[HPforGrownups] Re: Time-turning

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 167459

Carol:
> I realize that the chapter title, "The Dementor's Kiss," is
> misleading, but the kiss doesn't happen, or Harry would have been in
> the same state as Barty Crouch Jr. Instead, he merely feels cold,
> hears screams, feels the dementor's putrid breath on his face, and
> thinks he's going to die, sees a bright light, watches the dementors
> retreat, sees the Patronus returning to someone, and faints. The first
> two steps in this process, and the faintness, exactly match every one
> of his other encounters with Dementors, even Boggart Dementors. The
> Dementor gets close, very close, but it never actually administers the
> kiss, either to him or to Black. *There is no alternate reality in
> which Harry is soul-sucked, no reversal of that state. It never happened.*
>
> Carol, wondering if Bart might be confused by the medium that must not
> be named, in which it does seem as if Black, at least, was soul-sucked
> and got his soul back (which does not happen in the book)

Magpie:
I suspect Bart is looking at it more like I am. Perhaps it might be a good 
idea to stop discussing Harry's danger in PoA and instead look at another 
scene where someone is in danger of dying: Sirius' fall through the veil in 
OotP (to compare it). Why can't Sirius save himself from Bellatrix the way 
Harry saved himself from the Dementor?

Harry saved himself by, three hours later, going back three hours and 
zapping the Dementor. The MoM has lots of  Time Turners. Imagine one of them 
wasn't destroyed. There's one lying right there near Sirius. Can't he go 
back and save himself? After all, isn't he in exactly the same position that 
Harry was in? He's got something deadly confronting him, he's about to die 
by falling through the veil. He's got a Time Turner.

So why can't his future self to save himself just like Harry's does? The 
most obvious answer is--because he's dead. He doesn't exist an hour later. 
In order to go back in time he has to live into the future and then travel 
backwards through time he's experienced once. He can't do that if he's dead, 
so he must not have died. That's what happened to Harry--he didn't die; he 
lived into the future. Only when we ask why he didn't die it's because...his 
future self saved him. How does that work? He can't save himself unless he's 
alive to save himself, and he can't be alive to save himself unless he saves 
himself.

Julie:
I know that is confusing, and the human brain isn't supposed to understand 
it, as we can't experience time any way except linearly. And since I get 
most of  my physics
from books like Stephen Hawkings "A Brief History of Time" and Discover 
magazine, I'm not really able to make it more comprehensible! One just has 
to accept  that time
in fact isn't linear, that it can fold in on itself, and that  past, present 
and future are constructs of the human mind rather than an objective 
characterization  of Time.

Magpie:
I've tried to make it work based on my own similar readings (remembering 
that I am probably barely understanding the stuff I've read), but still come 
back to the fact that Harry, being human, is experiencing time linearly, 
just as we do, making decisions on the linear cause and effect. The plot 
absolutely depends on Time being linear--if it's not nothing really means 
anything in the story. Even this incident is basically keeping time linear, 
except for one loop in the line. We're supposed to be able to follow it. 
(And of course we can follow it--the plot makes sense.)

I have a feeling the kind of Time Travel that Harry is doing is impossible 
by scientific standards anyway, and probably brings up its own set of 
problems.

I actually think the best way to understand the Time Turner is similar to a 
Pensieve. It doesn't hold up to all kinds of scrutiny. It's more the 
realization of thoughts most people have when they're young that say 
"Wouldn't it be great if..." Such as: I have a memory. I wish I could share 
it with you perfectly. It's almost like a movie in my head. Wouldn't it be 
great if I could show you the movie in my head, so that "memory" was a 
physical thing I could take out on its own and show you? And if you imagine 
"living" my memory you'd be like another person there and you could walk 
around.

Or in this case: That's a terrible thing that happened. I wish we could have 
been there to stop it. Wouldn't it be great if we could turn back the clock 
three hours and then it would really be three hours ago only we'd know what 
was going to happen so we could fix it. I guess then there'd be, like, two 
of us, cause I was already there once.

It's kind of very logical and very illogical at the same time.

-m