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Author Topic: Time tavel question
srhowen
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OK I spelled the thread name wrong, and I can't change it here--sorry

Does this work---

If you are traveling in time, can you be in two places at once? Like this—a man leaves for the past at 3am---ok he spends time in the past until say 3:30---then he goes back to the future and arrives at 3am—it would then appear that he never left—right? He stays in the future until 4am then he goes back to the past and appears there at 3:30---it would then appear that he never left the past—right? So he would be in both places at once, but not really. Or am I clear as primordial soup?

He would then have a strange mixed mess of memories—or wouldn’t he? How would you show this? Can it work for a long period in which the writer shows only one time period? Then when he returns, those in the other time period think that he was there all along and did things as well---but he has only vague memories of it? Or do I need to show one of the shifts and what he does in each to make it work ?

Bad example follows:
I was sitting with the cat and then suddenly I was looking at my mother who had been dead for five years. I look at the calendar and realize that if my mom goes to the store today she will be killed.---I say, “Mom, don’t go to the sto---then I was looking at the cat again---I fed the cat and walked outside—if only I could figure out why I kept shifting this way---re today.” And I was looking at my mom again as if I had never left her. Or maybe---re today?” “Son, are you all right?” What the hell had just happened?

Does that work?

Comments, suggestions? Please, this is a major factor in making my novel work!

Shawn


[This message has been edited by srhowen (edited January 02, 2002).]


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SiliGurl
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I am by no means an expert, but I do know that there are tons of articles on the web regarding this very same thing... and there's a somewhat old book on writing time travel fiction; Time Travel (ISBN: 0898797489) by Paul J. Nahin.

I think that you're running into one of those weird paradoxes where Something would prevent that from occuring. Not sure if it's just a commonly held "writer's belief" or if it's actually what theorists suppose, but I've read that there are certain paradoxes to time travel that just won't let you do certain things... such as inadvertently killing your grandfather or bumping into yourself or being 2 places at the same time. AND even if all of that were just a writer's convention, it's probably a reader's convention as well, and you might have to explain your way out of that paradox in your story.

Just my 2 cents. Not sure if that was helpful at all!

[This message has been edited by SiliGurl (edited January 03, 2002).]


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Bardos
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A difficult question you pose here Shawn...
As I see the whole thing:

<<If you are traveling in time, can you be in two places at once?>>

I think no. I'll explain.

<<Like this—a man leaves for the past at 3am---ok he spends time in the past until say 3:30---then he goes back to the future and arrives at 3am—it would then appear that he never left—right?>>

He travels in the past at 3 a.m. Then, waits until 3:30 a.m. Then-- He goes to the Future at 3 a.m., you say? But that's the Past now, for him! (since he is at 3:30) So he isn't at two places at once.

<<He stays in the future until 4am then he goes back to the past and appears there at 3:30---it would then appear that he never left the past—right?>>

First, he goes to 3 a.m. Then, waits untill 3:30. Then, goes back to 3 a.m. Then he stays there --in the Past, not the Future-- until 4 a.m. Then, goes back to 3:30. Right? I'm a bit comfused...
I really think this guy is sliping to and fro in the timestream, but he isn't at two places at once; he is just moving up and down the Road of Time. Can you be at two places in a road? (Supposing you use time like a road, for there are also other explanations.)
The whole thing depends on what he does when he is in the "Past" or "Future" (which are subjectif, and related to the man in question, actually). That is what is more important. His memories will remain as they are: he will remember exactly what he sees, normaly --except if you're using some other explanation (a dream, parhaps?).

I hope I've hepled (a litle )


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WillC
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Time Travel:

I can't a problem about being in the same place at the same time. The YOU at any given time is the YOU at that time only. .00001 second later you are a different YOU than the YOU at .00001 second before. The existance thing isn't a static event; any micro-moment change in a person takes him/her away from the before.

Willis Couvillier
(really enjoyed Medicine Man, BTW)


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srhowen
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I take it you read it at DelRey (8 chapters there)(if you read it at DelRey do a review)Please? or the first three chapters at Critters?—(someone at critters thought it was s short story and liked it!)(way weird–but I guess looking at those three chapters, it could be.)I am very close to finishing the re-writes---the one thing that has bothered people is that he is in the future--his time but he did things in the past---I like the road idea--he can't be in two places at once but he could be in the two places--during the same time period by slipping back and forth--yikes, I hate time questions---

I think I have it worked out so it makes sense---though to explain how I did it would make your head hurt and mine.

Thanks,
Shawn


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Doc Brown
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Time travel? Hmmp. Doc Brown says it's impossible.

