Time turner theory

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 162000

Magpie:
> Just my view, but if the kids hadn't gone back in time something
entirely different would have happened that we didn't see. The key is
to remember we're not so much talking about the limits of time travel
but the way JKR writes time travel.
> 
> The way I think of it, if you imagine time as a linear thing, so
that Harry must do X before he does Y, then it works like this. Harry
didn't go back in time (Y) until after the execution was scheduled
(X).  So it's perfectly possible that Buckbeak could have been
executed during that time.  However, Harry and Hermione then went back
in time and interfered.  Once they went back in time they were
existing in that past moment. So that's what Harry saw.
> 
<snip>
> 
> If something prevented Harry from going back in time Buckbeak would
simply not have been saved.  He would have died in a totally different
memory--no swish thunk, no yell from Hagrid at that exact moment.  The
way JKR chooses to write her story, however, any alternative universe
where Buckbeak actually died is lost to our heroes memory.  All he
remembers is the version where Buckbeak was saved.  He was able to see
what he hadn't yet done because of the Time  Travel.

Carol responds:
Agreed so far, except that there is no alternative memory to be
erased. Because the kids *did* go back, that alternate version never
happened. They heard Macnair's axe hitting the fence and *thought* he
was killing buckbeak, but he wasn't. Harry saw himslef saving himself
and Sirius Black and *thought* he was seeing James, but he wasnt. If
Harry and Hermione hadn't gone back in time, Harry would have been
soul-sucked along with SB. so much for the WW and the HP series. So he
did go back in time in the one-and-only timeline, as fara as I can see.
> 
Magpie:
> The trouble is, for me, when people use this as a reason why Harry
can't Time Travel to do anything else, as if it's anything other than
a literary reason.  For instance, we know Harry doesn't go back in
time to stop Sirius from being killed.  We know it because Sirius
died.  But that doesn't give Harry the character a reason he can't use
a Time Turner and go back and save him. That would be circular logic,
suggesting that he can't use the Time Turner only because it would
change the Timeline, because any time travel changes the time line. 
What is true is that we know Harry didn't Time Travel back to save
Sirius, not that he can't.  If you say he can only Time Travel when he
gets the signal that he did Time Travel (the signal being that he sees
a version of the present where he's changed things) it's  totally
circular logic: he can't because he didn't, he didn't because he
can't.   What the rule really is is that the author always writes the
time travel in advance so the timeline is consistent. She always knows
when time travel's going to happen and writes it in the first time. 
Any alternative "before time travel" universes are unremembered by our
narrator.
> 
> I just made that more complicated, didn't I?  Sorry.

Carol responds:
Here's where I disagree. As I said above, there's only one timeline,
and Harry saving Sirius Black doesn't enter into it. JKR has said that
once a person is dead, he's dead, and no magic can bring him back.
that includes Time-Turning. Harry and Hermione could prevent Buckbeak
and Sirius Black from dying/being soul-sucked only because *they had
already done it* under the delusion that they were changing, as
opposed to creating, the past.

Now, of course, it would spoil the story for JKR to go back and change
it--it would have to be rewritten from the point where Harry changed
it--and we'd have an extra book if he saved Sirius Black and no series
at all if he saved his parents. But aside from what it would do to the
plot (JKR has said in an interview that SB had to die for some reason
other than robbing Harry of his mentors, and, of course, Lily had to
die to give Harry the blood protection that caused the curse to
rebound), let's look at the maechanics of Time-Turning.

Hermione's Time-Turner is an hour-glass with a charm on it that allows
her to go back an hour or so at a time. "Three turns should do it,"
says Dumbledore in the scene we're talking about. Three turns takes
her back three hours. But suppose that Harry wanted to go back to save
Sirius Black from Bellatrix and the Veil. He'd have to know exactly
when Black died, not only the number of days in the past but the
number of hours. Let's say that it's two years to the day after
Black's death and Harry wants to go back to roughly an hour before
Black died. Let's say that he's made the proper calculations and it
has to be 365 days times two minus ten hours. Or was one of those
years a Leap Year? (For the sake of our example, let's say that he
checks the calendar and it wasn't.) Okay, that's 730 days times 24
hours or 17,520 hours minus ten or 17,510 turns of the Time Turner to
get back to the time when Harry has to be at the DoM to save Sirius.
How long will it take to turn the Time Turner that many times? (I come
up with 292 minutes or four hours and 52 minutes of turning the hour
glass if each turn takes one second. That's a long time to stand there
spinning an hour glass, and what if he miscounts?) And that's just
going back two years. Going back to Godric's Hollow and saving his
parents, supposing it could be done, would take far more turns and be
far harder to do even if he could manage to arrive at the right time
and manage to save his parents, and would have unimaginable
consequences if he succeeded. You don't mess with time. Maybe Harry
*could* end up killing his past or future self, unimaginable as that
sounds, just by fooling with it.

Magda wrote:

Personally I think it would be great to find out that in fact it
wasn't James who saved Snape's life in the tunnel but rather TT!Harry
gone back in time. <snip>

Think of the fun! Think of Harry's angst in Book 7 when he finds out
he has to go back and save the man he hates almost more than
Voldemort! Think of him doing it anyway and learning something from
the whole process - maybe about his mother? I'm convinced that Snape
went into that tunnel that night thinking he had to protect Lily from
some Marauder prank; I've always thought the claim that Sirius'
telling him how to work the Whomping Willow caused him to just up and
try it a little too pat and glib for belief.

And it makes no sense that young Snape wouldn't have screamed the
castle down to get everyone expelled afterwards - unless there was
something about his own actions that he didn't want revealed. Like
he was saving Lily - something he might not want his fellow Slyths,
or James Potter or even Lily herself to know.

Carol responds:

Much as I like Magda's suggestion that it was Harry who saved the
teenage Severus Snape from werewolf!Lupin, I just don't see how that's
feasible, nor do I see Harry being motivated to save the future Death
Eater/eavesdropper, HBP or no, especially since it was Snape who
killed Dumbledore. If anything, he'd want James to let Severus die, in
which case, the consequences would be much worse. Voldemort would
never have been vaporized and there would be no Prophecy Boy to stop him.

As for Teen!Severus not "scream[ing] the castle down to get everybody
expelled," I think it was a matter of pride. He didn't want *anybody*
(besides Dumbledore and the Marauders) to know that he owed his worst
enemy a life debt or even a debt of gratitude. How humiliating! He
wanted to pay it off as soon as possible, and what happens? That
arrogant James Potter goes and ignores his warnings, given in person
or through Dumbledore, that the would-be murderer Sirius Black is a
spy and a traitor and gets himself killed as a result. Or that's what
Snape would have thought until a certain rat Animagus resurrected
Voldemort and proved him wrong.

I do think you're onto something about Severus's reasons for going
into the tunnel in the first place not being what they seem, though.

Carol, who can't see a feasible way to bring time travel back into the
story (except via bottled memories and the Pensieve as a way of
witnessing the past, not changing it)