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Terminator Timelines

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Started 1 year ago by M. J. Young
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temporal anomalies

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M. J. Young
Moderator

In his current game thread, John 2 John, John Cross has been "zygoted" into the life of John Conner, hero of Terminator. He's made a few comments about what timeline he's in, and I think he's misunderstood a few things rather surprisingly, so I'm going to attempt to do a brief explanation of how Terminator's timelines worked.

The AB(1) Timeline is the world in which no one comes from the future. Point A(1) is the moment when the T-800 101 does not arrive; point B(1) is the moment from which it departs. Its arrival in the past creates the CD(1) timeline, point C(1) being the moment when the T-800 does arrive, changing history. That entire history has to be written to reach point D(1), when the T-800 has to be sent back to kill Sarah Conner. As John notes, this has already happened; so, too, has it already happened that Kyle Reese has been sent to the past to protect Sarah Conner, and has become his father, or he would not be here.

Moments after point D of the CD(1) timeline Kyle Reese is sent to the past to protect Sarah; this, too, has already happened. However, Kyle is not sent from point D(1); he is sent from point B(2), the end of the AB(2) timeline; point A(2) is that moment sometime after the arrival of the T-800 at which Kyle does not arrive, and point C(2) is that same moment in the newly created timeline in which Kyle does arrive. That history plays out, and at point D(2) John Conner sends Kyle Reese back to protect Sarah, confirming that history.

There is some interplay between these two anomalies, because the presence of Kyle brings the T-800 into the Cyberdyne factory, where its destruction gives Cyberdyne the parts needed to bring SkyNet online sooner. So CD(2) sets up EF(1), which sets up EF(2), which sets up GH(1) and then GH(2).

John is in one of those timelines. It is absolutely essential that when point H(2) or Z(2) or whatever point it is arrives he send Kyle Reese back to protect Sarah Conner. If he does not do that, Kyle Reese never arrives, we revert to AB(2) which overlaps the original CD(1), and we have a complex infinity loop in which John is back to being a Zygote but has no memories of anything he did the "first time" through and so can't change anything.

That's the trap I set for him: if he fails to send Kyle Reese back to protect Sarah, he's caught in the infinity loop.

But I picked him because after myself and Kyler, he's probably the person who best understands the temporal anomalies theories, as far as I know. He should be able to work out the danger himself.

--M. J. Young

Tue May 25 2010 3:13 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

That's the trap I set for him: if he fails to send Kyle Reese back to protect Sarah, he's caught in the infinity loop.

Yeah, that's the problem. I realized that a long time ago. I'm not playing the world. Even if I do everything in my power to save Kyle Reese and ensure he is sent to the past, I could get a bunch of bad dice rolls and become caught in the infinity loop. It wouldn't have to be a bunch. I have Kyle safe and sound, and we roll a 30, Reese is killed, I'm not, and I'm stuck in a loop. It wouldn't even be my fault. What would you say to me then? "Oh, sorry John, the dice are like that sometimes" Uh, no. That's OK when I verse out, not for an infinity loop from which there is no escape. I'm serious MJ. I'd rather verse out right now than even risk it. I figured that was the trap after I realized it. If I verse out now, the timeline stays in order, and that's all there is to it. I'd rather do that than even risk an infinity loop. So, either you make it impossible for any infinity loops to happen and trust that I will get involved in the world on my own, or I walk out of the trap. I'm not kidding. The magic curve is 20, my self-explosion prayer is 9@9. I can do that.

(Doing Therapy)

Tue May 25 2010 3:23 am #
Tadeusz
Member

John, potential spoiler below (my theories).
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What happens if you get into an infinity loop? You keep on looping until some outside force intervenes to stop the loop.

1. The universe runs out of energy (I'm going to say that with each loop, the amount of entropy climbs. Thus eventually the universe ends.)
2. Versers arriving from elsewhen is not common, but you have ten or twenty thousand years of looping for it to happen.
3. Some sort of extremely low probablity event happens which throws the whole thing out of whack after rerunning it a few hundred times.

Essentially, as GM I'd be tempted to say that if you loop, you've already looped, and then I'd roll a GE roll to see which end of 1-3 you got. I may be spoiling MJ's idea here, but I'm not sure I am.

Tue May 25 2010 3:39 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

All I would have to do is roll a botch instead of a success on a single skill check at the wrong time. Guess what? I'm caught in an infinity loop. Completely beyond my control. If I verse out now, the machines win the war in this leg, in the next leg, the real John Connor takes over. We know he pulled it off, so that's a safe place to leave it. Tell me why I shouldn't do that?

You were right. I wasn't forced into Pearl Harbor. You can't be forced into a world, not even one you're zygoted into. I'll verse out as an infant rather than risk it.

(Doing Therapy)

Tue May 25 2010 3:43 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

Two

But I picked him because after myself and Kyler, he's probably the person who best understands the temporal anomalies theories, as far as I know. He should be able to work out the danger himself.

Yeah I do realize the danger, and the danger is avoidable. That's how well you explained the theory to me. It breaks down really simply. "Time travel is not to be messed with under ANY circumstances." Not even to play your dream game world. You probably thought I'd rather play the world. No. If we can't get this fixed, I'm versing out.

(Doing Therapy)

Tue May 25 2010 4:00 am #
WilliamTWodium
Member

If I verse out now, the machines win the war in this leg, in the next leg, the real John Connor takes over.

What real John Connor? Aren't you the real John Connor?

Tue May 25 2010 4:16 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

Dude, you're talking me into it more and more. I notice MJ didn't say a single word about my decision to verse myself out. If I do that, the timeline continues.

If I am the real John Connor, then who is going to be here for the next leg of the loop after I verse out? I'll be gone. SOMEBODY has to take that spot. It won't be me. I'm the product of Kyle Reese and Sarah. The REAL John Connor was the child born to Sarah and Man Unknown. That's who takes over after me if I verse out now.

(Doing Therapy)

Tue May 25 2010 4:36 am #
WilliamTWodium
Member

I think MJ didn't say anything about that decision on purpose. It's making me think maybe I shouldn't say anything either.

I will say that your suicide looks an awful lot like non-involvement to me.

Tue May 25 2010 6:31 am #
Kurt W.
Member

I would like to first say that this is not meant to insult or subject anyone to any emotions that might be negative.

I don't understand the issue here. MJ is the GM in this situation, and it seems has already prepared a scenario for John to run through.

You know a lot about the Terminator series (books and movies both it seems); however, who is to say that this universe isn't different from certain ones you've seen or read? Also, who is to say that Time functions in the same way in every universe in the multiverse? It may, and I may just not know about this rule, but it seems to me that MJ, for the sake of the player and general enjoyment of the game, can make time work however he sees fit.

My conclusion is: Don't worry about it. Don't worry about your personal knowledge. If you know it IC, then use it and it might be wrong in this scenario. If you are worried about an Infinity Loop IC then roleplay that aspect, and have some fun with it.

I apologize once more if this was at all out of line.

Tue May 25 2010 12:34 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

After sleeping on it, I will admit that the idea of versing myself out of the scenario does seem a bit selfish and rude. I think MJ intended for it to ensure that I would get involved in the scenario. It's Terminator. I'll get involved. That was never an issue here. That the "trap" is even making me consider non-involvement in a Terminator scenario is what has me worried. Non-involvement was never an issue before I found out about this. One Bad Dice Roll!!!! That's all it would take, and I'm stuck in this world forever. You gotta admit, that's a lot to put on a guy. I'll get involved in the scenario. That was never an issue. I don't need that kind of motivation to get involved here. All you're making me do is consider non-involvement in a scenario I was fully intending to jump into headfirst. It backfired, it's unneeded, and I think it should be done away with.