Seriously, you can do whatever you want to do in your stories, just as long as you can get your readers to go along with it.

In the Asimov novel The End of Eternity time travellers were constantly changing history. In OSC's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus time travellers could change history. Both are among the most respected of authors.

You begin to lose your readers when you start messing with causality. If I am sitting here at 3:00 AM and I suddenly see myself time-travel in from the future, the future me should already have memories of the event. If not, I had better explain why.

In your example, your character is in the middle of a different action when suddenly he finds himself finishing a sentence "-re today." You suddenly rob him of free will and self determination. He is just a passenger, not a primary actor. This seems less like time travel and more like a mental illness.


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srhowen
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Doc,

It was bad a example---I was trying to explain the effect I was going for---at the point in the novel he doesn't know how he is traveling yet---he does figure it out. And the scene was not out of the novel---good grief if I wrote like all the time I would have given up long ago---it was a quickly put together example in the middle of a brain storm on how to get the scene to work. Plus--the entire novel has an edge of the surreal to it.

Shawn


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JK
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quote:
Can you be in two places at once?

Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yes if he does what I think you're having him do. I'll put it in my own words, though, so if I've misunderstood it all you can correct me.
Our man (we'll call him Bob, I don't know why *grin*) is currently sitting in his living room at 18:00. He remembers that he needed to buy milk, but the shops are closed now, so he he pops into his time machine and zips back to 16:30 when they're still open.
Update: there are now two Bobs at 16:30.
Our Bob (Bob1, from 18:00), also remembers that at 16:30 he was fixing his car, so he won't disturb himself (Bob2 at 16:30). He decides to go and get the milk himself. He goes to the shop, buys it, then puts it in the fridge with a little note to himself so Bob2 won't be confused when he finds it, and so Bob2 knows that he'll have to make the same trip Bob1 does (else there'd be a paradox). At 17:00, having done all this, Bob1 pops into his time machine, and zips back to 18:00.
Update: there is now only one Bob at 17:00. There were two from 16:30 to 17:00.
Bob1 makes himself some tea with the milk he bought, then sits back and reads the paper. There has only ever been one Bob at 18:00.
So there can be two Bobs at a certain point in time.
As for how they'd remember things, I don't see why remembering it would be difficult. Because Bob1 is not techincally Bob2 (because in the hours between Bob being Bob2 and turning into Bob1, he's lost skin cells, moisture, had thoughts and experiences that alter him subtley), the entity known as Bob should have a single consciousness stream. The experience of going back in time, and the half hour spent buying milk, will simply slip between the two nanoseconds at 18:00 at which Bob leaves and returns.
That's my view on it anyway. I'd be interested to hear if I'm wrong.
JK

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Cosmi
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alright, i'm a physics buff with an Algebra II math education, so we'll just see what i can come up with.... {grin}

anybody familiar with CPT symmetry? i use it to rule out time travel in my sci-fi. i'll explain:

for a while it was accepted that the universe obeyed three symmetries: C, P, and T.

C: laws (of the universe) are the same for particles and anti-particles
P: laws are the same for particles and their mirror images (particles spinning left-handed and right-handed, for example)
T: if you reverse the direction of motion, a system will go back toward its origin (laws are the same forward and backwards in time, basically)

it was later found that the weak force doesn't obey C or P, but does obey CP

even later it was found that K-mesons don't obey CP

long story short, this shows that if you reverse the direction of time, the universe doesn't behave the same way. when you come out of it, the universe you're in will NOT be the past. so much for a road...

still, there are tons of other ways to time travel if you want to. i, for one, incorporate exotic matter (negative energy) feilds to escape light speed problems. that's sorta like time travel, and exotic matter feilds can also be used to maintain wormholes for time travel, if you want time travel.

i hope i haven't made things worse...

TTFN & lol

Cosmi


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srhowen
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I believe that JK got what I was after. Except while my guy is hopping around he forgets to eat and one set of "what he dids, gets blurred.

Thanks

Shawn


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TheNinthMuse
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There are numerous time-travel theories floating around. I believe personally that there is one fized time stream, so that anything you do in the past or the future will not change anything because the place in the time stream that you originated from would have already been subject to the effects of the changes you made. In this way everything remains constant.

I know this doesn't directly address your question, but I'll let you work out the implications for yourself...


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Liza
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Time travel is theoretical. It doesn't exist for us humans, at least not yet.No matter what anyone says about what would happen if we went back, etc, one fact remains: no one can do it. Therefore, in a fictional novel, I say characters can time travel any old way the author explains it, as long as it is consistent within the story.I have read numerous books and have seen many movies dealing with time travel. To me, it is the the fact that characters are travelling in time that is fun. It isn't very important to me what scientist's theory it is based on.

