[HPforGrownups] Re: Time Turners and Lupin's apparent premature ageing

[Jordan Abel]

No: HPFGUIDX 157011

> bboyminn:
> If they intend on having a future then
> they must return and take over for their earlier time
> traveling selves, or assuming they don't die, come up
> with some excuse to explain why they vanished from
> Hogwarts and never returned.

Whether or not they "intend" on having a future, clearly they can't
act on that intention if they're _DEAD_. As for an excuse, "Traveled
to the past and died" is a perfectly good excuse, and doesn't cause
any further problems beyond, you know, being dead.

> True, dying while time traveling in and of itself does
> not create a paradox, but it is the end of your life
> and that is not a good thing.

But it's no worse than dying in any other circumstance.

> Again, if you want to
> have a future, then you have to come back from the past,
> and that is all I was saying. That and the fact that the
> longer the time, the greater the risk.
>
> > > bboyminn originally said:
> > >
> > > I would also like to point out that while time
> > > traveling, you must be very careful not to alter
> > > time/history in any significant way, or the furture
> > > you were in when you time traveled may not be there
> > > when you get back. (The Butterfly Effect)
>
>
> > Jordan/Random832:
> >
> > You can't really cite an unrelated movie for stuff
> > about how time travel works because there are so many
> > ways of writing it. ...
> >
>
> bboyminn:
>
> I used 'Butterfly Effect' to illustrate the dangers of
> altering history. The books very clearly through Hermione
> warn us of the danger of making changes to history and
> creating time-paradoxes.

That shows things about how wizards, and/or how Hermione in
particular, _believe_ that time travel works, not how it actually
does. The contortions that the book goes through to show that there
were no changes at all could just as well mean that there could never
have been any changes. Hermione is _not_ always right. It could be
that all such "precautions" are superstition, and there is in fact a
guarantee that everything will work out.

> So, I'm not using an obscure movie
> to define time travel in JKR's books, I am using it to
> illustrate a point that was very clearly made in the books.

You're using a point from a movie in which history can be and is
altered to illustrate a point that _you_ perceive to be made in a book
in which history is never altered. Do you even realize how contrived
that is?

> > Jordan/Random832:
> >
> > The events of POA, ... follow the Novikov self-consistency
> > principle ...
> >
> > ...
> >
> > One problem is that people will often assume one of these views is
> > "how it works" and no others are considered

OK, smart-ass. What I was trying to say is that the events shown are
perfectly consistent with it, and in no way support any view that
history can be altered. The idea that history _can_ be altered and
they just got insanely lucky fails occam's razor in the face of a
hypothesis that such things simply cannot happen.

> bboyminn:
>
> I think the principles are very clear in the books. There is a danger
> of substantially altering history. There is a danger of killing your
> future or past self, which could create a huge paradox.

That danger is not illustrated at all. The only evidence we see is
that _Hermione_ believes it is so, possibly influenced as much or more
by cheesy SF movies than by any solid knowledge of how things really
work. She is only 14.

> Further, the
> events in PoA are consistent with these precautions. Nothing was
> really changed, once we see ALL the facts,

Which is perfectly consistent with my statement that there is a
mechanism by which it can be _impossible_ for anything to be really
changed.

> we see that things happen
> the same both times. It's just that when we see it the second time
> from a different perspective, we are given details that we didn't
> originally know. But, it is our knowledge of events, not the events
> themselves, that changed. I think JKR has create a very consistent
> account of time travel.

How is that in any way an argument against the Novikov
self-consistency principle? It's a perfect illustration of it, much
_unlike_ The Butterfly Effect.

-- 
Random832