Time Travel: Analyzing Hermione's missed Charms class

[davenclaw]

No: HPFGUIDX 137992

In past time travel discussions I haven't paid much attention to 
the "I forgot to go to Charms" incident.  I decided to go back and 
analyze this to see if it could give me some more clues into the way 
time travel works in HP. I discovered that it is much more 
problematic than I had thought!

But first: Why is it that when H&Hr TT from the hospital room, they 
end up in the entrance hall??  I would think they would be in the 
same place.  Hmmm.

Anyway, here's the scene.  I'm making up times and classes because I 
don't remember the details.  Hermione has Potions and Arithmancy at 
10am and Charms at 11am.  Normally she goes to Potions, heads to 
Charms, but before it starts she time turns back to 10am, goes to 
Arithmancy, then rushes to Charms and hopes no one notices.  But one 
day, she forgets to go to Charms after Arithmancy.  She doesn't 
realize it until several hours later, after lunch, when Harry and 
Ron find her sleeping on a book. She doesn't turn back to fix her 
mistake, she says "I forgot to go to Charms!" and that's that.

So, why couldn't she time turn back to 11am and go to Charms?

I see three possibilities:

1) Multiple-timeline theory:  Going back would change time; it would 
undo her missing the class and Harry and Ron finding her at the 
table.

2) Single-timeline theory: Time only happens once, so it can't be 
changed.  If she were going to go back in time to attend the class, 
she already would have done so, so Harry and Ron wouldn't be telling 
her that she missed it.

3) The conditions for Hermione being allowed to use the TT stipulate 
that she can ONLY use it to go back to attend classes where she has 
two at the same time.  So if she has two classes at 10am and two 
classes at 2pm, she can only use the time turner to attend the 
second class.  She's not allowed to use it to skip other classes and 
then go back, such as to give herself more time to study or sleep.  
Whether or not time can be changed doesn't factor in to this theory.


Now, the third option, which is very plausible, doesn't shed any 
additional light on time travel, but at least it doesn't create any 
additional complications.  However, if we still consider the 
situation in terms of the MTLT and the STLT just to see where they 
take us, we uncover major problems.

MTLT: You're not allowed to change time!  It's an important 
wizarding law!  Terrible things can happen!  Okay. But if the MTLT 
is correct, then EVERY TIME she goes back to attend a class she 
misses the first time around, she is changing time!  It may not be 
signficant, but it could be.  Who knows what events might eventually 
take place because a fellow student in Arithmancy notices that she 
isn't there, then maybe desides to go check on her, runs into 
someone, something happens, etc.  But then this all goes away when 
she TT's and shows up to the class.  And since this happens all the 
time, chances are high that somewhere along the way something 
significant will be undone.


STLT: Put aside the contradiction between this theory and the 
admonitions about changing time.  When I started thinking about the 
STLT with regards to Hermione missing Charms, I realized that the 
STLT truly does eliminate free will, despite the arguments that all 
events in the future are freely chosen.

Consider Hermione's situation.  Assume that her only restriction in 
using the time turner is that she can only use it to attend classes 
she would otherwise miss.  So she is allowed to use the time turner 
to go back to Charms if she chose to.  But according to the STLT, 
the fact that she didn't go to Charms means that she isn't going to 
use the TT, which means that she CAN'T use the TT.  This means that 
the future is fixed, AND it limits the decisions we can make in the 
present!!  

This blows the whole idea of the time turner out of the water.  It 
means that you can only use it in two cases: 1) when you are faced 
with obvious evidence that your future self has used it, in which 
case you MUST use it, and 2) You are NOT faced with any obvious 
evidence that you did NOT use it.  But if you ARE faced with such 
evidence - for example, Hermione clearly knows that her future self 
has not gone back to attend Charms - then you CAN'T use the time 
turner!  So she is not free to choose her actions - the effects of 
her future actions, even five seconds in the future, have already 
been made clear to her, so she cannot act differently.  Now, what 
would prevent her from acting differently, we don't know, but I 
guess there would be some magical laws that would prevent the TT 
from working.

The idea that actions in the present are restricted by the evidence 
about our actions in the future is, I think, implausible in the 
context of the book.  It requires effective use of the TT to only 
come about from ambiguity. H&Hr don't know what is happening with 
Sirius and didn't see Buckbeak get killed, so they can say "well 
since we don't know for sure that we didn't time travel to save 
Buckbeak and Sirius, we are free to try it; if we are able to do so, 
it means that's what has happened, if we can't, then that isn't what 
had happened."  But there is NOTHING AT ALL in canon to suggest 
conditions in which the time turner doesn't work or magical laws 
knock you backwards when you try to interfere with the one-and-only 
course of events.


Conclusion:  What we know about time-travel in HP means that JKR 
messed up something along the way.  Either "changing the past" is 
not as absolute as it sounds, but rather should be "purposely  
altering the course of events", or "free will" in the present has 
the potential to be severely hampered by decisions we will make in 
the future.


- davenclaw