Shawn, I think your way of explaining time travel makes sense. Modern humans have decided time is linear, but it isn't necessarily so. And some humans don't measure time in a linear way. I think we all just have habits and notions about the way we think of time and time travel, but it doesn't have to limit your story.


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Bardos
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TheNinthMuse: I too believe that there is no time, only various possibilities. But I answered with the road thing for simplicities sake.
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srhowen
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Hey, I have to have these "wee hours of the morning" brain storms mroe often this has been interesting and given me a number of ideas for future stories.

Thanks all,
Shawn


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Sekarai
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First I believe that if time travel is possible there can be two of the same person at the same time. However you must be careful not to create a "time loop." Let's go back to "Bob" buying the milk. Once Bob1 bought the milk, when Bob2 reaches the time that Bob1 left for the past Bob2 would have to go back in time to buy the milk or else in Bob3's time no one would buy the milk and all Bob's would end up with no milk. It's a little complex and may take some time to comprehend.
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srhowen
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Got it. And that's just about what my cahracter did---that's why one set of things that he did turned out to rather muddled, as far as memory went, until he got back to that time and left the other time---because in order for the first time things to be clear, he had to do his thing is the second time.

Oh boy---

Shawn


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JK
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Never fear, Sekarai, genius JK accounted for your paradox worries in his scenario *grin*
NinthMuse: your point is a good one. Theoretically, Bob1 should have already had milk, because Bob0 would have gone to buy it. However, if that is the case, it makes time travel stories rubbish.
Also, I (and, I imagine, the rest of the human race), have a little trouble imagining that some Bob didn't find himself with no milk; that there wasn't one Bob who started the whole time travelling scenario.
JK

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Sekarai
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The real questions are: does Bob have a beginning, and how does the difference in their actions affect the next Bob? Is Bob5 the first to go back in time or is Bob2, or Bob1, or Bob0, and so on. Unless every Bob that has existed or will exist at 18:00 goes to get milk we end up with two different classifications of Bob: those with milk and those without. As for question number two, each Bob will act slightly differently than the one before him because he will know a little more or a little less than the one before. If Bob1 goes back to get the milk Bob2 will act slightly differently than Bob1 because his life has been changed by having the milk, causing Bob3 to act differently from Bob2 and so on. So in the end we have ourselves an infinite number of Bobs each different from the rest. Also we have and infinite number of universes depending upon how each Bob affected his surroundings.
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Bardos
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Read Moorckok. He anylizes Time preety well in his multiverse.

And, yes, there possible time-dimensions where I've never writen this post.

There are other possible time-dimensions where Shawn hasn't started this topic.


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Liza
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And I insist that there are readers who are only interested in the fact that Bob got back there to get the milk at all, but don't really care how, because they get headaches trying to figure out what Bob did what.And when.Etc.
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sidewayzzzzz
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Anyone read Heinlein's The Number of the Beast? It deals with six dimentional time space travel. It is one of the most convincing arguments for time travel I have read yet. According to it the variances in perception only occur when subjective and objective time/space are compared. Bob1 would have experienced a half of an hour more than the composite Bob up to this point, thereby forcing all subsequent Bobs to also experience this half of an hour. All possible Bob's experience the same thing, and now Bob1 remembers looking for milk, finding a note to himself from the future and going back in time. a very small loop, it has no profound effect on anything, save Bob now has milk.
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Bone
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Well I think it all depends on your point of view. If we take Einstein's theories "I may have these wrong don't shoot". His time travel is a vessel moving faster than the speed of light. Which would cause time for you to slow down (if you are using the outside world as a reference) if I am not mistaken. You would not notice a difference
in the ship but when you slowed down and got out you would be further in the future. It might have only seemed like 3 days to you but it may have been 100 years to those outside the ship.

Other references such as in role-playing typically you can travel back in time but not make a major influence. Like if you kill a general who won a major battle history changes slightly and instead one of his soldiers stepped in and the same result ensued.

Also you being out of the time loop would be the only one not affected by the changes. Everyone else would think that is the way it always has been so you pose the danger or maybe affecting events you don't totally understand if you were to take that angle.

But in truth I am sure you can do just about anything you want being it if fantasy. (Micheal J fox almost met himself in Back to the Future).

-Donny


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Doc Brown
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Back to the Future? Never heard of it.

Seriously, if you recall the second movie in the series, Doc Brown almost met himself while stringing up the cables, and Jennifer did meet herself. These encounters and their effects really give no information to which any writer must adhere, unless you are writing the script for Back to the Future: Part 4.

