[HPforGrownups] Re: Time Travel Paradoces

[GulPlum]

No: HPFGUIDX 57727

Darrin admitted that I was confusing the hell out of him with my previous 
post and said:

>This is the Bill and Ted version of time travel!

Absolutely. At least, as far as my limited recollection of the first movie 
allows (I've never seen the second one from end to end).

One example in particular: Bill (Keanu Reeves' character, right?) tells his 
past self to remember to wind his watch. Of course, when it comes to the 
crunch, he didn't wind his watch, because the timeline had already happened 
that way. It didn't make any difference that he'd reminded himself. He'd 
*already* forgotten to wind it.

>So, what you're saying is that because no one went back in time to save Lily
>and James, they were impossible to save, but, on the other hand, no one
>would have known they needed saving until AFTER they had been killed.

Correct. Anything else would have been impossible.

>OK, I give up. Explain it like I'm a two-year-old with a learning disability.

Treols and the other maintainers of the alt.fan.harry-potter newsgroup FAQ
have already done a pretty good job of it, so I'll save myself the typing, 
and recommend that you read this, although it doesn't directly answer that 
particular question:

http://www.hogwarts-library.net/reference/potterverse_faq.html#time_travel .

(BTW Note to MODs/ADMINs: I would suggest that a link to that page would be 
a useful addition to the HPFGU front page, as it summaries a lot of the 
speculation which crops up here as well.)

>Why couldn't someone have gone back in time and just gotten Lily and James
>and Harry out of there?

Because the corollary of what's said above is that if they'd have been 
saved, they wouldn't have been able to have died in the first place (think 
about the complicated verbal grammar in that sentence).

Hence the whole thing would have been pointless. Just remember one thing: 
YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PAST. You can make it happen, but you can't change it. 
Whatever you made happen is what "the universe" knows to have happened. 
There is no alternate reality in which events occurred in a different way.

--
GulPlum AKA Richard, who thinks that the best way to think of the time 
paradoxes in the HP universe is to accept that time paradoxes can't happen.