Time Travel

[psychic_serpent]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Calliope" <julia at t...> 
wrote:
> Has anyone else read time-travel fiction, and wants to share the 
> author's theories, in hopes of figuring out either the Harry and 
> the Patronus confusion or the Ron!Dumbledore theory?

Well, IMHO, the idea that Ron and Dumbledore are the same person 
defies all logic (just look at their interactions in the books!) but 
I don't there's any Patronus "confusion" per se.

This site:
 
http://robertaheinlein.com/reviews/shortstories/byhisbootstraps.htm

has an extensive review of Heinlein's story "By His Bootstraps," 
considered to be the granddaddy of "fixed" time travel stories.  
There are also references to other stories which use the fixed 
timeline theory.  

Harry conjuring the Patronus comes under this type of time-travel; 
he already knew he was going to do it (although at first he 
mistakenly thought it was his dad), and his witnessing it was a kind 
of "premonition," if you will (or a self-fulfilling prophecy).  It 
was both something happening in the present and a peek into the 
future for Harry (because in HIS future he would conjure the 
Patronus).

Jack Finney's novel "Time and Again," and its sequel subscribe to 
the other theory, which is that time can be and has been changed 
numerous times. This page has some good information about it:  
http://members.aol.com/leahj/timea.htm . I adore this book; it's 
very well-written and researched and has numerous illustrations.  
When people return from time traveling they're "debriefed," and more 
than once it is discovered that someone who used to exist no longer 
does because of the time-traveler's mere existence in an earlier 
time and place for a brief period (and well-removed from 
the "missing" person, who now only exists in the time-traveler's 
memory).

"The Coming of the Quantum Cats" by Fred Pohl is another example of 
multiple-universe time-travel fiction, reviewed here: 
http://glinda.lrsm.upenn.edu/~weeks/if/review9.html .  There's some 
very funny stuff about the Reagan years.  (It's from the eighties.)

While I can read each type of time travel fiction without getting 
confused, as long as I know what the author's a priori assumptions 
are, I think that JKR isn't entirely consistent with the "fixed" 
camp.  On the one hand, when Buckbeak is discovered to be gone, 
Dumbledore is said to have "a note of amusement in his voice."   I 
believe this is because he saw Harry and Hermione making off with 
Buckbeak, which is how he knew that he would later recommend the use 
of the Time Turner to Hermione (I believe he also worked out as soon 
as he saw this that they must have used the Time Turner, and that he 
knew they had left the hut with Ron because--another theory of mine--
he can see through Invisibility Cloaks a la Moody, either with those 
blue eyes of his or his spectacles that are always so prominently 
described.)

Anyway, the inconsistency comes, I believe, when Hermione stops 
Harry from entering the hut to grab Pettigrew.  She tells 
him, "Nobody's SUPPOSED TO [emphasis mine] change time, nobody!"  
She doesn't say that it's impossible to change time--she says you're 
not SUPPOSED to, and Hermione is nothing if not precise with her 
language.  She also tells him that McGonagall told her (presumably 
to prevent her abusing the Time Turner in just such a manner) 
that "loads of them [time traveling wizards] ended up killing their 
past or future selves by mistake!"

Now, it would be possible to kill your future self if that self 
traveled back in time, you were surprised and/or suspicious because 
of this, and attacked your doppelganger, killing the other you.  
However, unless you were somehow unaware of its BEING you (perhaps 
extreme age on the part of the other person, or appearance altered 
in some other way) after that you would be aware that this was going 
to happen.  All you would need to do is avoid time travel altogether 
in order to sidestep this gruesome fate.  This would allow you to 
CHANGE TIME by simply avoiding time travel ever after.  One might 
still have a story that used the fixed-time theory, in which the 
protagonist would be hurled back in time through no fault or choice 
of his own, leading to his (evidently) inevitable demise at his own 
hand.  But if the person had any choice, I doubt he would meddle in 
time knowing that a mistake would probably lead to his death in an 
earlier time.

However, it seems patently impossible, with a fixed-time theory, for 
someone to kill his PAST self inasmuch as the FUTURE person would no 
longer exist.  If you travel back in time and kill yourself 
yesterday, you can't have traveled back in time.  Unless you just 
changed time.  Which means a time paradox, in a case like this.  Or, 
if you travel forward in time and your future self kills the time-
traveling self, wouldn't the future self automatically disappear as 
well? (Or you might be creating an alternate timeline that you 
cannot experience because it is one in which you had already died.)  
If McGonagall had only warned Hermione about people killing their 
future selves, it would be possible (see above) to say that JKR is 
consistent about the fixed-time theory.  Inclusion of the warning 
about killing one's PAST self (an activity that implies creation of 
alternate universes or time paradoxes) negates this.  I hope that's 
not too confusing!

I wrote a fic (The Time of Good Intentions) about Harry changing 
time using a powerful spell, in part because he seemed to find it so 
tempting in PoA.  Hermione was really the only thing stopping him 
from revealing Peter, or grabbing the Invisibility Cloak before 
Snape.  It still seems, however, that JKR has left the door open to 
other time-travel theories, and I'll be interested to see whether 
she uses time travel in the future books.

--Barb

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Psychic_Serpent
http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Barb