"Our" Throne Room

[Sylvain]

Time travel can lead to interesting grammatical situations! Is Sissy going to get along with herself?

This scene would tend to indicate that Dr. Sisyphus will indeed rule the world in five years, but we should be weary of making assumptions. Yes, it has been established that the future cannot be changed, but there are so many ways to explain this particular slice of time.

Perhaps she failed and is only pretending. Perhaps she has been tricked into beleiving that she succeeded. Perhaps she is indeed master of the world but will soon be defeated by Saundra, Volair and the kids. Anything is possible, which makes the plot an interesting one.

[Kesh]

Yep. A throne does not a ruler make.

... though it means bad things if it does.

[Schol-R-LEA]

Now, the question becomes, is travel forward in time different from travel backward? That is to say, if you go forward, are you somehow fixing those future events relative to the point you left from, or are they subject to change?

This is an important matter. So far, the evidence is that in the UH-verse, travel backwards can't alter events - it's already happened, the waveform has already collapsed. But does going forward collapse the waveform or not? Most concepts of physics say it should, if travel backward is possible at all - from the POV of the traveller, the round trip is two separate events, and unless some form of quantum inseparability effect is occurring, then returning to the past should leave the intervene time unchanged, even if they traveller was originally from the time they are returning to. Indeed, even just observing the future should cause the waveform to collapse, in some formulations of QM; while in others, the whole timeline is deterministic even if the individual events aren't from the local perspective, due to the sum-over-histories cancelling the individual probabilistic effects.

I'm not sure if any of that really made sense. Quantum mechanics is one of those areas that only can be really discussed mathematically, and I'm just going by my third-hand understanding of various interpretations of said math. If any of the actual physicists here can comment on this (even just by saying its BS), I'd be ever so grateful.

And in a strange side note, it seems my replacement user account is innaccessible, but the original account which got vaporized a few years back is working again. I have no idea why this would be, but such is life trapped in the Net.

[Sylvain]

Temporal mechanics aside, I wonder if something should be made of the fact that the sunburst effect on Sissy's throne is centered on her navel rather than her head?...

[Allan_ecker]

Now, the question becomes, is travel forward in time different from travel backward? That is to say, if you go forward, are you somehow fixing those future events relative to the point you left from, or are they subject to change?

*snort* If you haven't worked THAT out, I'm not going to tell you.

[Alfador]

I'll give it to ya simple.

You fix your own observations.

Whether you draw incorrect or indeterminate conclusions about future events from those observations is your own lookout.