Time-turning

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 167483

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.

Carol responds:
Exactly. If he were going to save himself, he'd have to have already
done so, somehow presciently known that Bellatrix was going to kill
him, snatched up a Time-Turner and put it in the pocket of his robes
so that his future self could come back and save him and then, erm,
what? If he'd fallen through the Veil, anyway, he would be dead and
his future self couldn't come back. If he had used common sense and
stayed away from the Veil instead of (*cough*) *fighting on the dais
with his back to the Veil* he would not have died and there would have
been no need to come back. At best, he would probably have given HRH
the Time-Turner to replace the old one. And HRH can't come back to
save him because he's already dead. If they were going to save him, it
would already have happened, a deus ex machina with Invisible
Time-Turned Harry pushing him out of the way, changing time, creating
a whole different set of events that we didn't see. (No sulky
resentment of Snape for goading Black to his death because Black
didn't die, for one.) But it didn't happen that way. Dead is dead, but
I do think Harry will meet Black beyond the Veil, which is why he had
to die in that particular way.
> 
zgirnius:
> 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. <snip>

Carol:
Exactly. We can go by the canon I cited in a previous post, willingly
suspending our disbelief as to whether Time Travel, if it really
existed, would work as JKR depicts it, or we can let logic and a
knowledge of physics get in our way. We have to suspend our disbelief
to believe in magic in the first place, in spells or potions or
magical creatures or Time Turners, so why not suspend it a little
further and let it work as JKR says it does? (Not quite as *Hermione*
thinks, though--obviously, your future self can't kill your past self
or there would be no future self in the first place. What matters is
not that they don't take action, thinking that they are *changing* the
past when they are actually *creating* that past, but that they not be
seen by anyone--except for Dumbledore, who seems to have been aware of
two Harrys and two Hermiones and given them a little nudge out the
hospital wing door so that events could take shape as he knew they had
already done, with the exception, as you said earlier, of Sirius
Black, whose fate he did not know--which explains "more than one
innocent life may be spared"--he knew that Buckbeak had been saved and
hoped that Black might be as well.)


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.
 
> 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.

Carol:
Exactly. That may be why the only Time Turner we've seen works in
hour-long increments, as well. That way, people aren't coming back ten
years or one hundred years later and altering time. Even "It's a
Wonderful Life," in which the alternate reality is only an illusion,
shows that one life makes a difference, and one event that happened a
different way or didn't happen at all has all sorts of consequences.
And the consequences, intended and unintended, of the characters'
actions, their *choices*, are a hugely important theme in these books.
Harry can't say, oh, I made a terrible mistake preventing Lupin and
Sirius from killing Wormtail and go back and change that (Hermione
prevents him from doing that, in any case). The present reality is
what it is, and any Time-Turning is part of that reality, taking place
 in both the present and the future at the same time. Past mistakes
can't be remedied through Time-Turning. Buckbeak and Black and Harry
himself were saved specifically because they didn't realize what they
were doing. They didn't know that they were creating the reality that
they had already lived only a few hours before.

We can think about what might have happened or would have happened had
Hermione not had a Time Turner and DD not figured out that she had
one, but it's best not to think about it. That alternate reality *did
not happen*. If it had, there would be no Harry Potter to save the WW.
> 
zgirnius:
> 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."

Carol responds:
Or, if not impossible, extremely unwise because of the consequences
that arise from every action. If DD saved the Potters, particularly
Lily, Harry would not have become the Chosen One, "the one with the
power to vanquish the Dark Lord." At most, he could have vaporized
Voldemort himself, delaying his return, but he would not have enabled
Voldemort to make the Prophecy true, to create his own powerful enemy.
Terrible as they are, the events at Godric's Hollow had to happen,
just as the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus had to occur for the
Resurrection to happen. Or, to return to HP, Wormtail had to escape
and restore Voldemort so that Harry could ultimately destroy Voldemort
permanently. Evil comes out of good (saving Wormtail), but good also
comes out of evil (Godric's Hollow and, I hope, the tower), and good,
if given a chance to operate on its own through the choices of the
protagonists, without interference from well-intentioned meddlers from
the future, will ultimately triumph.
> 
zgirnius:
> 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.
>
Carol:
Of course, Pensieve memories can be used in much the same way without
the temptation of meddling with the past, and I think they're a much
safer way to go back in time. Yes, it's the future that matters, but
the past must be understood before the right choices can be made. The
past that we've seen in the books *happened*, and no Time-Turner is
going to change it, I'm pretty sure. But it may well have been misread
(as we see Harry doing time and again, particularly with regard to
Snape). Again, the PoA Time-Turning scene primarily illustrates, at
least in my view, that perception (particularly Harry's perception) is
not reality. We've seen that time and time again in the HP books. I
rather think that we'll see it one more time with regard to a certain
former Hogwarts teacher in DH.

We can like or dislike JKR's handling of Time-turning. We can complain
that it's illogical, that it violates the laws of physics, that it's
just pure fantasy (rather like Felix Felicis and Blast-Ended skrewts
and giants marrying wizards), but in the end, it's the canon that
matters. Harry saved himself because he saved himself. It's circular
logic, I realize, but, as Mrs. Figg said at Harry's trial, "That's
what happened." And, had it not happened that way, Harry, Sirius
Black, and perhaps Hermione would have had their souls sucked out.
Unless, of course, HRH had stayed in their rooms like good children,
in which case, Peter Pettigrew would have been killed. Now there's an
alternate reality that would have changed the whole HP series.

Carol, satisfied that she understands the mechanics of Time-Turning in
the HP books, "realistic" or not, logical or not, but hoping not to
see it again in the last book because it does seem like a deus ex machina