Time-turning

[Zara]

No: HPFGUIDX 167478

> 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?

zgirnius:
As I understand Potterverse time-travel, Sirius cannot save himself, 
because the past *only happens once*. As OotP was written, we were 
told by the narrator that a certain specific event *happened*, 
namely, Sirius fell behind the Veil. An event that really happened, 
is written in stone. Nothing can change it. It is a fact.

The situation is different in PoA, because Harry did not die or 
become a soulless husk. On the contrary, it is a fact we were shown 
that he did *not*. So his survival is what was written in stone.

> Magpie:
> 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.

zgirnius:
If Sirius had grabbed a Time Turner and used it during his duel with 
Bella, his future self could have saved him if it was Rowling's 
desire to take the story in that direction, yes. (Obviously, it was 
not, he *had* to die for reasons I suspect will be clearer on July 
21). But then we would never have seen Sirius fall through the Veil, 
because it would never have happened. And anything that happened in 
the MoM in the chapters preceding the scene in the Veil Room would 
remain unchanged, because if future Sirius was around and about 
following Bella around in Order to prevent her killing him, he was 
*always* there.

> Magpie:
> 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.

zgirnius:
It is my contention that time travel as described in the Potterverse 
is precisely *NOT* this kind of time travel. Harry did not change 
anything that we were explicitly shown in PoA "the second time 
around" (to use a phrase that I consider totally misleading). He 
averted potential disasters that *might* have happened had he not 
Time Turned, but *nothing* that *really* happened, changed.

To take the most dramatic hypothetical example I have ever come 
across, I have seen it speculated, both here (apologies to the poster 
who suggested it, I *know* I read this here, but I can't recall who 
wrote it) and elsewhere that the reason Dumbledore knows so much 
about what happened in GH is that he Time Turned in order to be an 
invisible witness.

How could he?!!! You ask. How could he stand by and let Lily and 
James be killed? If my interpretation of the rules of time travel in 
the Potterverse are correct, the answer would be, "Because, as a very 
learned wizard, Dumbledore knew that it was *impossible* to change 
what he could clearly see (from the corpses abd rubble littering the 
scene) had already happened."

Which is also an answer to the question "why bother to invent time 
travel if it cannot change anything?" If nothing else, it is a way to 
learn what really happened in the past, in a place one's past self 
was not present at the moment of interest. Knowledge that might be 
used to affect the future in a positive way.