Time Travel and Prophecies (was PoA: an explanation of the time/patronus parado)

[sevenhundredandthirteen]

No: HPFGUIDX 67994

Olivia Wood wrote:
 
>Whenever someone 
> messes with time, time has to run through an (in)finite number of 
> possibilities to get to one that works, and that's what happens. 
> Like if Harry messed up the first time, before he went back in 
time, 
> and then when he did go he fixed it but didn't tell himself he did 
> so he wouldn't know to go back in time later and prevent it from 
> happening, it wouldn't work, so he'd have to go back in time for 
> something else(the original problem now being nonexistant) and find 
> a way to fix that, unintentionally preventing the original problem 
> from happening(so he wouldn't have to go back in time to fix that 
> again), and if he didn't, he'd just have to do it over and over 
> again until it all worked out(please excuse the run-on). Of course, 
> from his point of view, he only time-traveled once, and it just 
> happened to work out, becouse none of the other possibilities ever 
> actually happened. 

Me:

But if time happened only once (you said that you are of 
the 'singular time plane' group) then Harry2 was going to succeed all 
along (eventually) because Harry1 lived. It's true that it could take 
more than one Harry to succeed- for instance, perhaps if Beaky's 
escape and the patronus were closer togther in time and it became 
impossible for someone to do both, then perhaps Harry would have had 
to leave Beaky with Hermione, then travel back in time, not worry 
about Beaky and just go over to the lake to cast the Patronus. That's 
entirely possible- but one-planar time-travel Harry could have 
*never* failed and caused *more* problems which he then had to fix. 
For instance- he couldn't *not* produce the Patronus in one planar 
time (it happens once, and the one time it did Harry suceeded) but he 
could fail initially (let's say he suddenly looses his voice so can't 
say the spell), then tip over the time-turner (before the event had 
actually happened) come back again, then sneak up beside his other 
self and cast it successfully (whislt his other self was tipping over 
the time-turner to go back in time to try again because he thought he 
failed... if you catch my drift...)


Olivia Wood wrote:
 
> Okay, considering what the Prophecy in OoP says about Harry killing 
> Voldy or Voldy killing Harry, it would have been impossible for 
> Harry to have been kissed, since the terms of the prophecy hadn't 
> been fulfilled yet. So maybe Harry wouldn't have been given the 
> second chance, the ability to time-travel from the future to 
prevent 
> his own death, if it wasn't for the 'greater magic' that ensures 
the 
> fullfilment of prophecies and such matters.

Me:

Well, you see, prophecies are ridiculousy ambiguous. I think you 
could say that if Harry died at the lake it was because the Demenotrs 
attacked him, and that was because they were there looking for Sirius 
Black, and that was because the MoM thought that he was a Voldemort 
supporter...

You see, so you can always bring it back to Voldemort. Essentially, 
you could argue that if Harry was kiseed by the Dementors at the 
lake, in a round-about way, it still could be traced back to 
Voldemort. This is the wonders of ambiguous prophecies.

~<(Laurasia)>~