Disbelief caused time travellers go away?

@kennethmd:
Traveling back in time and buying ice cream will not effect the time line.
Click to expand...
The link you provided doesn't seem to work for me at the moment.
But what you said about buying ice cream not affecting the timeline is not true.

From the very moment of your arrival in the past you've already changed the timeline.
Because before that no time traveller arrived (or bought an ice cream for that matter).
When you make changes (and that includes just being in the past), it doesn't matter how small a change is, a change is a change.
And saying that something that seems to have no big ramifications because it is so trivial, is no guarantee that it actually won't.

You have to be prepared that WHATEVER you change, no matter how small, can have as much as big an impact later on as if you'd have committed arson.

Of course you can try to keep as low a profile as possible, so that the probability of unwanted consequences are low. But as I said, it's no guarantee.
This means if one ever travels back in time, he better not be ignorant to that fact.

EDIT: Link works now, will take a look.
EDIT 2: Can you give me a hint where on that website I can find what you were referring to? /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
Yes, the link worked again, I've said that in my edit before you posted.^^
But can you specify where exactly it is stated that something like buying an ice cream wouldn't change the past?
 
Buying ice cream in it self will not change the time line. But, if there was a line of people were there buying ice cream. And one of them had a importing meeting to get to. You may end up causing that person in losing his or her job. Which in turn will get someone hire in his or her place, and that person may or may not be better doing the job. But he or she gotten hire because you took your time in the ice cream line.
 
I just went back in time and bought some ice cream. I even flirted with the person serving it. And went on a date with them. You know what? History didn't change. That's because nearly everybody never makes it to the history books. There are billions of people alive on earth at any given time, yet only a handful are remembered beyond their lives. Making major changes can typically only be done by very deliberate acts. Or extreme carelessness. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
I think you mistake changing the timeline with chaniging the history. They are two very different things.
A change in the timeline is ANY change, no matter how small, that makes it different to how it was in an earlier form.
That means if you add even one single atom from the future into the past, even if it's not on earth, you've CHANGED the timeline.
The size or importance from the viewpoint of us humans doesn't matter!

A change in the history of one or more persons on the other hand, or to be more precise: a specific outcome in the life of one or more humans is a VERY different thing.
Because in order to succeffully change a specific outcome for this human/these humans you have to make specific changes.
And then it counts WHICH changes you make. They can be comprised of only miniscule changes, or big changes, or both.
It's all a question of what consequences these changes have if you follow their chain-reactions.

But again, that's something else entirely compared to what counts as a change in a timeline!
 
Well the common assumption is that every change to the past is amplified indefinitely. However, most changes are damped. Only certain things affect the "time line" in the long run. I don't like to use the term time line though. It sounds too pop sci.
 
But still it doesn't matter if a change will have big or small effects in the long run.
The outcome doesn't change the fact that a change still remains a change.
Just because it will be dampened to have almost no effect does not mean it will vanish.

For example:
Let's assume that, originally, somewhere deep in the woods there is a spot which hasn't seen a human for 6 years already.
On one of the trees in this spot, there is a fly.
Now let's call this point in time: A
This fly flies around this spot the whole day. Since it's lifespan is nearing its end it will die a few hours later.
10 Years pass...
Now someone, let's call him Adam, want's to travel back in time 10 years. He takes his time machine to some remote part of the woods.
Incidentally he chooses the exact spot I just talked about earlier.
He turns on the time machine and BAM, arrives 10 years into the past.

From the point of view of the timeline he will arrive in it looks like this:
...somewhere deep in the woods there is a spot which hasn't seen a human for 6 years already.
On one of the trees in this spot, there is a fly.
At time A, from one moment to the next out of nowhere, there's suddenly a man standing in the middle of this spot!
The fly smells something funny on this man and flies towards him and then lands on his face.
Unfortunately for the fly though Adam's hand is very fast and smashes the fly.
And for simplicity's sake let's say that after that Adam somehow lost interest in doing whatever he came here for and leaves this timeline again.
END OF STORY

Alright, now what has changed?
Well, first the timeline where Adam originated from, had in its past NO Adam arriving from the future.
The fly died of old age.
But the moment Adam travelled back, the timeline he arrives in is different that the one he left.
Here, there's a time traveller arriving.
Here, the fly dies from the hand of a human who wasn't there in the other timeline.

Since the time traveller left immediately, the changes won't propagate into an effect that Adam would possibly mind.
What stays forever in that timeline thought, is that the Fly died by the hand of a human.
Granted, the fly would've died a few hours later eventually, but this change will still remain.
All the atoms Adams body pushed away would've been where he stood. But now they were moved.
Every single interaction between his body and the outside world made this timeline FOREVER different than the one he came from.