I reiterate, as long as you explain the cause and effect behind your time travellers' actions well enough that your readers don't balk, you can do anything you want.


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JK
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I love the Back to the Future series. My only complaint about it is that the videos aren't sold over here any more, so I can't buy them! Phooey.
There's some good stuff on time travel in OSC's How To Write Sci-Fi and Fantasy. He's also written a few good short stories featuring time travel.
Bone: you're right about the time dialation, but that's only if you're travelling close (under) the speed of light. As far as I know, the effects upon a person travelling faster than light are unknown. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Doc Brown: I am ashamed to admit that I hadn't figured out the inspiration for your name until now. I must be shot for my laughable ignorance *grin*
JK
P.S. I also see no problem in meeting a past version of yourself. Could someone tell me why this is to be avoided? Thanks.

[This message has been edited by JK (edited January 11, 2002).]


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Cosmi
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JK~

your question reminded me of a funny story. i don't remember all the details, but here's a paraphrase:

A baby girl is abandoned and left at an orphanage in 1945 and grows up lonely and depressed. One day in 1966 at a bar she finds a lone, drunk vagabond with whom she can relate. She feels as though he knows exactly what she's been through and the two fall in love. they share a night together, but he disappears the next morning. Nine months later she gives birth to a baby girl, but something goes terribly wrong with the birth. It turns out that the woman has both male and female sex organs and in order to save her life, must be turned into a boy. Depressed with her fate, the now man becomes a drunk vagabond. A month later (s)he meets a middle-aged male who says he is from the Institute of Time Travel (something like that--i can't recall the actual name) in 1985. He gives (her)him the opportunity to seek revenge on the drunk who left (her)him in this state in 1966, but first (s)he must do two things: 1)leave his baby girl at an orphanage in 1945 and 2) join the Institute after getting his revenge. The man agrees, drops off the baby in 1945, and then travels to 1966 to the bar where he met the vagabond. At the bar, he can not find the vagabond and drinks heavily to stay his depression. He then meets an oddly familiar woman. She seems to understand and relate to him very well and the two spend a night together before he must leave to join the Institute of Time Travel. There he becomes a prominent member and in 1985 gets his most daring mission yet--go back in time and lead a young man to confront the father of his child.

can you imagine THAT family tree?!

TTFN & lol

Cosmi

[This message has been edited by Cosmi (edited January 11, 2002).]


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JK
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How bizarre *grin*
JK

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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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That story is by Robert A. Heinlein, and I believe the title is "By His Bootstraps."

Credit where credit is due....


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Cosmi
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Kathleen~

thanks. i read it in some science book (they've begun to mush together {sigh}) and couldn't recall any more about it. i didn't know it was by Heinlein. actually, i've always been a fan of his so that's neat to know.

thanks again.

TTFN & lol

Cosmi


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Survivor
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There are actually two separate ideas being discussed here, as I see it. One is whether it is possible for time travel to exist. The other is whether a single person can simultaneously experience multiple points of veiw.

These two questions actually have nothing to do with each other, so they must be answered separately.

Time travel is possible, since we all travel forward in time. It is also possible to exert some control over the rate at which time passes, as we learn from relativity. There is no theoretical exclusion of traveling backwards in time either, although Cosmi is correct in postulating that some forms of reverse times may not display perfect symmetry. Thus, the time inversion would not lead to a previous time, but rather a "past" logically consistent with the "present" from which you travel. Because this form of time travel does not involve paradox--at least not as such--it cannot be ruled out as a theoretical possibility (I will point out that this type of time travel does involve inverting the fundamental physical constants in such a way as to make some substantial part of the universe go in reverse, so while it is not impossible, it is certainly quite difficult).

More recent speculation involves the possibility of using a wormhole to travel between two points. If one entrance is kept stationary (or nearly so) while the other end--let us call it the y end, meaning the young end--is accelerated to the speed of light and taken on a round trip back to it's point of origin, then you will have a pair of "portals" that are connected. If you go into the first opening that is, say, 100 years old, then you will come out of the y opening when it turns 100, i.e. nearly 100 years after you entered its mate. To you this will seem instantaneous. There is no physical principle that prohibits the return trip, entering the 100 year old Y end and coming out the first end when it was 100 years old (or slightly after you entered it). Having returned to your initial time frame, there is still nothing to prevent you from entering the y end again. Only this time, you will be entering the y end when it is less than a year old, and you will emerge from the stationary end when it is less than a year old. Thus you will have traveled back to a time prior to your first trip through the wormhole.

