[HPforGrownups] Re: Chapter Discussion: Prisoner of Azkaban Ch 16: Professor Trelawney's prediction

[Shelley Gardner]

No: HPFGUIDX 190308

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, June Ewing <doctorwhofan02 at ...> wrote:
>> I have a very logical way of thinking which tells me
>> to need to go back in time to fix something, it would have had to
>> have gone wrong in the first place, which would have to mean that on
>> some timeline Buckbeak would have had to have lost his head.
> zanooda:
>
> Buckbeak was about to be executed, and there was no way to save him - that's what has "gone wrong" :-), and without Buckbeak Sirius was doomed as well. But this doesn't mean that Buckbeak lost his head.
>
> There is only one timeline in this case, because Harry and Hermione went back in time *before* Buckbeak was executed. *If* the kids saw the executioner behead him, *if* he actually died, and only *after* that H&H went back to prevent this from happening, then yes, there would have been a second timeline (I suppose :-)), where Buckbeak died and Sirius was Kissed.
>
> But that's not what happened in the book. H&H went back in time *before* Buckbeak was killed and prevented it, therefore he was never killed. JMO :-).
Shelley now:

Think of putting a pencil to paper, and then drawing a circle, and 
continue drawing around without stopping at any point. In this example, 
there is both a "beginning" (a point in time at which you started 
drawing), and a continuous line that appears not to have a beginning, 
because you can't tell where it began.

This timeline example is just that- there is a beginning- a lineline 
where Buckbeak and Sirius died, and then as time continued, Dumbledore 
realized a TimeTurner could indeed change the results. In this 
situation, you do indeed have two Harrys present- as he goes around the 
loop, his current self sees his past self from that earlier trip. We 
don't know what happened to Harry the first time- maybe he was smart 
enough to pull a Patronis out of his wand, but on the 2nd trip around, 
he didn't want to take the chance of himself dying and so he showed up 
to insure that he didn't die.

In the pencil circle example on paper, the top line is the one you see, 
and so it is with the timeline loop- the most recent one is the one that 
appears to be the current reality. (Colinear, is the mathematical term- 
two lines on the same path, but you can draw it as just one line.) But, 
agreeing with June, once upon a beginning, there was a reality of two 
deaths that needed to be corrected with a TimeTurner. If there were no 
deaths, no one would have even needed a TimeTurner to correct it!

Note that time is linear, and happens only ONCE until a TimeTurner is 
used to create a loop in that time. Once the TimeTurner is used, only 
the person(s) who make that trip can be in two places at once, just as 
Hermione attended two classes at the same time, and Harry was able to 
save Harry, and all three kids saw themselves at Hagrid's place. To 
everyone else, they were on a linear time and had only one self in that 
timeline.

zanooda:
Buckbeak was about to be executed, and there was no way to save him - that's what has "gone wrong" :-), and without Buckbeak Sirius was doomed as well.

Shelley again:
Zanooda- think through the order of events- Dumbledore suggests the TimeTurner only AFTER Buckbeak was executed. It wasn't that a future Buckbeak needed to be saved, rather, it was one that had been tragically executed. The TimeTurner allows the person to go back in time. In this case, things didn't go well the first time- logically, there is no reason to go back in time at all if all went well the first time.







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