So NO MATTER how small a change and how insignificant the outcome of that change may be... it REMAINS a change.

Clarification:
With "timeline" I refer to a specific chronological sequence of events that have occured.
Not "human history" but the history of the whole universe, of every single atom, electron, etc.

P.S.: Pardon me for the length, it's the example that strechted it so much. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
dimaggio,

You're on the right track. A small change in the past is not attenuated (damped). It goes to the theory of "six degrees of separation".

I've used this example many times but for you I haven't used it before:

Suppose a time traveler goes into the past with the specific purpose of making the most minor interaction possible with the inhabitants. In that past we have Mr. Jones. He's single, never been married and has no children. I'll change my typical scenario a bit to include ice cream.

In the "original" history Mr. Jones has a chance first encounted with the woman that results in their marriage. From that marriage they have children. This chance encounter originally occured at location "X" and time/date "T".

It's now time/date "T-minus 5 minutes" and he's near Location "X". Our time traveler is at the street vendor ice cream cart as Mr. Jones walks by. Our TT tastes his ice cream and makes a comment about how good it is. Mr. Jones hears the comment, stops and buys an ice cream cone. This minor encounter was not in the original history. It takes but 1 minute. The effect is, however, that he ends up missing the chance encounter with the original Mrs. Jones. They never meet, never marry and never have their children. Instead they each meet and marry someone else and have two entirely different sets of children.

But the scenario is much deeper than this. In the original history the people whom they marry in the altered history themselves married someone else and had two more alternate sets of children. The people that they married in the alternate scenario also met and married different people in the original history - and had yet more different sets of children.

Now comes the Six Degrees of Seperation. Give this scenario six generations - about one century. In the alternate history it is extremely unlikely that there is even one human being living on Earth, in this alternate history, that was present in the original history.

Our time traveler did nothing more than make an off-the-cuff comment to a street vendor and changed the entire history of the planet.
 
It's easy to come up with examples of interactions which are amplified in time, but not all interactions are. As a general rule, social interactions are more dynamic than typical environmental ones. One may say that the interaction of a time traveler with her past may converge on her original history (except for unnoticeable things like molecules of dirt moved) or diverge indefinitely. It is the latter upon which most focus, but both are equally possible. We should quantify this in order to make certain guidelines for time travel.
 
First of all, thanks Darby for trying to give an example of how small changes can propagate into big consequences.
I appreciate the support, but unfortunately that was not what I wanted to point out.

The only thing I wanted to make clear is that regardless what the consequences of ANY actions are,
the initial action will forever remain in the timeline it resides in!
Even if it is a tiny little change that WON'T have a butterfly effect. Or to be fair, even if it won't have a butterfly effect for many many many gazillion years.^^

So my point is if we have a timeline A and we "somehow" would be able to compute a cryptographic hash value of it and then travel back in time,
as soon as we ARRIVE, the hash value of the timeline we arrive in will be totally different and will never be like the one of timeline A.
Even if the timetraveller would have ended up at the other end of the galaxy and thus wouldn't have interacted with anything on earth.
The hash value/signature which describes the whole universe/timeline he travelled to will be different from his original, mereley because he travelled to it.


P.S.: What the hell is a cryptographic hash?
Sorry for that, but I couldn't think of anything else that would fit.
It's sort of like a "Unique Signature", but see for yourself -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function
 
The easiest analogy I can come up with is meteors. Think of small meteors which strike the earth, and the craters they cause. In most cases, life is not exterminated. It takes a meteor above a certain mass and energy threshold to have permanent effects.
 
Your answer reads to me as if you didn't even read my post.
I know that not all changes have big consequences, but that was NOT my point!

IF you travel back in time, the moment you ARRIVE in the past you have arrived in a timeline that will now be DIFFERENT from the one you departed from.
No matter WHAT changes propagate in big consequences or don't propagate any further than one second!

Ok, another try, maybe this is more clear:
You have two identical rolls of film of some movie.
Now let's assume that somewhere near the end on roll A there is a blue dot.
This blue dot now decides to travel to an earlier point on roll B.
After the dot arrives we do the following: We cut out the frame on roll B where he arrives in and the frame that represents the same moment out of roll A.

Now if we compare these two frames then we will notice that, even though the frames represent the same moment, their content is different, because in one there is a blue dot and in the other there isn't.

We DON'T look at what consequences the blue dot will cause or not, that doesn't matter.
Fact is, the change that's been already made REMAINS, no matter how small the consequences, they even can be zero later on.
The very moment something is different, it stays different.
The simple fact of an arrival where there was non before is making a timeline different to the one the traveller came from.