Tue May 25 2010 2:02 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

Two

MJ, you finally found a scenario into which I was eager to get involved. Your attempts to ensure my involvement is what's making me want to jump out of it. Please Don't Do That!!!!!

This is exactly the opposite of what you intended and expected, I know. You thought you could motivate the non-involvement player to get involved. No. You motivated a player who was fully intending to get involved to consider complete non-involvement. Exactly the opposite of what you wanted.

Tue May 25 2010 2:51 pm #
Max
Member

I also wonder if Terminator world that John plays really use time travel or just using worlds with parallel time line with it. If it uses worlds with parallel time line, a lot of problems could be resolved without making the world go through infinity loop.
A visitor in parallel world probably thought they have gone back through time although this might not be the case.

Tue May 25 2010 6:02 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

I'm going to comment on Eric's ideas, viz.,

1. The universe runs out of energy (I'm going to say that with each loop, the amount of entropy climbs. Thus eventually the universe ends.)
2. Versers arriving from elsewhen is not common, but you have ten or twenty thousand years of looping for it to happen.
3. Some sort of extremely low probability event happens which throws the whole thing out of whack after rerunning it a few hundred times.

The first is simply not true, under the default theory of time. When the universe is "rewound", it is returned to exactly the state at which it was at the moment to which the time traveler travels, and thus the entropy level is reduced back to what it was then. An infinity loop never runs out of energy.

The third is also excluded under the theory: nothing changes except what is impacted by the time traveler himself, and if the time traveler is exactly the same person he has exactly the same impact. If John causes an infinity loop, the result is that he loses all memory of everything that happened and returns to being a zygote with no memory that he ever was a zygote before, and so his actions are exactly what they were "the first time" because for him it is "the first time" even though it is "the first time again". The reason infinity loops happen is that once the causal chains are fixed, there are no "low probability events" possible outside what has actually happened. That is, John winning the lottery on a single ticket purchase is a low-probability event, but if it happens in one of the timelines in the loop, it happens in that timeline every time that timeline repeats.

Thus the only option is for outside influence to save him. A new verser is the simplest choice for that, although a supernatural intervention is also permitted. The complication from John's end is that once he's in the infinity loop he cannot be the one who initiates the intervention; it must come from someone outside the loop--in essence, referee fiat.

And of course, when Jane Conner sent Kyle Reese back to protect her mother, she had no idea that it was going to result in her being born a boy. Scott's right--there is no "other" John Conner.

--M. J. Young

Tue May 25 2010 9:47 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

Scott's right--there is no "other" John Conner.

So what happens if I do get killed in this scenario? The T-1000 might succeed. I could have a psionic botch. I don't verse back in as a zygote to stay in the infinity loop, do I? Is that what happens? That can't be what happens.

Tue May 25 2010 9:55 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

John--I can't tell you what "will happen". I can tell you that wherever you do not attempt to alter the unfolding of events that do not depend on you, they will happen as they do.

You have more than a decade to practice in botch-free practice mode all your psionic (and, if you like, magic) skills, which will give you high levels of probability on success by the time you might face your next problem. That significantly reduces your chance to botch; the stakes should encourage you to rely more on the skills that are strong in this world--the bod skills you will recover and learn, the tech skills you can develop. The mag and psi can become your fallback answers. You've also got a few pieces of technology more advanced than anything Skynet has--the laser pistols, the wristop, not to mention the penlight and spidersilk rope.

So you want to avoid botches. That's a given--the fewer botches you have, the less likely they are to result in real disaster. The way to avoid botches is to get good at everything through lots of practice and use the less reliable skills sparingly.

You're right that the T-1000 might succeed; but then, you're looking for him, and you'll probably have most of your stuff by then, so you've got an advantage over the movie version of you.

--M. J. Young

Tue May 25 2010 10:20 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

Sorry about that. I was just freaking out at the idea of an infinity loop. You could not imagine. I'm OK now. I can win this.

I can tell you that wherever you do not attempt to alter the unfolding of events that do not depend on you, they will happen as they do.

Define "Actions that do not depend on me." If the TX isn't chasing me, it might get the lieutenants instead. It's still an infinity loop. (Or are Reese and I the only targets?)

So you want to avoid botches. That's a given--the fewer botches you have, the less likely they are to result in real disaster. The way to avoid botches is to get good at everything through lots of practice and use the less reliable skills sparingly.

No, I WAS talking about gun botches. Botch on my shotgun skill whilst trying to drive a Terminator away from Reese the way he did it with Sarah. That's all it would take.

What happens if I practice a summoning skill? Do people show up 1/3 of the time? On the 1/3 that they do, can I interact with them?

(Doing Therapy)

Tue May 25 2010 11:54 pm #
Tadeusz
Member

So infinity loops defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

According to what I've heard, if the universe is a cycling loop of Big Bang, Expansion, Contraction, Big Crunch followed by Big Bang that entropy continues from each cycle and thus there is a maximum of a hundred cycles that could have been gone through. This is not quite the same thing as an infinity loop, but the closest thing.

Wed May 26 2010 1:35 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

Eric, every time it repeats, it goes back in time. Why would the loop lose power?

Regarding writing things in a word pad document on my computer, I'm doing that now. I've got plans for something which will make this the best time a guy could have in a world. I hope I can pull it off. Your trap did backfire MJ, not like I was thinking, but I bet your jaw will hit the floor. I can use the infinity loop to my advantage. (Laughing hysterically)

(Doing Therapy)

Wed May 26 2010 2:05 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator

John, let's not worry about the T-X until it appears. It is not impossible that you could prevent the sending of the TX (and even of the T-1000) and so miss those timelines completely.

Eric--I can see why you would say that time travel violates the law of thermodynamics, and I'm not certain I can satisfy a physicist as to why it doesn't, but maybe I can satisfy you.

If I travel from 2010 to 2000, I arrive in 2000 in the state the universe was in at that time. Any "entropy" that has occurred in the interim has not happened yet. The question is, how is that possible?

The fixed time theory argues that it happens because my arrival in 2000 was always part of history; time is not moving, but is a fixed dimension like space, and just as at any given instant in time all objects are at a fixed position in space, so too all events exist at fixed positions in time, all of history existing (not occurring) from beginning to end "now". We only experience it as if it were moving. This means you cannot change the past, not because (as the library computer in The Time Machine suggests) you cannot go to the past, but because time is only a way of perceiving the static state of the universe.

The multiple dimension theory argues that it happens because you are not traveling to the past of your own dimension but to that of another dimension that was exactly like yours up until the moment of your arrival. Since anything you do does not affect you, you simply have arrived in that universe at an earlier moment in its history, before that entropy has occurred. The divergent dimension version of this is the more difficult from a thermodynamics point of view, because it asserts that your arrival creates the new universe (where did we get all that matter and energy?); but the pure parallel dimension theory, which asserts that all the dimensions always existed and you simply move between them, has major problems of its own (because the parallel versions of you will also make the same trip unless you somehow prevent them, in which case the parallel universes are no longer the same, and the second time traveler will arrive in a universe which is different from his own).

