the world. The Infinity Loop is in that sense quite simple–you travel to the past and kill Stalin (yeah, everyone picks on Hitler), with the result that Stalin never comes to power and you have no reason to kill him, so you don’t travel to the past and don’t kill him; but that means he does come to power, which means that you will make your trip, and so there are two histories of the world and they alternate.
The N-jump in its simplest form says you traveled to the past, and whatever you changed did not matter to the fact that you traveled to the past and changed that, so your doppelganger in the new history will also travel to the past and do exactly what you did. You travel to the past intending to kill Stalin, but you fail to do so, barely avoid being caught, and return to the future. The you in that world not being at all impacted by your failed attempt to kill Stalin makes the same trip. History has been changed, in that there is now a failed attempt to kill Stalin, but that did not in any way prevent you from making that failed attempt.
The Sawtooth Snap is more complicated. You make a trip to the past to kill Stalin, and you know that to do so you have to kill Grobninski; so you kill Grobninski, but you fail to kill Stalin. Your counterpart still wants to kill Stalin, but he knows nothing of Grobninski, and instead figures he has to kill Karpov to get to Stalin. He kills Karpov, but is stopped by Grobninski; he then also kills Grobninski, but fails to kill Stalin. The next version of you knows nothing of Grobninski or Karpov, and when he travels to the past he intends to kill Andropov; his efforts kill different people. With each trip to the past, a different history is created.
There are three possible outcomes for a Sawtooth Snap.
One is that eventually one of the histories exactly causes a previous history–the history in which you killed Karpov and Andropov but not Grobninski causes another version of you to travel to the past intending to kill Grobninski and Stalin, and succeeding in the one but not the other, exactly as the first altered history, which results in all the histories between those two inclusive repeating in sequence perpetually. This is like an infinity loop, and before I had the term “Cycling Causality” I referred to it as “an Infinity Loop Termination”, meaning that the Sawtooth Snap eventually folds back on itself and repeats histories it has already created. Cycling Causality is the better term for this, because it more readily allows for multiple histories looped that way. You could analogize this to a division problem that produces a repeating decimal, such as 2/7=0.285714285714285714285714285714….
The second is that somehow after however many trips occur one of them causes itself–it turns out that when you leave from the future intending to kill Andropov and Stalin, instead wind up killing Grobninski and Karpov, and so your counterpart also leaves to kill Andropov and Stalin and also winds up killing Grobninski and Karpov, and we have a stable history finally. You might analogize this to 1/6=0.01666….; in this context, the repeating six means the same history happens each time, and thus we have a stable history that continues. (If you prefer you can think of it as 1/16=0.0625 in which the presumed line of zeroes thereafter are the stablized timelines.)
The third is that like some irrational number every iteration of history is different in some way from every previous iteration, so that it continues to do this–like pi=3.1415926535897932384626433832795…in which the sequence never repeats itself no matter the number of decimals. The Stalin example is fairly unlikely to have this outcome (most likely to fall into a cycling causality), but it could happen.
What you were trying to avoid was an infinity loop.
I did understand that involving a supernatural extra-temporal being was supposed to make it possible to avoid an anomaly, and I certainly accept that. On the other hand, the notion that you can undo a cause in the future without undoing an effect in the past seems essential to Niven’s Law–and I feel a bit silly pointing you to the article http://www.examiner.com/time-travel-movies-in-national/temporal-theory-101-nbsp-what-is-niven-s-law What Is Niven’s Law, since I’m pretty sure you called my attention to it originally, but the article gives some of my objections to it. Also, http://www.examiner.com/time-travel-movies-in-national/terminator-part-13-nbsp-killing-niven-s-grandfather Terminator part 13: killing Niven’s grandfather addresses the issue, and why I think that handwaving causality out of the picture is irrational.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on August 30, 2011
Thanks MJ, that cleared it up for me a lot. That’s not exactly right, but gave me a new perspective on an old concept.
JohnA1nut said on August 31, 2011
Grobninski and Karpov, Andropov
Were these real people, or did you make them up?
Tadeusz said on August 31, 2011
1. I’m just trying to wade a bit into the water without getting too complicated, and thus losing track of what I’m doing. Your first explanation ‘infinity loop’ is what I was talking about.