This would seem to provide a way of changing the past, except for the fact that it does not logically imply that the past will be changed. The mathmatics of wormhole interactions demonstrate that for any complex particle interchange across the event horizon (and I believe that a human jumping through still qualifies) there exists a self consistent solution such that the past is not changed (to be more precise, the 'independent' or 'origin' particle interchange is consistent, so it is only your past, or that part of it that you remember, that is unchanged).

In less wordy terms, no matter how you set up the "time machine" you cannot 'force' a paradox, there is always a way for the universe to resolve things so that the person that travel back in time doesn't change his or her (or both, as the case may be) past.

For this reason most physicists think that even if time travel is possible (and many admit that it seems possible in theory) it would simply always turn out that a person trying to change the past would simply be thwarted by circumstances. One of which circumstances would be the sudden collapse of a wormhole (with our time traveler inside) if that was the only self consistent solution. In short, attempting to change the past is probably impossible, and may be extremely fatal.


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Survivor
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Now for the other question, I think that it depends on how you define your terms. I can see no reason that a single person couldn't experience several streams of perception and conciousness at the same time (although whether they could maintain any degree of mental coherence is doubtful). But if you are talking about a single person simultaneously being multiple persons, then you might be specifying an implicit contradiction in terms.

Assuming for the moment that we are simply talking about a single person experiencing more than one stream of consciousness, I can think of a number of perfectly respectable SF conventions that allow this. Telepathy, for instance, is often just such a device. Or the possibility of cybernetically integrated persons (an idea much older than the "Borg" of Star Trek fame) can be invoked. If you like, then some type of duplication technology (possibly an offshoot of matter transmission technology) could result in the duplicates of a single person having limited telepathy amongst themselves. If you dislike the idea of telepathy even in this context, then I suppose that you will have to resort to the cybernetic communication.

As I said at the beginning, this concept is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of multiple persons resulting from time travel, as a person traveling back in time could not be permitted to affect him or herself in the past, even (perhaps particularly) as a result of telepathy.


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Skolovic
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What are your thoughts on the Time Continuum?
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Survivor
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Time Continuum?

Term undefined, no assignment, or improper parsing error.

I'll do my best to answer

I assume that by Time Continuum you mean the extension of a single event stream from the past to the future, such that any given waveform can be defined for any given 'point' in time (I here use the term point for a specification of the dimensional value of t independent of any other dimensional values, much as a point existing on a one dimensional line or two dimensional plane is often specified without reference to any other dimensions) within the limitations of quantum indeterminacy.

Which is to say, there is one past, and it cannot be altered by an event in the present.

I am sorry to say that there is no scientific proof at the present time for such a hypothesis. While mathmaticians have demonstrated that there is always a self consistent solution for a particle/wave (or complex of the same, such as a person) traveling through a wormhole to a prior point in time, they have not yet proved that the self-consistent solution is implicit, only that it always exists.

And the first time travel mechanism I discussed is even worse. As Cosmi pointed out, 'time' flowing backwards would not be perfectly symmetrical to 'time' flowing forwards, so that if you tried to go back in time by causing 'time' to go in reverse, you would not even go back to your own past, but rather a 'past' consistent with the 'present' moment from which you initiated the 'time' reversal. Now, (as you might have guessed from all those little quotation marks) I think that this form of reversal isn't really "time" travel, properly speaking. After all, in order to travel 'back in time' using this approach, you have to have someplace where time is not going backward, but forward. Therefore, I would characterize this approach as "inverting" the laws of physics such that physics worked "backwards" rather than reversing time.

To use a rather silly and simplistic analogy, you can make your car go backwards by throwing it into reverse, but that doesn't make time go backwards. I think that the same is true of the universe...you (well, someone powerful enough) could make everything happen backwards, but since they would have to "invert" the fundamental constants to do so, I think that couldn't be considered to be actual travel backwards in time (particularly since, as Cosmi has already pointed out, because of the lack of symmetry this reversal wouldn't lead to the universe returning to a previous configuration (or 'past'), but only to one logically consistent with the moment from which the "inversion" took effect.

Which is to say that it is possible that we could consider this sort of 'time travel'to be perfectly consistent with a Time Continuum. In fact, because this sort of 'time' travel cannot generate a paradox anymore than you could by putting your car in reverse or running backwards, I would tend to posit that it cannot cause any given waveform to become undefined for any given value of t.

Which is all very well and good, but I probably have completely misunderstood the question:0


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Skolovic
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No, you were right, I didn't clarify my question. Any way, you answered what I wanted to know, I was curious on the theory of the continuum and you answered that.
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Doc Brown
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Kathleen, I think you got the author's name right, but I believe the story's title is "All you Zombies."