Replacement theory is more difficult to envision, perhaps. The "easy" way to envision it is to suggest that history rewinds to the point of arrival and is erased and re-recorded based on the changes injected by the time traveler. The metaphor is not entirely accurate; once the old recording is erased, it is not something which was and no longer is but something which now never was within timespace. There is a spreadsheet illustration on the temporal anomalies web site which attempts to illustrate the replacement concept in a format in which causal chains exist but time does not; that might be an easier way of seeing the notion that the time traveler has reset the universe to the exact state at which it was at the moment of his arrival.

However you understand it, the point of time travel is that your arrival is in the universe exactly as it was at the moment of arrival (or in the case of an anomaly caused by the failure of the time traveler to appear, the moment of non-arrival). That means not that entropy has been reversed but that it hasn't happened yet.

Does that work for you?

--M. J. Young

Thu May 27 2010 1:59 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

John, let's not worry about the T-X until it appears. It is not impossible that you could prevent the sending of the TX (and even of the T-1000) and so miss those timelines completely.

Are you expecting me to play every timeline of this? So whatever skills I get here, I lose in the next timeline, until I finish and verse out? Do we have to play it like that? Why not just put me in the final timeline, and if I infinity loop it, I lose (or do I?)

(Doing Therapy)

Thu May 27 2010 2:14 am #
Max
Member

They changed in sequence, one after another; yet they did so instantly, without passage of time.

If that is the case, time could probably continue after the infinity loop event for the observer (which might also include the time traveler) but it might be unstable one which would revert from one state to another but the people in one state would be unaware of the existence of the other states.
For example, if Time B1 depends on Time A1, and Time A2 (Time A1 after time travel) depends on Time B1 because of time travel, Time C1 still could exist because it depends on Time B1. The change of Time A2 however will propagate to change Time B1 to Time B2 and Time C1 to Time C2. When Time B1 (or Time B2) becomes unstable because it changes value, Time C1 (or Time C2) would still exist but the value would become unstable.

For the time traveler, killing themselves in the past would probably not cause the future time traveler self to die. It will just create a future where the past self dies but the future time traveler self lives on. This is because the time traveler must be protected from causality of this time line future to even try to go back to the past in the first place. Another interesting thing to think about is what would happen if someone tries to duplicate self multiple times via time travel. This would probably create more states to the time.

Thu May 27 2010 8:20 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

I have a plan.

--M. J. Young

Thu May 27 2010 8:20 pm #
Max
Member

Cross-posted with MJ.

Thu May 27 2010 8:22 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator

I'm not certain I fully understood what you wrote, Max, but I do not consider it plausible for the time traveler to be protected from causality.

One reason for this is that such protection becomes an intelligent thing. That is, it's one thing to say that since the time traveler has to travel from 2010 to 2000 to maintain the changes he made, the changes he made cannot affect him. It's quite another to say that since the time traveler has to travel from 2010 to 2000 to maintain the changes he made, those changes cannot affect the one thousand other people who were responsible for the invention and operation of the time machine nor the thousands of others who directly or indirectly formed him into the person he became who does what he does. Eventually, protection for the time traveler must require either that you cannot change history at all, or that there is some omnipotent omniscience carefully allowing only those changes which are not self-defeating.

I believe in God. I don't believe we ought to rely on Him to protect us from the consequences of our own folly.

--M. J. Young

Thu May 27 2010 11:17 pm #
JTM
Member

It's somewhat typical for the time traveller to remain protected from changes while the time machine and everyone involved in the creation of the machine is not changed.

Thu May 27 2010 11:22 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

I believe in God. I don't believe we ought to rely on Him to protect us from the consequences of our own folly.

"Trust in God, but keep your door locked and your 357 at the ready."
Uncle Bob.

Fri May 28 2010 6:44 am #
Max
Member

I do not consider it plausible for the time traveler to be protected from causality.

I mean the causality from the future time line that the time traveler travels to. The time traveler is still affected by causality of the current time line. The time travel event itself makes the past to be dependent to the future which will introduce different states of time line, but the time travel machine must also include a rule which will make the the time traveler to be only dependent to the state which the time traveler departs which means that the time traveler will be independent from change of state in the future of the time the time traveler arrives. This will lock the state of the time traveler to specific time state.
For example, the original time line is A1-B1-C1. Time traveler departs from B1 to A1 which will now be rewritten to A2. The time machine will have to make the time traveler to only refer to this B1 state. A2 will make changes to B1 which will rewrite it to B2 however because B1 event was change to exclude the possibility of time travel itself, the A2 state will be rewritten back as A1. The time traveler would not see this effect because the time traveler causality only refers to state B1 and when the time traveler past the point of B2, time will continue to point C2 for the time traveler. The time line would be unstable from point of arrival of time traveler but time still continue onwards after the point of departure of time traveler. This will create an unstable time which will revert back and forth from state A1-B1-C1 and A2-B2-C2. The observer of each state will be unaware of this change of state but time still continue onwards.

Infinity loop would probably happen if the time machine does not include the ability to only depend on the state of departure. This would introduce the element of uncertainty to the existence of the time traveler in the past which will make time travel itself improbable unless the action of time traveler is pre-programmed to fit the simulation that will not thwart the effort of time traveling itself.

Fri May 28 2010 12:27 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

I do not consider it plausible for the time traveler to be protected from causality.

So the time machine couldn't have been built with some kind of protection against that? I wouldn't know what kind of protection would be needed, just that I'm sure someone could think of something which would work.

Fri May 28 2010 3:08 pm #
Tadeusz
Member

I've read hmm..Time Scouts or Time Commandoes or something. In it, the base from which time probes are launched, or time missions run is surrounded by temporal shields. So people inside the base remember teh original timeline, but outside it changes. This can have problems as exterior forces might attack the time base.

If the enemy succeeds in say changing history so that your government bureau is under investigation by the FBI, or that riots are inflamed in your home town, or that the whole town is being bombed by enemy air forces you might find your home time base breached by outside forces.

In this scenario, one of the factors was keeping your time base hidden. Otherwise of course, you'd have those outside forces kicking in the door or trying too all the time.

Fri May 28 2010 7:13 pm #
Glantri
Member

As to time machines being built with protection against causality, they can, it just would stop them from doing anything. :P
Time machines by definition and by goal change time. If the goal is to not risk causality issues don't turn the time machine on. Once it's on though so are the issues.

Fri May 28 2010 8:00 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

Time machines by definition and by goal change time. If the goal is to not risk causality issues don't turn the time machine on.

Actually, there exists a sort of time machine now. The Concord supersonic passenger plane. If it takes off from Columbus Ohio (My home town) and heads to Los Angeles California, it takes 2 hours and 45 minutes to arrive. With the three hour time difference, you arrive 15 minutes before you took off. I wonder if you could call yourself and tell yourself how the flight was.....

(Doing Therapy)

Fri May 28 2010 8:26 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator
Maxx wrote:

I mean the causality from the future time line that the time traveler travels to. The time traveler is still affected by causality of the current time line. The time travel event itself makes the past to be dependent to the future which will introduce different states of time line, but the time travel machine must also include a rule which will make the the time traveler to be only dependent to the state which the time traveler departs which means that the time traveler will be independent from change of state in the future of the time the time traveler arrives. This will lock the state of the time traveler to specific time state.