I hope this will finally get through what I mean. Sometimes I hate my inability to find the right words everybody can understand. Forgive me.^^
 
IF you travel back in time, the moment you ARRIVE in the past you have arrived in a timeline that will now be DIFFERENT from the one you departed from.
No matter WHAT changes propagate in big consequences or don't propagate any further than one second!
Click to expand...

I keep hearing this 'different timelines' stuff.....and it is palpable and demonstrable nonsense.

It is a piece of cake to get round this ' must be different from the one you started from ' supposed constraint. All you do is travel to a different timeline.....and then back to the past in YOUR OWN timeline.....which by your own definition is NOW a 'different timeline'.

Huh ??
 
No, you don't travel back to your OWN timeline, since you travelled away from that in a sense.
And the use of the word timeline might be misleading, I merely use it as a synonym for chronology, i.e. the chronicle or arrangement of events in their order of occurrence from the POV of the time traveller.

So if you have lived your life without anybody saying "blueberry sausage chameleon frappastrockl" to you and then later you come up with that sentence, travel back and tell your younger self this very sentence, then I'm merely saying that the timeline/history YOU came from and which you can remember DIFFERS from the one you're in now.
And this change cannot be undone from the point of reference of the timeline/history you're in.

So I'm just trying to point out that if you travel back into the past then the past you're in is - from the very moment of your arrival on - different from the past you originally came from.

Sorry again for my excessive use of the wird timeline, it seems to be a very elastic term.
But as I said, I merely mean the chronicle or arrangement of events in their order of occurrence from the POV of the time traveller.
 
No, you don't travel back to your OWN timeline, since you travelled away from that in a sense.
Click to expand...

How can you insist I don't, or cannot ? Once I make the initial time leap to a 'different timeline', then my original timeline then IS yet another 'different timeline'. You might argue that 'xxx didn't happen in that timeline'.....but then neither did it happen in any of the other timelines I might then travel to. So why is my original timeline any different as a travel location to any others ?
 
So I'm just trying to point out that if you travel back into the past then the past you're in is - from the very moment of your arrival on - different from the past you originally came from.
Click to expand...

No....that just doesn't cut ice. If someone can travel to our timeline from 2275, from a different timeline.....then what is to stop me getting in my time machine, travelling to 2275 to meet the time traveller.....and then travelling WITH the time traveller...er...back to my own timeline !

You simply cannot get round that one.
 
I see where you're going.
You can't get back to the present you departed from because after you've left that present the people you left there would've seen you vanish (since you travelled back).
From THEIR perspective, you've gone and they will never see you again.
From YOUR perspective though you do indeed travel to the future again, but the people you see there are not the same people you've left behind earlier.

This is better understood if you look at travelling back in time.
First, let's say there wasn't any travel in the "timeline" before.
Now you travel back and thus... the timeline from YOUR perspective is different in that it now has a time traveller (you) arriving in the past.
But the people you left behind... from THEIR perspective they can still remember no time traveller ever arriving in their past.

No, coming from that I could say we now have two different "timelines".
But you don't necessarily have to see it that way. It's just relative to the observer.
From the POV of the time traveller he is in a different "timeline" that he can remember.
From the POV of the people he left behind their "timeline" (or history) is still untouched.

There's a very nice graphical depiction of this I'd like to point out:
http://primermovie.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=640
(you have to ignore the stuff about the film primer and just concentrate on the model he describes)
 
I see where you're going.
You can't get back to the present you departed from because after you've left that present the people you left there would've seen you vanish (since you travelled back).
From THEIR perspective, you've gone and they will never see you again.
From YOUR perspective though you do indeed travel to the future again, but the people you see there are not the same people you've left behind earlier.

This is better understood if you look at travelling back in time.
First, let's say there wasn't any travel in the "timeline" before.
Now you travel back and thus... the timeline from YOUR perspective is different in that it now has a time traveller (you) arriving in the past.
But the people you left behind... from THEIR perspective they can still remember no time traveller ever arriving in their past.

No, coming from that I could say we now have two different "timelines".
But you don't necessarily have to see it that way. It's just relative to the observer.
From the POV of the time traveller he is in a different "timeline" that he can remember.
From the POV of the people he left behind their "timeline" (or history) is still untouched.
Click to expand...


Lol....no..your mistake is to keep thinking I don't understand. I fully see what you are saying. I am saying that you are wrong.

Look at it this way. ANY timeline you travel to, you are intervening - as you have yourself said. No matter where you go, you will make things different to what they would otherwise have been.

Now, what I then don't understand is how it is OK to then go back and screw up SOMEONE ELSE'S past......but not your own. In what sense is the past in any other timeline OK to mess up....but somehow your own is sacrosanct ?