JK, you may still not understand the meaning of my handle. Go here for a hint.

[This message has been edited by Doc Brown (edited January 15, 2002).]


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Survivor
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Well, always glad to be of service.

Now then, I have a question...and I don't want to start yet another thread to ask it...hmmm.

Okay, since we cannot positively exclude time travel at this point in time, nor can we positively exclude alteration of the past, even leading to apparent paradox...I would ask,

What if you could go back in time? Would you? What if you could change the past? Is there anything that you would change? What?

And just for good measure...What if you were not only telepathic, but had the ability to 'dominate' or 'possess' another person?


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Doc Brown
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Survivor, OSC's Pastwatch is all about going back in time and changing a crucial event: the encounter between Columbus and the native Americans. OSC thinks big.

Personally, I'd go back in time and tear up my 403(b) application before I invested in Enron.

If I had the ability to control minds, I would use it to help my students learn their engineering lessons better. In my book, any other use would be immoral.


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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Doc Brown, "All You Zombies" was the other title I was thinking of for that story, but I wasn't sure. (I think it may have appeared under both titles.)

I'll see if I can find out for sure and let you all know.


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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Okay, "By His Bootstraps" was published in ASTOUNDING in October 1941 and is also a time loop story.

The one Cosmi described is "All You Zombies" published in FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION IN March 1959.

So, you're right, Doc, and I was wrong.

Thanks for making me check.


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JK
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Doc, if that's not you, I'm even more confused. If it is, that I am enlightened and even, dare I say it, envious.
Survivor, knowledgeable as you are, time travel is a fairly moot question. As such, there are probably fairly few writers who will use the laws of physics as they stand to play with time travel (a la Back to the Future). If I had a time machine, I'd use to look at cool stuff in the past and the future, then I'd use it to save time (no pun intended, honest. No, don't throw that!)
JK

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Doc Brown
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JK, I am in that picture, but you really can't see me because I am in the driver's seat, obscured by sunglare. The smiling passenger is my wife.

Kathleen, I prefer to think of myself as providing helpful information, rather than making you check.

"All You Zombies" is a classic time paradox story, but it is pretty thin on plot and character development. For crying out loud, the main character spent half his/her life as a woman and the other half as a man . . . that aspect alone could make a whole series of books! The story has little action or tension, and darn few characters. It could be fascinating to build the same premise into a fully-developed character in a novel and see what happens. She/he might even make a good secondary character or sidekick.


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Survivor
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Well, obviously time travel technology is useless if all we can think of to do with it is look at our own past.

Anyone ever read those Thingamummy Hall stories? I liked some of the ideas in that, creating a sealed of universe composed of the same space at different thousand year periods, terraforming extra-solar planetary systems, recruiting a vast organization of select individuals that wouldn't get a fair shake in the time they came from...all good ideas, in my book, but why stop there?

One thing that I don't think I would personally try is saving suicides from the past and trying to integrate them into a futuristic society (a story called The Golden Halls of Hell was based on this idea, and while in the story it wasn't as bad an idea as the title makes it sound, I had more sympathy with the character that provided the title than the main protagonist)...I also don't think that it would be a very good idea to go back and enslave people in the past, like in so many stories that I forget.

One thing that time travel would make possible is effective FTL travel, since you could simply go near lightspeed for some distance, travel into the past, and then complete your journey. You could even complete your journey before you started it without causing a paradox, as long as you kept within the limitations of your destination's light event radius. Of course, that has nothing to do with changing the past, but it's still a pretty nifty idea, don't you think? On the down side, if you are using wormholes to travel in time, you could just as easily use them to travel in space without the exercise.

I think that I would probably use time travel for pretty selfish things, without a lot of consideration for the larger consequences. That's probably why I don't have that particular ability


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ANGEL 01
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This probly doesn't even matter any more, but...

I think that time travel is completely valid,seeing as, by one's view from Einstein, by moving faster than light, time for you would speed up, But now, how would you go backward in time? An old Star Trek The Next Generation episode used the theory that, just like there is matter and anti-matter, there is time and anti-time. In that episode, there was a time-anti-time explosion. The area effected by the explosion would increase the farther back in time you got. This of course would be impossible, seeing how anything in the past would affect the future. The only way this could work is if you accept the theory that all time exists at once, and the reality we experience flows through them. This of course opens the doorway to the stream flowing backward.


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srhowen
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Correct me if I am wrong but I think Pastwatch was about the MesoAmerican meeting with the spanish.

Native Americans are generaly those in N. America.

