Paradox of Time Travel in PoA - The Twist.

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 132100

> > <smilingator81 at a...> wrote:
> > > ...edited...
> > > "Nobody's supposed to change time!" (page 398, US) Hermione 
> > > didn't say that you CAN'T change time, just that you are not 
> > > supposed to ...
> > >
> > > "Professor McGonagall told me what awful things have happened 
> > > when wizards have meddled with time... Loads of them ended up 
> > > killing their past or future selves by mistake!" (page 399,
US). 

Julia:
> However, Mcgonagall had been teaching Hermione for two years when 
> she said this.  She would have been well aware that one of 
> Hermione's first actions on hearing about time-turners would 
> probably be to go to the library and read up about them.  Therefore 
> she is hardly likely to have given her false - or even very
exaggerated - 
information about anything concerning them.
> 

Pippin:
I think the thing to remember is, this is magic and you *can* have 
it both ways. The consistency of natural law which happens to be 
the foundation of modern science is just not operative in the 
Potterverse. A broomstick defies gravity because the wizard wills it 
to, not, I think, because there is some sort of  alternate physcial 
universe in which broomsticks fly. Whether the time traveller 
can change time, ie create events which he knows did not occur, 
IMO, depends on the intention of the time traveller. 

Hermione was deadset on saving Buckbeak and Sirius while
avoiding anything that would appear as  a paradox to her future 
self, and IMO, the magic obliged.

A wizard who did want to change time might engender all sorts of
mischief, and so Hermione has been sternly warned. Once she  
learned that she didn't attend charms class, she didn't try to use 
the time turner to go  back all though there doesn't seem to be any 
physical reason that she couldn't have. 

But her future self would have observed a paradox, in that Ron and
Harry had informed her that she wasn't there. This, according to 
Hermione and Dumbledore, is forbidden by wizarding
law. There would be no need for the law if this was, in fact, 
impossible.

The shattering time turner cabinet in OOP may indicate what can happen
when a time turner is used carelessly. There we can see time
operating locally instead of universally, just as it does in the 
hummingbird's jar, creating a sort of travelling loop. If you really
want a headache, think about that for a while.

Neither the universal time line theory nor the alternate time lines
theory explains how the hummingbird can be seen shrinking back 
to an egg. Time inside the jar seems to be operating according to the
intention ofthe wizard that  enchanted it -- so that the much longer 
lifespan of a middle-aged Death Eater can be reversed in the same 
amount of 'real'  time as it took for the hummingbird to become an 
egg again, itself very much sped up.

Pippin