Ah, I understand. I disagree, but I understand.

My objection is simple, but let's be clear on my use of terminology.
- Point A=the moment in the past which will be targeted by the time traveler, in the original history, such that no time traveler has arrived.
- Point B=the moment in the original history from which the time traveler departs.
- Point C=the same moment in history as point A, altered to be the start of a new version of history by the arrival of the traveler.
- Point D=the same moment in history as point B, except that it follows from the events initiated by point C and thus is in the new version of history.
You would suggest that the traveler departs from point B and arrives in point C, but when he then moves forward to a time after point D he remembers the history between points A and B, and not the history between points C and D.

Let's suppose that I'm the traveler, my AB self, and I travel from today to 1900. It won't surprise anyone to learn that sometime between 1900 and today I was born. Let's suppose I, the AB self, stay in the past for five years, until 1905, and then return to 2015. Let's also suppose that I made some changes to history, none of which prevented my own birth, that of my CD self, in the middle of the twentieth century, but which did impact history enough that my knowledge, my CD self's, of that history is different. Here are the possible outcomes:
1. My CD self also made the same trip and wound up in an EF universe, where he made changes to history to be considered separately. This is some sort of parallel dimension theory, which I address in The Two Brothers: Why Parallel Dimension Theory Is Not Time Travel. In short, my AB self did not travel to the past, but to a different universe that only looks like the past.
2. My CD self did not make the trip, but is still alive in this timeline in 2015 identical to me but having completely different memories. This again is consistent with parallel dimension theory, not with time travel. It also raises the serious problem of where my AB self originated, since the AB history has been destroyed including everything I "remember". Those events never happened; no one could remember them. Also, the AB self now was never born; only the CD self was born. So how can the AB self exist, never having been born?
3. For some completely inexplicable reason, at some point my CD self ceased to exist and my AB self replaced him. The only version of me in this world has a full set of memories of the other world, and no memories of this one. All the problems of the solution with two versions of me apply, plus the completely unexplained disappearance of the version of me that actually does remember this world. That seems to be what happens in , which is a disastrous movie temporally.
4. My AB self and my CD self merge into one self with all the inconsistent memories of both histories. I remember making the time trip and not making the time trip. Of course, this gets a lot tougher when I remember losing the arm I haven't lost, as for the two of us to merge we must be as nearly identical as can be imagined apart from our memories--twenty pounds difference in weight would be an insurmountable problem for the merge, and it's likely that the guy who spent the last five years in the nineteen aughts is physically significantly different from the one who spent them in the twenty teens.
5. Finally, the solution I propose is that the AB version of me has been "undone", was never born; he exists only as the CD version of me, the only one who actually was born, who lived through the revised history and has no memories of the original history. If somehow AB me gets past point D, he ceases ever to have been; only CD me (or the final version, whatever version that is) has the ability to reach the future beyond the end point of the anomaly.
That's how I see it. There are a lot of ideas in fiction that are complete nonsense, and a few that can only be explained by accepting that what happened only appeared to be time travel. I can make most of them "fit" one way or another, but usually they involve multiple dimensions, not time travel.

--M. J. Young
Sat May 29 2010 2:35 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator

I can't believe I did that. I picked up a bunch of quotes from several posts, answered the first at length, and then posted the whole thing without answering the others. I've edited them out of the first post and am posting again to address the other points.

John wrote, quoting me:

I do not consider it plausible for the time traveler to be protected from causality.

So the time machine couldn't have been built with some kind of protection against that? I wouldn't know what kind of protection would be needed, just that I'm sure someone could think of something which would work.

It has nothing to do with whether you could put those protections into the time machine. You'd have to find a way to put them into the original history. Yes, you could do it--by making it not time travel but dimensional travel. The problem isn't that the time traveler is changed while he is in the time machine. The problem is that the time traveler initiates changes which change him before he ever entered the time machine.

In the example of myself, I really changed nothing while I was in the time machine. While I was in the past, in 1900, not in the time machine, I made changes to the world. Those changes which I made changed who I was in the latter half of the twentieth century, before I ever entered the time machine. If they don't change me, in what sense did they change the world? If because of my acts in 1900 John Kennedy lost the Presidential race in 1960, why would it be that my young self remembers the assassination that never happened? Assuming he grows up in a world in which Kennedy was never President or assassinated, what happens to his memories? Am I "protected" such that I grew up "knowing" a history of the world that never happened? Did my return to the future erase my memories of what "really" happened and replace them with a completely delusional version of a reality which never was?

You would have to have the ability to see futures or histories which might have been--a valid psionic ability which Maud D'ib had, but still distinct from what he remembered as having happened.

John further wrote:

Actually, there exists a sort of time machine now. The Concord supersonic passenger plane. If it takes off from Columbus Ohio (My home town) and heads to Los Angeles California, it takes 2 hours and 45 minutes to arrive. With the three hour time difference, you arrive 15 minutes before you took off. I wonder if you could call yourself and tell yourself how the flight was.....

That's sophistry. You have not traveled through time; you've changed your clock. What you're suggestion means that if I happened to miss recording Inspector Lynley tonight at midnight and don't realize it until two, I could just change all the clocks in the house back to midnight and record the show then.

If you left Columbus by plane at 9:45 PM Eastern Time, you arrive in LaLa Land at 9:30 PM Pacific Time, and you think you arrived before you left. But when you left it was 2:45 AM Greenwich Mean Time, and when you arrived it was 5:45 AM Greenwich Mean Time, and unless you changed your watch sometime between departure and arrival, it read 9:45 Eastern Time when you departed and 12:45 Eastern Time when you arrived.

I thought you were going to say something intelligent about time dilation in supersonic travel--not really time travel, but at least interesting and challenging within the context of the discussion.

--M. J. Young

Sat May 29 2010 2:49 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

I thought you were going to say something intelligent about time dilation in supersonic travel--not really time travel, but at least interesting and challenging within the context of the discussion.

What happened to your sense of humor?

(Doing Therapy)

Sat May 29 2010 2:56 am #
Max
Member

In short, my AB self did not travel to the past, but to a different universe that only looks like the past.

What if it is the same universe that looks like the past?

It also raises the serious problem of where my AB self originated, since the AB history has been destroyed including everything I "remember".

The observer from point CD would probably wonder about that however for the time traveler themselves (AB self), they believe that they came from a future before the rewriting of time takes place.

So how can the AB self exist, never having been born?

The AB self have been born in the time before the rewriting takes place.

All the problems of the solution with two versions of me apply, plus the completely unexplained disappearance of the version of me that actually does remember this world.

The AB self still remembers the event that happen within AB time line but would not know anything of CD time line if it have not happened yet. The CD self would only know the event that have only happened in CD time line.
This will beg the question who is the real self right?
That depends on the time machine. Below are some of the versions of time machine that I thought of but there might be others.
Version 1: If the time machine reverses self and create another self as the time traveler then CD self is the real one.
Version 2: If the time machine create another self to fill the void of self, then the AB self is the real one.
Version 3: If the time machine splits self into two and reverses one part of self then both selves are the real one. This type usually will make the reversed part be able to be assimilated into the non-reversed part to counter the effect of splitting and reversal.

My AB self and my CD self merge into one self with all the inconsistent memories of both histories. I remember making the time trip and not making the time trip.