Shawn


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Doc Brown
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Technically, I believe the term "MesoAmerican" was coined by Paul Kirchhoff in 1943. Kirchhoff used the term to imply the geographic area where certain cultural groups lived. Since then the word has drifted into a temporal-specific use, indicating the pre-Hispanic period, that Kirchhoff originally did not use.

I used the term "Native Americans" because it generally has a broader interpretation. I think either is correct.

OSC's book Pastwatch did feature the first encounter between Spainish speakers and people "native" to the American continents. However, the key to the story was Christopher Columbus. The Hispanic sailors might as well have been Chinese or Martians; it was the presence of Columbus that was critical for the plot.


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Saffron Buggles
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Okay, I've slogged through all the posts to see if my ideas had been expressed already and find that there is still a problematic idea that's been bugging me.

I don't profess to have either the scientific knowledge nor infallible intellect to make this solution to the problem that's a gnat's bite on my earlobe, but here goes.

I'm going way, way back in time, so to speak, to JK's wonderful little story about Bob. (Jan 3)

JK, (and this is for you too Shawn, since apparently you have been exploring this idea in Medicine Man... the rest of which I'm anxiously anticipating getting my mitts on... ), there was one thing that bothered me about Bob's little quest, which spurned an idea about the paradox theory on why you can't meet yourself from the past. (I'm gonna make the foray into SF just to further develop all these wonderful ideas that are floating around)

You had Bob1 leaving a note for Bob2 to go back in time to get milk at 18:00. This seems to create the loop/paradox, at least for me.

For argument's sake, let's say that Bob1 knows nothing about the milk in question prior to going back to retrieve it. He goes back, gets the milk, leaves the message and returns to 18:00. Everything seems to be going along ok to this point, but there occurs a paradox. Bob2 has interacted with Bob1, by reading the letter. All of a sudden you have split the relative timelines of Bob1 and Bob2, and there is no guarantee that when Bob2 gets to 18:00 and goes to get milk, that he will do things exactly the same, because he'll always be wondering how Bob1 is going back in His reality. You will in effect have Cloned Bob, from the point where he reads the letter. Even if the letter is left anonymously, the only way to avoid that cloning would be if the note was ALWAYS there, and Bob1, has a recollection of that strange message in the firstplace, not knowing the significance of it until he gets to 18:00. There's your loop. Of course then you get into a chicken/egg dilemma that will leave the audiences wondering, "Where the heck did the original letter come from?"

Here I propose another alternative to the Bob dilemma...
Don't leave the note!
Why?
Ok, let's take a different viewpoint on the time theory... For any person, time travels ever forward, in a line from birth to death.
Here then becomes our Bob scenario.
18:00, Bob(there is only ever 1 Bob now.) goes back in time to 16:00, buys his milk, and makes a bee line back to 18:00, where he makes his tea.
Past Bob has no contact with Future Bob, and goes happily on from 16:00 to 18:00 washing the car or whatever, and at precisely the same point when he's about to have his tea, he's reached the same decision to go back in time and get milk. Here you avoid the paradox. (sounds like Back to the Future I guess, but let's take it further)
The tension for this story then becomes Bob's quest to avoid himself, whenever he goes back in time to get things he's forgotten. Say next he realises at 18:30 that he should have gotten the groceries for his dinner as well. He'd have to try a different store, or different day, else create a paradox for the staff who see him. (any of this assumes that for other people's realities, his interaction has no effect on their timelines, otherwise we'd be back to square 1 - in truth I see no way out of that paradox regardless).
But the result is that we have a Bob who, because of so much time travelling is getting older, (because of his relative time line), before his time (as apparent to the not timetravelling folk), and is a monumentally good scheduler in space and time!!!

O-------------kay,
Time to give the old mind a rest, and not think of paradoxes for a while...
(grin)

Dave


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JK
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But if Bob1 does not leave the note, Bob2 has milk and does not realise that he needs to do any time travel in order to have it. That's what creates the paradox, the note is an attempt to avoid it. And yes, there will be differences to Bob2 and the following Bobs, but they will be so minor as to be inconsequential.
The idea of Bob was not really story-motivated either, just an example. After all, who wants to read about a guy doing his grocery shopping, albeit in the past. Why can't he just buy in his groceries in the present? (The milk was an just example, by the way.)
JK

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Saffron Buggles
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The point I was trying to make is that Bob never leaves the milk there for Past Bob, so Past Bob remains totally oblivious, and continues on his normal timeline as just BOB.

Granted it's not an interesting story, but for simplicities sake it's a good example.


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Saffron Buggles
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that should read "simplicity's"

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FlyingCow
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I think it all depends on your concept of time, and for this I'll label them the Back to the Future model and the Sliders model, for sake of argument.

