Time travel in science fiction books has always seemed to be impossible, or incredibly delicate by virtue that the Butterfly Effect of causing a small change in the past could totally overhaul the future. This stems from the assumption that the timestream is a collective feature, and therefore everyone is affected by time all at once. Moreover, it is linear, so it becomes impossible for one to go into the past to kill one's father.
Theoretically, if timestreams were individual rather than collective, it is possible for the current reality to remain unaltered if one went back and did things that could incorporate themselves into one's past. For example, the inventor of time travel could go back in time to tell herself about how time travel works, and it was the basis of this self-informing that led to the creation of time travel itself. It may sound convoluted and contradictory, but it really just involves creating an individual time loop, where everything fits neatly into the past.
Also, this opens the possibility of a hero learning how to time travel, die in the past, get resurrected in the future and still not affect the hero's original reality. That's because the hero already lived through the entire timeframe, learned to time travel, went back to the past, died (probably without affecting other timestreams) and was somehow resurrected, then traveled to the future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
It seems quite strange for me to see the "Butterfly Effect" in popular usage, since the "Butterfly Effect" was orignally termed by E N Lorenz to describe the nature of chaos (in weather prediction), and this chaos is what we call deterministic chaos. The system must be deterministic, otherwise it is not the chaos of the "Butterfly Effect".
This brings up the question of whether History can be well described with a set deterministic equations. Perhaps one day a Hari Seldon will appear and give us a theory of psychohistory.
Suppose that yes, History can indeed be described as a deterministic system. Then the second misuse of the "Butterfly Effect" is the concept of causing a small change that causes a cascade of effects which overhaul the future. Chaos is just that, chaos. The only thing that can be "ascertained" in any way would be that the initial condition was altered, thereby leading to a very different final condition. Questions of going back in time to make changes like talk to oneself, kill one's father, and so on, are not related to the "Butterfly effect".
Post a Comment