If the time machine uses the splitting variant, then the AB self will be the dominant part which will help with the merging process. This might also result in a mind meld event.

AB version of me has been "undone", was never born

AB version could not be "undone" by destroying CD self because AB version causality does not depend on the future of CD time line.

If somehow AB me gets past point D, he ceases ever to have been; only CD me (or the final version, whatever version that is) has the ability to reach the future beyond the end point of the anomaly.

That depends on the time machine. If the time machine set a limit to AB life line so that only CD survives after point D (which is likely for Version 1 of time machine) then probably that would happen. AB self could probably survive if the time machine does not set any limit to AB life line.
For Version 2 of the time machine, the CD self would probably die after point D but CD self would probably survive if the time machine is set to make it survive too. The time machine could also add other properties to this surviving CD self such as memory that the CD self is a replica to fill the void or something after point D.

I can make most of them "fit" one way or another, but usually they involve multiple dimensions, not time travel.

That depends on how you define time. Time might be only an illusion of moving space. If a space is reversed then do you define that as time travel?
For example, a glass of water falls down then breaks. When a part of space is reversed, the glass is back to normal. This would probably look like all the universe except the glass travels back to the past. The causality of the rest of the universe is still preserved but the causality of the glass that makes it broken have been removed. This reminds me of a skill that can reject a particular event from ever happening.

If there is no past/future and there is only the present, "time travel" would have to be redefine to "space/time causality manipulation". This is because if the "time traveler" perceive that they come back to the past, they still have experienced what they have experience before and what will happen next will not change their previous experience.

If for example the time traveler causality depends on the action the time traveler will take in the future, this will make the time travel itself improbable because there is no future yet for CD time line. How can the time traveler said that he travels from the future if the future have not happened yet?
If the future have happened for the time traveler then it would be the past for the time traveler which would explain the time traveler causality. Anything that will happen in the future will not cause anything to happen to the time traveler. This would look like taking a copy from AB time line and pasting it again after point B. However, at point B onwards, the time traveler could change the event that unfolds which will make this CD time line which point C is exactly after point B. If this is the case, infinity loop could happen if time travel is not stopped from happening.
For example, the time traveler uses the time machine and succeeds in going back to the past but then dies without changing anything. Time will continue onwards until the time machine is used yet again with the same results. This will make it look like AB-CD-CD. The CD time line will repeat until someone from outside the universe intervenes.

*****

Assuming he grows up in a world in which Kennedy was never President or assassinated, what happens to his memories? Am I "protected" such that I grew up "knowing" a history of the world that never happened?

Yes, that would be the price to pay for changing the past. This is not the only answer to the question as it would depend on how the time machine would actually work.

Did my return to the future erase my memories of what "really" happened and replace them with a completely delusional version of a reality which never was?

No, I do not think a time traveler could return back to his old future. The time traveler would experience the new history first hand. If the time traveler wanted to go to the future, the time traveler could freeze himself or something. Again, this would depend on the time machine itself.

Sat May 29 2010 4:41 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

When Reese is telling Sarah about the picture of her that he had, he says "I always used to wonder what you were thinking at that moment." At the end of the movie when the picture is taken, did anyone catch what Sarah was thinking? She was thinking about Reese. I thought that was kind of interesting.

Sat May 29 2010 8:46 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

Two

MJ, I supposed I should probably tell you that I am going to be trying to push the August 29, 1997 timeline as the start of the war. (That was Michael Jackson's birthday, BTW) Obvious reason, if we try to stop it, we can create an infinity loop. Can't have that. I'm going to see if I can't get Miles Dyson working for us. See if he can build a flaw into SkyNet which will shut it down automatically in 2040 or something. That's the best outcome. Perhaps see if he can reverse engineer and duplicate my 4 laser pistols. Even if he builds them much, much larger, but with the same or greater power, that would help tremendously. I just thought you should be aware of that.

Sun May 30 2010 2:13 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator
Max quoting me wrote

In short, my AB self did not travel to the past, but to a different universe that only looks like the past.

What if it is the same universe that looks like the past?

I was describing multiple dimension theory in that quote (either parallel or divergent dimensions); if the time traveler lands in the past of the same universe, then it is either fixed time theory and he cannot change anything and will only discover that whatever he does here is the cause of the events he wanted to undo, or it is replacement theory and we have to deal with the anomalies according to the rules of that theory of time. The latter is my default assumption in all time travel, and what the book recommends if the world description does not specify otherwise.

Max further wrote:

The AB self have been born in the time before the rewriting takes place.

This is the disconnect. The AB self was born in the original AB history, the "time before the rewriting takes place"; but the "rewriting" involves erasing everything that happened in the AB history. That means that anyone born in that time was never born; and anyone who was never born does not exist. The AB time traveling self has been erased and replaced by the CD time traveling self. This happens over the course of the CD timeline, but by point D, the AB version not only no longer exists, he now never has existed. Anything he ever did was done by the CD version, or it was never done.

This will beg the question who is the real self right?
That depends on the time machine.

It does not depend on the time machine at all. It depends on the nature of time itself.

But it occurs to me that when you said

What if it is the same universe that looks like the past?
You might have meant something more like
That would mean that in 2010 I decided I wanted to go back to 2000, but instead traveling back to 2000 I caused everyone to forget everything that happened over the course of that decade, undid the births of everyone born in that time and the deaths of everyone who died in that time, undid every cause and effect which occurred, realigned all the stars and planets to their positions in 2000, and youthened everyone except myself to our ages at that time.

It is an absolutely insane notion, but it might be possible. It raises some issues concerning the natures of time and space and their relationship to each other, and whether you can undo entropy that way (perhaps if you are using magic, you could draw an immense about of supernatural energy to do so; a technological solution is definitionally impossible here). If you missed something--radioactive decay somewhere in the universe which could be and/or had been detected and recorded, for example--you would leave traces to prove that the universe lost ten years.

I would argue that this is not time travel, though, and so if that's what you mean we'll have to address it as "something that spoofs time travel".

If somehow AB me gets past point D, he ceases ever to have been; only CD me (or the final version, whatever version that is) has the ability to reach the future beyond the end point of the anomaly.

That depends on the time machine.

No, again, it depends on the nature of time, not the nature of the time machine.

If time works by erasing what happened and replacing it with the new version (replacement theory), then the version of the time traveler who came from the AB history has erased his own existence, not as a function of the time machine but as a function of time itself: he was never born, and so he cannot now be.

If time works by preventing any change to the past, then the question is moot: the AB timeline has always included the presence of the traveler from the future, and there is no CD timeline nor a CD version of the character, and nothing that the time traveler can do will change anything that ever happened in the world from which he came.

If time works by shunting supposed time travelers to a different universe, then the traveler vanishes from the original universe never to return and duplicates a version of himself in the target universe. If that duplicate version also makes the same trip, everyone in this universe is deceived into believing that the original universe version is the second universe version arriving from the future, and in all probability the same thing will happen in the third universe; but the first universe will realize that time travel is a failed experiment, that the traveler simply disintegrated never to be seen again.

It is also more likely that the first universe traveler will be different enough from his second universe version that the second universe version will never make that trip, which means they will both exist as independently existing people, akin to identical twins but for being different ages and having the same fingerprints.

That depends on how you define time. Time might be only an illusion of moving space. If a space is reversed then do you define that as time travel?