In the Back to the Future scenario, Bob would have to deal with whatever actions he made in the past. Running into himself may create a paradox, leading him to never want to travel back in time in the first place, thus making it so he never did travel in time. But, of course, this resets everything to the point where he wants to travel again - creating a loop. But any situation may cause inadvertant interaction. If Bob bought milk, for instance, and carried it to the future with him - might not someone an hour after he bought that milk go to the same store and find all the milk sold? That person would then have no milk, and the future would be altered - maybe this person got in a car and drove angrily home, crashing into the Bob of the past on the way (creating a paradox again, because he then would never have traveled back in time, having been in an accident and not being really concerned with milk).

Traveling backward in time with the BttF model is very dangerous, as there are an infinite number of factors which could create paradox (which they portrayed in the movie, but with license, as Marty didn't instantly disappear when things were changed, but things started to slowly fade... for the plot's sake, giving him a chance to rectify the problem). The farther back you go the more of a ripple effect you can have, so that bumping into a random stranger 100 years ago might delay your father from meeting your mother by a month (or prevent it altogether)... and even the tiniest deviation might cause a different sperm to impregnate the egg that would eventually become Bob - thus creating a slightly different Bob.

Very dangerous going backward. But forward is fine, since you're not disrupting your own timeline.

The Sliders model solves a lot of these problems. There are an infinite number of "present day" realities, each following a different path through time. Every decision or option, from whether or not Bob buys milk to whether the US wins World War 2, creates an alternate path, and an alternate future.

Apply this to Bob. Bob 1 at 18:00 decides to go back along his time stream to 16:00 to buy milk and place it in the fridge. As soon as he touches down at 16:00 he creates an alternate future. The path he traveled from had no such occurence, but the path he created has a new agent (an agent whose intent is only to buy milk, but who inadvertantly changes the course of an infinite number of lives, simply by interacting with people, animals, and air particles even). Bob 2 is not Bob 1's former self, but a new version of Bob entirely, traveling along a new temporal path.

When this Bob 2 comes home and finds milk, he reacts (whether there was a note or not) differently than Bob 1 had in his own past when he opened the fridge. He doesn't travel back in time, because he has no need.

Now, this brings us back to Bob 1. Unless he can somehow hop back to the original timeline that he came from (in effect, traveling to a parallel dimension, not through time) he is trapped in this new timeline he created for Bob 2.

If he travels to the future, to the exact moment he left, he will find Bob 2 existing in that timeline along with him, because this Bob 2 never left his slot in the timeline vacant to travel back and get milk. The vacant slot is along Bob 1's original timeline, which he corrupted when he added a new factor along to its past.

Now, he can interact with Bob 2, with only psychological effects. But, this would create another timeline entirely. His decision, whether to interact or no, creates two possible futures for Bob 2. Bob 2a never interacts and lives a life somehow without knowledge of Bob 1's presence. Bob 2b interacts with Bob 1. Thus, there is another timeline split.

Unless you can hop between parallel realities (as they did in Sliders), between a present where Bob travelled and one where he didn't, or between a present where Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and a present where they were repelled by US forces, you can't return to your point of origin if you travel backward in time.

No paradoxes, no collapse of the time stream. Just Bob 1 being trapped in Bob 2's timeline.

Now, if you really want to screw things up, have Bob 2 go back in time at some point, creating a new timeline altogether. So now there'd be Bob 1, Bob 2, and Bob 3 in the mix.

Of course, there's a third construct for time, as portrayed in Heinlein's All You Zombies. Time is predestined. If you go back and meet yourself, you'll only appear as someone you yourself already had met - but a person you hadn't realized was yourself at the time. Go back and talk to yourself at 6 years old, and suddenly you put two and two together and realize that strange man who talked to you when you were 6 was actually you! (Like Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkhaban... the whole "Harry thought it was his father, but it was really him travelled back in time" philosophy).

This third construct is also kinda what they used in 12 Monkeys, though it only worked with very sparse information from the past. They conducted the travel to answer questions about the present, but in so doing created the questions they sought to answer. Predestined time. The present exists because of some destined interaction the future will have with the past. (For a fantastic example of this, read "Go Toward the Light" by Harlan Ellison, in his Slippage collection of stories)

I love all the theories - there's so much to mine for story ideas. I'm sure there are more, but those three are definitely distinct in themselves.

Just my two cents.

Cow

[This message has been edited by FlyingCow (edited January 29, 2002).]


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ANGEL 01
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quote:
If you destroy the univers with impossibility, the gods of fate will kick you out of existance. --- The Great Path of Play

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