The rest, sadly, I’m going to mostly ignore as confusion producing.
2. I will try on the two Niven articles. I was the fellow who mentioned Niven’s Law to you, hoping it would be of use to you, as a chance for you to spar with the thoughts of someone of depth and strength of thought and significance in the SF world.
3. Andropov existed. He was Chairman of the KGB, and eventually leader of the Soviet Union.
4. As to undoing a cause in the Future…in my example there is no Future. Chronos destroys the world and recreates it at an earlier date from his memory.
JohnA1nut said on August 31, 2011
Eric, if you had my understanding of this temporal theory, you would understand without doubt why I’m kind of glad to be out of the Terminator scenario. It was TERMINATOR THOUGH!!!!!!!!! TERMINATOR FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!!!!!!!
Tadeusz said on August 31, 2011
Hey, I can send you to my Terminator scenarios….or some other rogue AI killer robot scenario….there are plenty of them. I will NOT send you to some directly movie based scenario because you know more about it than I do….
One temptation is to go to a Rush to the Singularity scenario….
But probably not directly after Days of Future Past 2042 A.D..
M. J. Young said on August 31, 2011
The names: I was looking for Russian-sounding names. I was not drawing on any knowledge of Stalin’s rise to power. As Eric says, Andropov was someone; so was Karpov, somewhere, but I don’t know where. Grobninski just sounded Russian.
“As to undoing a cause in the Future…in my example there is no Future.”
Well, sort of. The problem is that Chronos acts based on knowledge of what happens in a world that he causes never to have existed, and if it never existed no one has knowledge of it. The solution is that Chronus, being a god and specifically a temporal god, has knowledge of all possible futures and so in undoing one and creating another also has knowledge of that future which he undoes, and so can prevent the anomaly by relying on that knowledge.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on August 31, 2011
Eric, I know you’re still checking this, did you ever watch Animaniacs? I’m watching one, the story is told from the perspective of a candle flame. But not just any candle flame, the candle flame used to write The Declaration of Independence. It just seemed something your unusual writing style would appreciate.
Tadeusz said on August 31, 2011
John,
Hunh. That sounds challenging. Yes, I’ve watched some Animaniacs.
MJ,
Well, in ways this is not really time travel.
Tadeusz said on September 1, 2011
Second….
MJ,
I think you are misunderstanding Niven’s Law.
In the Nivenverse, time travel keeps on occurring until the time travellers change things so that time travel never exists.
JohnA1nut said on September 1, 2011
As far as remembering histories, I kind of like the Butterfly Effect idea. Remember them all.
M. J. Young said on September 1, 2011
John: in Butterfly Effect, Evan does not remember the history that happened, but only the history that he undid. But there are a lot of other problems in that story, too.
Eric: time travel includes acting on information from a point in time that is in the future relative to the point in time at which the act has effect.
Also, I’m not sure whether some of the proponents of Niven’s Law fully understand it, but I think I do, and it still suffers from the problem I suggest.
What proponents of Niven’s Law seem to believe is that if you can change the past, eventually you will make the present so wonderful that you won’t need to change the past. My article citing De Nomolos in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey shows one reason why that doesn’t work: people in the future are no more likely to agree on the perfect past than people in the present will agree on the perfect future.
However, I don’t think that’s what Niven meant; I had to think about it quite a bit, and discard what people were saying about what Niven meant, to get to this. Let’s suppose, though, that Rufus gets time travel first; he travels to the past and orders history the way he wants it. Assume that this does not derail time, and that indeed Rufus will still get time travel first. De Nomolos then gets time travel; but he knows that Rufus has already altered the past. His best strategy is not only to alter the past to fit his own preferences, but to prevent Rufus from getting time travel so that he can’t undo what De Nomolos does, and make himself first to have it. But then since De Nomolos has time travel, eventually Rufus will get it, and he in turn will travel back to prevent De Nomolos from having it. With each thus preventing the other from discovering time travel, eventually no one will discover it, because they will have sabotaged each other out of the time travel business.