I think I can demonstrate that time is a dimension very similar to the three spatial dimensions. For our purposes here, though, let's just say that "reversing space" is another word for "reversing the direction of the movement of the universe through time", which is a form of time travel. Yes, I can reverse causality such that the glass which just spilled and broke rises and reforms, but doing so is not different from making time go backwards in the area of the glass. How that impacts the rest of the universe might be a significant issue (as is whether having reversed time for the glass it can then avoid the accident which lies in its future), but it's not unresolvable.

If there is no past/future and there is only the present, "time travel" would have to be redefine to "space/time causality manipulation". This is because if the "time traveler" perceive that they come back to the past, they still have experienced what they have experience before and what will happen next will not change their previous experience.

This would for game purposes be time travel; it would involve isolating the traveler from the causal stream, which constitutes isolating him from time, and then adjusting the flow of the causal stream as desired, which constitutes temporal mechanics. Simply redefining the concepts does not get you out of the problems of time travel.

If for example the time traveler causality depends on the action the time traveler will take in the future, this will make the time travel itself improbable because there is no future yet for CD time line. How can the time traveler said that he travels from the future if the future have not happened yet?

Max, I've got an entire web site addressing issues like this, and I feel foolish using my time to address them again here when I could just tell you to go read the hundred or so pages of time travel work I've already done.

In one sense, the AB time traveler is "instantly" unmade at the moment he enters the CD timeline; in another sense, that event happens at the moment he leaves the AB timeline. But I've put a lot of work into explaining all that elsewhere, and should be running game threads here, not answering questions I've already answered.

For example, the time traveler uses the time machine and succeeds in going back to the past but then dies without changing anything.

This is a fundamental error a lot of people make. If the time traveler succeeded in arriving in the past, he changed the past. In the original version he was not there; in this version, he was. His death does not prevent him from having left an impact in the form of his decaying corpse. If somehow his corpse was snatched away, his mass has caused ripples in the atmosphere and through the earth's crust. If he traveled non-corporeally, his image may have been seen by some creature who moved to avoid him. Anything which arrives in the past changes the past simply by its arrival.

The error is confusing "significant" changes with any changes. Because of the butterfly effect, we can't really know what changes will be "significant". We hope that whatever the time traveler did does not change anything that "matters", and in temporal terms what "matters" is anything that is necessary to support what the time traveler did. That is, if the AB time traveler went from 2010 to 2000 and then died, then the CD traveler must also go from 2010 to 2000 and die, because if he doesn't then we have two different histories, one in which the time traveler arrived and died, and the other in which he never arrived, and even if that is the only difference between the two histories, as long as each supports the other we cannot have a single stable version of history and thus we cannot have a future built on a single stable version of history. Time ceases.

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young
Sun May 30 2010 11:00 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

Max, it took me years to get a handle on this theory, and, reading some of the stuff MJ put down, it seems I don't understand it nearly as well as I had thought I did. Just relax about it. I'm the one dealing with this.

Sun May 30 2010 11:12 pm #
WilliamTWodium
Member

Aside to Maxx:

That would mean that in 2010 I decided I wanted to go back to 2000, but instead traveling back to 2000 I caused everyone to forget everything that happened over the course of that decade, undid the births of everyone born in that time and the deaths of everyone who died in that time, undid every cause and effect which occurred, realigned all the stars and planets to their positions in 2000, and youthened everyone except myself to our ages at that time.

It is an absolutely insane notion, but it might be possible. It raises some issues concerning the natures of time and space and their relationship to each other, and whether you can undo entropy that way (perhaps if you are using magic, you could draw an immense about of supernatural energy to do so; a technological solution is definitionally impossible here). If you missed something--radioactive decay somewhere in the universe which could be and/or had been detected and recorded, for example--you would leave traces to prove that the universe lost ten years.

I would argue that this is not time travel, though, and so if that's what you mean we'll have to address it as "something that spoofs time travel".

Is that a decent summary of what your character is trying to do in your game thread? I've been trying to wrap my head around it, and this sounds kind of like my working theory of what you may have been trying to say.

Sun May 30 2010 11:14 pm #
Max
Member

It does not depend on the time machine at all. It depends on the nature of time itself.

It may also depend on both the nature of time and the time machine.

This would for game purposes be time travel; it would involve isolating the traveler from the causal stream, which constitutes isolating him from time, and then adjusting the flow of the causal stream as desired, which constitutes temporal mechanics.

Would this form of time travel be different from any of your theories?

I've got an entire web site addressing issues like this, and I feel foolish using my time to address them again here when I could just tell you to go read the hundred or so pages of time travel work I've already done.

I think I probably have read the answers before in the replacement theory section but I still do not quite understand why the time traveler could exist in the past in the first place if their action is to prevent the time travel itself after going back to the past. Would it be correct to imagine the causality of time traveler as some thread that loops back to the current time traveler which probably look like a chain? I would be grateful if you can point me to the right direction or website that addresses that issue.

without changing anything.

You are right about the phrase "changing anything". It should be changing anything that "matters". I could be wrong though because if the time traveler arrive at the past, the time traveler would emit some wave or material. What would happen if the emitted wave or material gets into the time machine in the future?
Would this cause an infinity loop to the particular wave or material?
If the location of time travel arrival is not changed for example, would the AB traveler collide with CD traveler or something?

That is, if the AB time traveler went from 2010 to 2000 and then died, then the CD traveler must also go from 2010 to 2000 and die, because if he doesn't then we have two different histories, one in which the time traveler arrived and died, and the other in which he never arrived, and even if that is the only difference between the two histories, as long as each supports the other we cannot have a single stable version of history and thus we cannot have a future built on a single stable version of history. Time ceases.

That is what confuses me about it. Why can there be only a single stable version of history?
The time travel itself destabilizes history which would make it have at least two states. So, is there any reason why only a single stable version of history could make time continue onwards?
If an opposite party knew about the time travel and succeeds in stopping it, would this cause an infinity loop?

I hope this helps.

Yes, thank you very much.

*****

Is that a decent summary of what your character is trying to do in your game thread? I've been trying to wrap my head around it, and this sounds kind of like my working theory of what you may have been trying to say.

Yes.

Mon May 31 2010 2:35 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator
It does not depend on the time machine at all. It depends on the nature of time itself.

It may also depend on both the nature of time and the time machine.

Well, yes, in the sense that it might be possible to build a machine which you thought was taking you to the past but was actually taking you somewhere else. The reason that is unlikely is given in The Two Brothers: Why Multiple Dimension Theory Is Not Time Travel, but the short version is that if your first time travel experiment resulted in the time traveling object vanishing never to appear again, you would assume that your time theories were all wrong and never send another object by that means.

This would for game purposes be time travel; it would involve isolating the traveler from the causal stream, which constitutes isolating him from time, and then adjusting the flow of the causal stream as desired, which constitutes temporal mechanics.

Would this form of time travel be different from any of your theories?
It could be different in a number of ways.

For one thing, it might be plausible to reverse causality in a limited area--the people and events here on the ground ran backwards, but the stars continue forward, which results in confusion for those who are aware of the stars.

It would also meant that entropy in the universe would continue to increase even though locally it would be reversed.

