Time-Turner Questions?!

[iamvine]

No: HPFGUIDX 111092

Brenda,

OK, I'll bite.  I was going to put this in private mail, but I think
it makes sense to say it here instead.

> I thought I made my peace with Time-Turning plot device, but more 
> questions are splurging out, now that it's been repressed.
> 
> It gets SO confusing, for many reasons:
> 
> 1. If there are times or events pre-destined to be revisited or 
> corrected, it defies the whole purpose of free-will and "I'm in 
> charge of my life" motto. It strongly reminds me of that vase 
> incident from Matrix, when Neo visits the Oracle.

People have had this problem with God since way back.  If He's
all-knowing, then He knows what you're going to do in the future, so
how can He behave as if you have free will, and punish you for your
sins?  Augustine's answer was that God is "outside time" and sees the
whole of history all at once.  "Past" and "future" exist only in our
minds.  There is time, it all happens, and God sees it.

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/3b.htm (scroll down to "Human
Freedom")

It could just as well apply to Time-Turners.  If God sees all of time
at once, He can also see all Time-Turner trips, and He can see that
they fit in with what's happening in the rest of the universe.

> 2. Another thing is that I have even greater problem is -- so time-
> turner acts as a DNA replication device? Wizard cloning machinery?
To 
> be able to produce multiple copies of same human being, with every 
> bit of intelligence and cognition intact? How is that possible?? 

To me this is not worth worrying about.  It's just a standard effect
of time travel, seen in a different way that makes it seem weird. 
Yes, call them clones if you like, but remember that Clone 1 will
eventually twirl a Time-Turner and disappear, and that Clone 2
remembers doing everything that Clone 1 will do until then.  So it's
much more limited than Dolly the sheep.

There's a theory in quantum physics, which I think is a kind of
physicists' half-joke, which says that maybe there's only one electron
in the universe.  All electrons are exactly the same, right?  Why is
that?  Why, because they're all the same electron, which is doing lots
of time-travelling!  When it's moving forwards, it's an electron, and
when it's moving backwards, it's a positron (the electron's
antiparticle).  At the points in time when the electron turns around,
we see antimatter reactions.  Sometimes an electron and a positron
appear to hit one another and both disappear, and sometimes a pair of
particles appears out of nowhere.  Who knows?  Maybe it's true.

Draw a zigzag line on paper, then draw a straight line that cuts
through it at least twice.  The zigzag line is the path of the One
True Electron, or Hermione, moving around in time.  The straight line
represents Now.  Everything on that line exists Now.  Each point where
the lines cross, that's a copy of the Electron, or Hermione, that
exists in the present.  Yet they're all points on the same zigzag. 
There is only one Hermione, she's just moving around in odd ways.

This is easier to see with the electron IMO, because you can see it
when it's moving backwards, as a positron.  You never see a backwards
Hermione.  (Enoimreh?)  So instead, imagine that you sewed the
Hermione zigzag into the paper.  You can see the zigs, but not the
zags because they are on the back of the paper.  What looks like lots
of short-lived copies of Hermione is really only one.

> 3. I'm now wondering if Time-Turners can be used in court. Wouldn't 
> it prove to be a much more effective and truthful testimony if it
can 
> be verified by going back in time and the whole event presented in 
> front of more witness? Wizards have better means to verify the
truth -
> - either by Legilimens or Pensieve or Time-turners. I wonder why we 
> don't hear of these devices during wizarding trials.

Partly because going back to witness something would be changing the
past, unless the witnesses were there in the first place.  If there
was someone else around, maybe the crime would never take place.

Partly because we have no evidence that you can use a Time-Turner to
travel forwards.  We have only seen it used to go backwards a short
way, and then the user exists in two places at once until the time
when they left comes round again.  Trials don't tend to happen very
soon after the events being examined.  If you wanted to check out
something a year ago, you might have to live an entire year in hiding
before you got back to the present.  Not worth the trouble.

And partly because they could use the other methods, I suppose.  Only
they don't seem to.  I'd wonder why not, but that's a topic for
another post.

Eleanor