Here is my problem. If Rufus can prevent De Nomolos from changing history by preventing him from having time travel abilities, and De Nomolos can do the same to Rufus, then it seems that you can prevent changes to the past by preventing the time travelers who made the changes from making those trips to the past; but then, if that’s true, then when you have been prevented from going to the past yourself, you have been prevented from preventing the other person from going to the past.
Hopefully your head is not spinning from that. In short, though, Niven is wrong. If having time travel makes it possible to prevent you from having time travel, then once you’ve prevented yourself from having time travel you can’t travel back in time to prevent yourself from having it, and you will again have it.
Either we can alter history or we cannot. If we cannot, the entire question is moot, and all questions are moot, because we do what we do, and it is already all done. If we can, then whatever change we make is made, and impacts everything that flows from it, including whether we make the change. If it changes whether we make the change, then we’ve got trouble.
–M. J. Young
M. J. Young said on September 1, 2011
John: the movie in which the character remembered both histories was Frequency; that didn’t make a lot of sense, either.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on September 2, 2011
John: in Butterfly Effect, Evan does not remember the history that happened, but only the history that he undid. But there are a lot of other problems in that story, too.
I think you’re wrong. In the end, Evan is talking to that shrink, and the shrink says “Alternate realities with colleges and prisons..” Realities, plural. Plus, the prison reality was several realities back. I think Evan remembered them all.
JohnA1nut said on September 2, 2011
Actually, I know for a fact that Evan remembers them all. The shrink also mentions paraplegia. Evan was in prison and a paraplegic in two different realities. Evan has to remember them all in order for the shrink to know that.
Tadeusz said on September 2, 2011
I agree that Niven’s Law has an Infinity Loop problem.
Your example of Rufus and De Nomolos sabotaging each other out of the time travel business is correct.
I like a short story I read as an example. Present Day Guy sneers at Greeks with their pitiful 4 element science, and thinks how much better it would be if they jumped straight to more solid science. What technological advancements we could have in the Present Day! He time travels back, shows the Greeks some real science while pretending to be from India, and jumps back to the Present. In the past, the Greeks were intimidated by this superior example of the ‘Indians’, and chose to steer away from science. PDG arrives back in the Present to find Native American tribes still own all of America and the tech level is Stone Age.
He has now fulfilled Niven’s Law (although not forever).
Niven’s Law thus requires an Independent Time Traveller. Once you travel in time, you are unstuck from Cause and Effect in your past.
This is why I say your ideas are going to cut the Time Travel Theory in half. In one half are going to be those who stick to logic, and cleave closer to logic. In the other half are going to be those who decide Cause and Effect are needlessly complicated stuff. Things happen, dude! Don’t try to explain it!
This is the same thing that happened when Paganism met Christianity, and out of that came Christianity and Atheism. A brighter light and a darker dark is the result.
M. J. Young said on September 2, 2011
John, you’ve got it backwards. I didn’t say that Evan doesn’t remember the realities we see. What he doesn’t remember is the realities we do not see.
That is, after the first change when he awakens in Kayleigh’s bed in her sorority dorm, he remembers the history in which he was not a fraternity BMOC and does not remember the history in which he became one. Yes, he remembers all the events we see him experience; the problem is that he has caused those events never to have happened, and some version of him has lived through the events that happened instead, but he does not remember those events. For example, he changed history such that he was crippled by the blockbreaker in the mailbox, but he does not remember being put in a wheelchair, does not remember Kayleigh becoming someone else’s girlfriend, does not remember having had to get up every morning and get into the wheelchair–an entire decade of his life in a wheelchair is completely unknown to him; as far as he remembers, yesterday he was fine.
Also, I think the scene you cite must be in the director’s cut; I’ve never seen it.
Eric: That story works in divergent dimension theory. The hero has not changed the past of the world from which he departed; he has created a new universe that diverges from his own at the point of his arrival. In that particular version, he cannot return to his own universe, but instead travels to the future of the universe he has created. For reasons I explain in The Two Brothers: Why Parallel Dimension Theory Is Not Time Travel, any such development of time travel will never result in anyone traveling to the past–since the time traveler always vanishes from the universe never to return, it will be assumed that the technology is a failure, and no human life will ever be risked.
–M. J. Young