In short, in this case you are not actually or really traveling in time, but causing the world around you to move backwards instead of forwards, from effect to cause instead of from cause to effect. Time is still moving forward in that part of the universe, but every means of measuring time is moving backwards. (This might depend on the scope you're covering. If you're causing the planet itself to spin backwards and move backwards in its orbit, the shift in the stars might be imperceptible; but the shift in the planets might be noticeable if they were continuing in their orbits. I should also mention that to the best of my knowledge no one has established whether the stars in your present universe are other than fireflies stuck on that big black thing that covers the sky, or that they're not angels dancing in the dark, nor whether there are other planets. The world might be flat, for all you know.)

...I still do not quite understand why the time traveler could exist in the past in the first place if their action is to prevent the time travel itself after going back to the past. Would it be correct to imagine the causality of time traveler as some thread that loops back to the current time traveler which probably look like a chain?

You've probably seen this image (I don't think I can post an image, but if I can it should appear <img src='http://www.mjyoung.net/imgsrc/anom.jpg'>here</img>. The second image from the left, marked "infinity loop", displays time (the past at the bottom) in that situation. At point A the time traveler has not yet traveled in time, but at point B he leaves trying to reach point A; his arrival in the past makes that point C, where he duplicates himself (an older self who traveled from the future and a younger self who has not traveled through time). If somehow the older traveler prevents the younger traveler from leaving from point D, then no one arrives at point C--the older traveler has now ceased ever to have existed, and the younger traveler who is now the age at which the other made his trip does not do so. Thus no traveler arrives in the past, and point C reverts to become indistinguishable from point A, the history in which no time traveler arrived. But we know that the events flowing from point A lead to point B, where the time traveler will travel to C and prevent his doppelganger from leaving from D resetting history to point A, and that's why it's an infinity loop. (That's what John fears; there is no known way to escape one, nor even to realize that it is happening.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "look like a chain", so I can't answer that part.

You are right about the phrase "changing anything". It should be changing anything that "matters". I could be wrong though because if the time traveler arrive at the past, the time traveler would emit some wave or material. What would happen if the emitted wave or material gets into the time machine in the future?
Would this cause an infinity loop to the particular wave or material?
If the location of time travel arrival is not changed for example, would the AB traveler collide with CD traveler or something?

There are three general possibilities here, as illustrated in that diagram.
1. I've had to make the assumption that individual molecules are interchangeable. I don't know how credible that is, but in essence it matters that there are thirty seven billion molecules of oxygen in the tank, and not which thirty seven billion molecules they happen to be. Thus if the change becomes "insignificant" in the sense that everything is the same except for the individual identifies of subatomic particles, we have an N-jump, because nothing changed that will not result in exactly the same changes.
2. If whatever impacts the time machine prevents the time travel event from occurring, then we revert to point A, the non-arrival of a time traveler, and so wind up in an infinity loop.
3. If the impact is slight such that the time trip still occurs on schedule but something is different, we move to a sawtooth snap. That means that each history is a little different from the previous one, but each of them leads to a very similar trip through time. Typical examples of this are when the time traveler contacts himself. Having done so, he changes himself, and so he changes the version of himself who travels back to contact himself, making the changes slightly differently, and so changing himself yet again. It is theoretically possible for this to happen perpetually (like an irrational number), or to replay itself in a loop (like a repeating decimal), or come to an N-jump ending and continue based on the last history.
That is what confuses me about it. Why can there be only a single stable version of history?

The simple answer is that on the day after the time traveler leaves for the past, everyone is going to have to have a coherent unified memory of what happened the day before yesterday, and everything that exists today has to be linked causally from that.

In Bender's Big Score there is a throwaway scene in which Bender, trying to track down and kill all the Frys in the world, rushes into a polling place in Florida where someone named Fry is chatting with Al Gore about how good things are going to be once Gore is elected, and there is a huge stack of Gore ballots being counted. Bender's stray shot destroys them, costing Al Gore the election. As I argue in Bender's Big Score part 9: The Gorey Details, if Gore had won the election in 2000, there is almost no chance at all that Obama would have been a candidate in 2008. But if it's perfectly all right for both histories to remain, then either Obama both is and is not the President of the United States now, or there are two separate universes. Since I argue that multiple dimension theory only mimics time travel, there can't be two universes involved in genuine time travel. Thus there can only be one universe, and for that universe to have one current reality it must have exactly one actual history leading to that reality. Anything that is not part of the history that leads to that reality never happened; if it happened in a necessary alternate timeline, that timeline has been erased, has "unhappened", and now never happened.

You can't have two histories of the present world, because if you do you have two conflicting realities in the present world, and there is only one reality in any given universe.

If an opposite party knew about the time travel and succeeds in stopping it, would this cause an infinity loop?

Almost certainly so, unless it took very specific precautions.

Let's suppose that in 1980 Marty McFly decides to travel to 1920 and kill Adolph Hitler. Let's further suppose that he succeeds in doing so. Some researcher named Doc Brown in 1970 realizes that there was a crime in 1920 perpetrated by a time traveler from the future. He cannot identify the time traveler, but he determines to stop him.

If Doc Brown manages to prevent Marty McFly from making the trip from 1980 to 1920, that action will mean that Hitler was not killed; it will also mean that Doc Brown never discovered that the killer came from the future, and so never prevented McFly from making the trip, and so McFly will make the trip.

Brown has an alternative: he can hop in his time machine in 1975 and travel to 1920 and take action in 1920 to stop McFly from killing Hitler. That will have exactly the same effect, though, because now Brown can't make that discovery--unless somehow Brown in 1920 manages to leave information which his doppelganger in 1970 will recognize, and so communicate to himself that he must make the trip in 1975 to stop McFly in 1920. The information would have to be quite exact: his alternate self will have to travel from the same point to the same point for the same reason. There may be a sawtooth snap as the ripples of change stabilize. It might be more serious--Brown might have caused himself never to have existed (Brown is alive in the altered history created by McFly; he might not have been part of the original history). But there is at least a chance that an infinity loop can be avoided this way.

I use something like this, only considerably more elaborate, for my solution to make 7 Days possible. It involves passing data through a third party and preventing the time travel team from knowing whether the information they receive is fresh information based on events that happened or data they already delivered to the past for a disaster they have already rectified. Once events have been undone, the only way there can be knowledge of them is if that knowledge is passed from the future to the past and preserved in the next timeline in the same way.

--M. J. Young
Tue Jun 1 2010 6:11 am #
Max
Member

You've probably seen this image

Yes I have.

Thus if the change becomes "insignificant" in the sense that everything is the same except for the individual identifies of subatomic particles, we have an N-jump, because nothing changed that will not result in exactly the same changes.

If a being have the ability to observe the changes to subatomic particles, would that being have to stopped from activating their ability so that N-jump can happen?

Anything that is not part of the history that leads to that reality never happened; if it happened in a necessary alternate timeline, that timeline has been erased, has "unhappened", and now never happened.

Is there a reason why the necessary alternate time line does not have a future?
What would happen to the person that sends the time traveler to the past?
Does this person time somehow stops or does this person time continue onwards?

You can't have two histories of the present world, because if you do you have two conflicting realities in the present world, and there is only one reality in any given universe.

The replacement theory that you said actually make the causality travel forward in a state manner.
The diagram below shows what the replacement theory will do if the time traveler attempt to alter his own value. The value after a letter will increase to represent causality.

