POA Prongs Patronus, for Alina and Yuiren

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 100417

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "debcip" 
<debcip at y...> wrote:

> Thank you both; your answers illustrate exacly what I don't 
 understand.  How can Harry, in "real time" (the first time) see 
 himself across the water, when he didn't come back and do it 
yet?
> 
> Maybe I just don't understand time travel?
> 

Think of time as a string of beads. You can touch a string of 
beads in more than one place at a time, but an ant moving along 
the string can only touch one at a time. Mostly we experience 
events as the ant does, one at a time, but the time turner acts on 
both the present *and* the past. It  removes the user  from his 
current position, and inserts him  into a time he already 
experienced, *at the moment when he first experienced it*.   
There never was a "real time" when Harry didn't drive off the 
dementors. 

The magic of the time turner will see that no paradox is created 
as long as the time-travelling wizard is  careful not to allow a 
paradox to be observed. So, once Hermione had been observed 
to have missed Charms class, she wasn't supposed to  use the 
time turner to go back to it. But since Harry did observe himself 
driving away the Dementors, although he thought it was his dad, 
it was okay for him to do it. 

On the other hand, a misused time turner will create paradoxes.  
As we saw in the Ministry of Magic in Book Five,  the smashed 
cabinet full of time turners got stuck in a travelling loop very much 
like the one which contained the hatching hummingbird. So 
Hermione's caution is understandable.

Pippin