In a sense, you are treating your own timeline in some 'special' Platonian ( as opposed to Copernican ) sense. But if it is OK for time travellers from other timelines to travel here...AND CHANGE THE PAST...which by definition they must be doing.....then why can't I travel to another timeline, and then hop back to my own as ONE of those time travellers ???

You cannot have it both ways. If time travellers from other timelines can come here and by definition change the past, then there is absolutely NO reason why I should not also be able to do so.
 
Ok, I see you didn't misunderstood that. I just thought you did because you talked about arriving in a past that's already different in all aspects.

But no, I don't hold the time travellers originating timeline in a special protected bubble.
Of course there could be time travellers arriving in his original timeline.

I'm just saying - and that you could say I postulate - is that there had to be a beginning.
What I mean with that is that there is a timeline many many iterations back that had no time traveller ever arriving in.

And THEN the first time traveller went back into the past.
From this point on we can AT LEAST differentiate two distinct sets of coexisting histories, because if you'd be able to rewind the "road" the time traveller went along, you'd get back to where he departed from and where no future version of him ever arrived in.

Ok, this is gonna be long, but here is part of a post I've made in another forum where I tried to explain the origin of a watch given to a time traveller which SEEMS to always have been given to himself by himself:
First of all: The watch HAD to come from somewhere initially. If the watch had an inbuilt camera with an unlimited energy source, you could see its original past and probably its inventor.
Now, it all depends what happened the first time around, i.e. from where the watch initially came the first time around.

Assumption 1: The boy originally bought the watch by himself.
Then, he travelled back in time and gave the old lady the watch.
Now it further depends on WHEN exactly the woman gives the watch to the boy.
If she gives the boy the watch AFTER he bought himself a watch, then he'll have two watches that look the same, only that one watch is a little bit older than the other one.
If she gives the boy the watch BEFORE he bought himself a watch, then he'll have only the one watch she gave him and the watch he WOULD'VE bought is still in the shop. But the watch he now possesses still was bought by the older time traveller version of himself in his past.

So, now when it's time to travel back in time for this boy and he has only one watch the process is repeated until either the watch will be destroyed or he simply decides that the watch looks to old to be given away and buys one that looks the same and everything can start anew.
This way there would be mutliple timelines across which there'd be a watch growing old. Then after these, this pattern would repeat itself because of the decision to buy a new watch.

But what if the boy had been given the watch by the woman AFTER he bought one by himself?
Then it depends on WHICH of the two watches he takes back into the past to give the old lady.
If he gives her the watch she once gave him as a boy, it's going to be one tough ride for this watch because it will be caught in this loop until it breaks or (as before) the traveller decides to buy a replica because it looks too old to be given away.
But if he had decided to travel back with the watch he bought and leave the one the lady gave him, then the lady would (in every iteration) get a watch of the same age, since it only came from ONE timeline before and not many timelines before.

Alright, these were just the most simple logical ways the watch could go when using Assumption 1.

Assumption 2: The boy never had this watch in the first (unchanged) timeline. So in 2007 he decides to travel back either ...
a)... with buying the watch as a present BEFORE his departure, or ...
b)... he buys it AFTER departure, or ...
c)... he never gives the lady a present to begin with.


a):
He then gives the watch to the lady, who in turn will give this watch to the boy of her timeline.
From then on it will depend on if the boy will take the watch he has been given to the past, or if he will buy a replica.
The outcomes of his decisions are already played out in Assumption 1 though.
So it's either always the watch from the first timeline, caught in a loop and getting older and older until replaced,
or it's always a new watch, preserving the loop to infinity.

b):
Since he bought the watch AFTER he arrived in the past, the lady will receive a watch from her own timeline and thus so will the little boy after that.
This means no watch will ever travel in time and we can already stop here.
( EDIT: Of course when the boy has been given the watch then it might very well be that from then on he will take this watch back in time and give it to the lady. Then the watch will be in a loop again. But then again, why give her a gift that was a gift from her to begin with.
)

c):
So the first time around he didn't have a watch, but didn't give the lady a watch either when he travelled back.
Maybe he just wanted to travel back and talk to her and just bought her flowers of whatever.
Then a little bit later the lady buys a watch in a shop and gives it to the boy of her timeline as gift.
From now on the boy decides to take the watch back with him into the past and give it to the lady, who in turn will not buy it in her own timeline anymore, but will give the one she received back to the boy.
Now this watch will travel for many many timelines loopwise, until it gets broken (again).
But then you can bet that EITHER the lady at some point decides the watch looks too old to be given away and buys a duplicate which she will give the boy (so the loop is "recycled"),
or the old man will decide that the watch looks to old to be given to the lady and buys a replica before he departures into the past.
Click to expand...
 
Back
Top