Here is the initial state of time:
A-0-B-0-C-0-D-0-E-0-F-0

Here times flow normally:
A-1-B-0-C-0-D-0-E-0-F-0
A-1-B-2-C-0-D-0-E-0-F-0
A-1-B-2-C-3-D-0-E-0-F-0

Here time A is rewritten after time traveler travels from D to A to stop self:
(* represents the time that is changed by the time traveler)
A-4*-B-2-C-3-D-4-E-0-F-0
A-4*-B-5*-C-3-D-4-E-5-F-0
A-4*-B-5*-C-6*-D-4-E-5-F-6

Here time A is rewritten after time traveler does not travel from D to A:
A-1-B-5*-C-6*-D-7*-E-5-F-6-G-7
A-1-B-2-C-6*-D-7*-E-8*-F-6-G-7-H-8
A-1-B-2-C-3-D-7*-E-8*-F-9*-G-7-H-8-I-9

Here time A is rewritten again after time traveler travels from D to A to stop self:
A-4*-B-2-C-3-D-4-E-8*-F-9*-G-10*-H-8-I-9-J-10
A-4*-B-5*-C-3-D-4-E-5-F-9*-G-10*-H-11*-I-9-J-10-K-11
A-4*-B-5*-C-6*-D-4-E-5-F-6-G-10*-H-11*-I-12*-J-10-K-11-L-12

As you can see, time still continue onwards if replacement theory is used but there will be some sort of ripple that changes history.

Tue Jun 1 2010 11:04 pm #
Tadeusz
Member

In 'Metaplanetary', a peculiar kind of 'time tower' which is a peculiar kind of LAP (Large Array Person) is Thaddeus Kaye who has been imprinted on the local aka solar system wide causality field so much so that if TK dies he might create a temporal black hole which might give birth to other universes with different basic rules.

LAP are a few human bodies (an original and a few clones) and a number of computer copies of the original spread out in different places throughout the solar system so that a LAP could be talking to his love on Earth, calculating sales for feedstock out on Saturn, doing art in his virtual reality apartment near Mars, and doing an experiment near the Sun all at the same time. Obviously this requires instantaneous FTL comms.

Time towers were LAPs designed to experience a decade as a single moment.

TK even more so became the local time field.

I'm not sure what to make of this, but I thought you might find it interesting.

Wed Jun 2 2010 2:15 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator
If a being have the ability to observe the changes to subatomic particles, would that being have to stopped from activating their ability so that N-jump can happen?

The working theory is that subatomic particles are not distinguishable from each other; all that can be observed is their state and relationships, and the causal chains will still work given a different set of subatomic particles in the same states and relationships.

That is, if we have ten molecules of water, each has ten protons, seven neutrons, I believe eight electrons (might be wrong--my molecular chemistry is not that good), plus some number of muons, tachyons, and other subatomic particles. They stand in relationship to each other within the atoms. In sending ten molecules of water to the past, it matters that we have sent those ten molecules which are drawn from a specific set, but it does not matter whether they are the same protons, neutrons, electrons, and other particles, as long as they are the same numbers of such particles in the same relationships.

I think you're asking whether the ability of a creature to observe these subatomic particles would make a difference to the anomaly, but I don't see how it could. How would they be observed?
- They might be observed from any point of time up to the moment of their departure. In this case, their arrival is irrelevant, and if that observation began prior to the moment of arrival we know that none of the particles departing were among those arriving. If it happens to be the stabilized timeline, the observer expects to see those particles vanish, and thus his observation is interrupted by their departure.
- They might be observed from the moment of their arrival forward. In this case, the observer was awaiting their arrival with his attention focused on that point; but he did not observe them prior to their departure, and it is not necessary that these particles depart at the end of the history, so the observation is irrelevant.
- The observer might travel with the particles, in which case he would see the same particles arrive as he saw depart; however, the observer who departs exists sequentially before the one who arrives, and the one who arrives is not going to depart again, so it will in that sense be a "different" observer observing a "different" collection of subatomic particles, in the sense that that observer and those particles have not yet made this trip. That observer will also see the same particles arrive as depart.
- Even if there were a way for the observer to observe particles arriving in the same timeline from which he observes them departing (which I cannot find as I think about it), he could not detect any difference in the arriving particles as compared with the departing particles, because the transition would still be completely smooth: particle one leaves point B and particle 2 arrives at point C, and all the world changes around the particle, but the particles are indistinguishable from each other and there was no instant at which they were observed not changing.
Is there a reason why the necessary alternate time line does not have a future?
What would happen to the person that sends the time traveler to the past?
Does this person time somehow stops or does this person time continue onwards?

Abe and Bob build a time machine. The started building in 2000 and finished in 2020. In 2020, Bob operates the machine and sends Abe to 2010.

Either Abe arrived in 2010 or he didn't.

If he arrived in 2010, it doesn't matter whether Bob knows it or not before 2020; the fact is, Abe exists in the past, at 2010, when before he didn't. Abe will change the universe by his presence, even if Bob and Abe's counterpart, who are now working on that time machine in 2010, don't know this. So the logical solutions are:
1. Abe arrived in 2010, but that this did not change anything because you can't change the past, and thus Abe always arrived in 2010. Nothing Abe or Bob can do will prevent them from creating the time machine on schedule in 2020 and sending Abe to 2010, no matter what disaster Abe causes; it won't be a change, but will be what happens in history.
2. Abe thinks he has arrived in 2010, but he is actually in another universe. In Bob's universe, Abe vanished never to be seen again, and Bob now knows that their time travel experiments are a failure, that he has killed his friend Abe. In Abe's universe, it does not matter whether Bob and Abe finish the time machine, except that if Abe never leaves for 2010 in that universe there will always be two Abes in that universe, one ten years older than the other, one who came from a future that might never come to be in this universe. This is not time travel; it is dimension travel.
3. Abe does arrive in 2010 and so changes history. There "was", in a metaphysical sense, a previous history in which he did not arrive, but that history has "unhappened" and a new history is created which includes Abe's arrival. As to Bob, the 2020 version of him has not yet existed, but his 2010 version is working on the time machine. When 2020 arrives, he will exist in whatever form the altered history gives him, which might be exactly the same and might be entirely different. If he is different enough that Abe's memories of him are different, then the Abe that arrived in 2010 also is replaced by the new Abe that makes the trip from 2020--what we would call the "second" trip, but that the "first" trip has now never happened (whether or not the "second" trip occurs).
Bob doesn't cease to exist, really. He simply reverts to who he was at the time of Abe's arrival and becomes whoever he will be given the changes to history. Bob has a future--the same future everyone has now that Bob and Abe have changed the universe such that there is a different future for everyone.

When you think about it, there wouldn't be much point to changing the past if the past of your own universe isn't going to change; and it wouldn't be time travel if you were changing the past of someone else's universe. Either Bob's universe changes and Bob with it, or Abe is in a different universe and never actually traveled to his own past.

I don't understand your symbols in your efforts to describe timelines--what are the "0"s? What do the numbers represent? But the short answer is, either the time traveler enters the past and changes the universe for everyone everywhere such that the old history never happened for anyone anywhere, or the time traveler enters the past and cannot change anything because he was always part of the past, or the time traveler does not enter the past but travels to a different universe and changes nothing in his own history but events in another as yet unformed timeline.

There is no way that a time traveler can travel to his own past and change it and also not change it at the same time.

--M. J. Young
Wed Jun 2 2010 11:09 pm #

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