Destiny: Events that never did happen and now never shall, will cast their conclusions and occurrences out into the worlds.
Destiny: Cause and effect will jostle, unable to tell quite which came first. The event horizon will come closer and closer. Wrecks and mirages of time and occasion...
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Kindly Ones (New York, 1996), Part 11, p. 15, panel 1, panel 1, panel 2.
Sounds like the Time Patrol?
Guion reminds Wanda Tamberly that causality:
"'...can double back on itself, can even annul itself.'"
- and that the source of a disturbance:
"'...perhaps does not exist in our yet, our reality.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, July 1991), PART THREE, 31,275,389 B. C., p. 135.
Events that have not happened can have effects.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Hard to grok that, events which have not happened can or will affect us.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
In the Time Patrol universe, an effect can prevent its cause. Thus, the cause does not happen but has an effect.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Ugh!!!! That affronts my sense of what should be logical.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
It is counterintuitive but not contradictory. The only contradiction would be to say that an event both happened and did not happen.
Paul.
Time travel plays hob with causality.
Kaor, Paul!
It still seems contradictory to say "...an effect can prevent its cause. Thus, the cause does not happen but has an effect." How can an effect come to exist without its preceding cause?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
A causal relationship is contingent and empirical, not logically necessary.
Paul.
Paul: true. If time travel is possible, then 'loops' are entirely predictable.
Note that some physicists who are trying to integrate relativity and quantum mechanics think that future events can affect the past.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Then maybe we are not living in an immutable time line? Not at all sure I like that.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But we are not/will not be aware of it if a time traveller changes, e.g., the outcome of World War II. He will regard our WWII outcome as now in the past of the second temporal dimension. Our entire 4D continuum, including us remembering our WWII outcome, will exist in what, to the time traveller, will have become the past of a 5D continuum.
All change involves a relationship between a state changed from and a state changed to. That is a relationship of before and after, a temporal relationship. So changing a timeline involves a second temporal dimension.
Paul.
See this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_protection_conjecture
for an interesting discussion of Science and SF, including:
"The idea of the Chronology Protection Agency appears to be drawn playfully from the Time Patrol or Time Police concept, which has been used in many works of science fiction[4] such as Poul Anderson's series of Time Patrol stories..."
Kaor, Paul!
Then, unless we are time travelers, the timeline we are in is immutable to us?
Ad astra! Sean
It seems that way to me. There can be a timeline in which my parents met and I exist. There can be a timeline in which they did not meet and I do not exist. There cannot be a timeline in which they did not meet but I existed until now and then as an adult ceased to exist.
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