The Chrono Lab

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Acatalepsy
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The Chrono Lab

Post by Acatalepsy »

One of the key points of this 'verse is that I want the rules here to be complete. This means that unlike in most franchises, one doesn't just see a a few possible effects of time travel, but a complete picture. I want there to be no question of "well, why can't they do X?". Quite simply, if I can't figure out what happens in any given time travel situation, and keep it consistent, then I've failed.

The way to keep the rules rigorous is to do SCIENCE! to it - namely, an experiment. It's not enough that the rules be shown to work in the field where things are messy and uncontrolled enough that outside factors can stabilize things, they must be show to work in a lab where someone is deliberately trying to break them.

So the purpose of this thread is to be a laboratory. The premise is simple: You (meaning the reader) have a laboratory and are trying to determine the rules of time travel. You have a Quantum Projector, a device that can teleport a roughly human mass/volume equivalent up to ten years in the past. You also have an essentially blank check to buy any additional equipment to set up an experiment. Come up with an experiment to make sense of this whole time travel shenanigan thing. Feel free to tweak existing experiments too, and ask for variations - after all, no experiment is guaranteed to be right on the money the first time.

I'll start with an example, and keep updating this post as things go on.
Example wrote:In this experiment. you take a pound of diamonds and place it in a safe in the morning. In the afternoon, you send all of the diamonds in the safe through the Projector to earlier in the morning. with a note place them in the safe as well. At midday, how many diamonds are in the safe, and what happens if you take those diamonds home?
In this example, one would expect a perhaps 50% chance of finding a full load of diamonds in the safe, a roughly 30% chance of finding more than one pound but less than a full load, and a 20% chance of finding the same amount you started with.

The future where you find lots of diamonds is weakly dominant because the future where you place lots of diamonds in the machine and send it back is very probable if the diamonds come back in the first place. Once it happens once, there is nothing stopping it from happening many times. Nonetheless those transitions states must exist and there is always a chance of the loop terminating min-iteration.

If/when you decide to take the diamonds home instead of iterating them, nothing obvious happens that might prevent you from doing that. However, how you make this decision will strongly affect the actual outcome of the experiment. For example, if you decided that at the end of the day, you would pocket the diamonds no matter what happened, then it is unlikely you would ever receive any diamonds. If you decide to send the diamonds back in time no matter what, that would increase your chance of finding the diamonds. However, once you actually had the diamonds, what you chose to do would be completely up to you.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

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I've been thinking about the scenario you've posited for twenty minutes now, and I'm starting to develop a serious conservation of mass and energy related headache. Are mass and energy conserved, or is it possible to conjure mass from thin air? Because depending on the answer I have an issue with the probabilities as you described them:
In this example, one would expect a perhaps 50% chance of finding a full load of diamonds in the safe, a roughly 30% chance of finding more than one pound but less than a full load, and a 20% chance of finding the same amount you started with.
I don't get this. You're starting from the premise that I send the diamonds back in time, which makes sense because if I didn't, there'd be no chance of finding more diamonds than I had in the first place. In other words if I didn't send them back, nothing happens. So for all intents and purposes in this scenario there's a 100% chance that I send the diamonds back in time. But, according to you, the chance that I start with more diamonds than I began with is not 100%. Instead the chance is only 80%; there's a 20% chance of not having sent the diamonds back.

But surely that cannot be, because it means the probability for a given event is both 1 and .8 at the same time. That doesn't make sense. Either I sent the diamonds back or I didn't.

What also doesn't seem to compute is the chance of finding less diamonds than I sent back, because this will translate into a loss of mass for no discernible reason, as I will now demonstrate:

At time-point A1 I have X amount of diamonds. I send X diamonds back in time to time-point B, which chronologically takes place before A1. So, when I went to bed just prior to point B I had X amount of diamonds, and when I wake up at point B I suddenly have X + X = Y diamonds. Therefore at time-point A I can either have X diamonds (if I didn't send anything back or if I didn't yet -- this is A1) or Y diamonds (if I did -- this is A2). I can't ever have Z = X + .7X if I sent X back, because that means .3X would be lost somehow1.

Not only would the loss of .3X be inexplicable logically, it'd also all kinds of creepy. It doesn't matter so much when it's diamonds vanishing into thin air (well, apart from a conservation of mass point of view2), but what if you send a person back? If there's a 30% chance that less mass materializes at the destination time-point... Well, I'm sure you can figure out what that means if it happens to a person. It's pretty gruesome.

1 The only way I could end up with X + .7X = Z diamonds is if I sent less than X back to time-point B. If I sent .7X back I would end up with Z diamonds at time-point B, but only because I left .3X for myself at A1, which would be silly because I'm overwriting myself anyway.

2 For the purposes of building this theory I've assumed that mass and energy are must always be conserved. This means the time-machine cannot conjure mass from thin air, so if a pound of mass is sent back in time (i.e. disappears from the universe) this has to be compensated for somehow. The most likely way to make this happen, I imagine, is that the Quantum Projector draws the energy equivalent of the displaced mass from the target destination. So in effect the time machine is trading energy from its target destination (either the past or the future, but in this case the past) in exchange for the displacement of the mass equivalent to that destination. If conservation of mass goes out the window, well, then all bets are off and I guess an occasional inexplicable loss of mass in transmission is less of an issue, but it would also make the whole scenario terribly weird (and messy).
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Acatalepsy »

Siege wrote:The only way I could end up with X + .7X = Z diamonds is if I sent less than X back to time-point B. If I sent .7X back I would end up with Z diamonds at time-point B, but only because I left .3X for myself at A1, which would be silly because I'm overwriting myself anyway.
That's right, you would (almost) never end up with 1.5 pounds of diamonds - all of the most probable loads of diamonds would be even multiples of the amount you started with. When I say that you get less than a full load, it means that you get less that the maximum carrying capacity of the machine, but still more than you started with, like ending up with 12 * X rather than the 52.6 * X that your time machine is capable of holding when stuffed to maximum capacity.
Siege wrote:Not only would the loss of .3X be inexplicable logically, it'd also all kinds of creepy. It doesn't matter so much when it's diamonds vanishing into thin air (well, apart from a conservation of mass point of view2), but what if you send a person back? If there's a 30% chance that less mass materializes at the destination time-point... Well, I'm sure you can figure out what that means if it happens to a person. It's pretty gruesome.
See above. Matter isn't lost, the question is "how many times is it likely you successfully sent/send/will send matter back in time", not "how much matter is lost in transmission."
Siege wrote:For the purposes of building this theory I've assumed that mass and energy are must always be conserved. This means the time-machine cannot conjure mass from thin air, so if a pound of mass is sent back in time (i.e. disappears from the universe) this has to be compensated for somehow. The most likely way to make this happen, I imagine, is that the Quantum Projector draws the energy equivalent of the displaced mass from the target destination. So in effect the time machine is trading energy from its target destination (either the past or the future, but in this case the past) in exchange for the displacement of the mass equivalent to that destination. If conservation of mass goes out the window, well, then all bets are off and I guess an occasional inexplicable loss of mass in transmission is less of an issue, but it would also make the whole scenario terribly weird (and messy).
As far as Dr.Siege the temporal scientist can tell by looking at the laboratory, matter is popping out of nowhere. That doesn't mean that matter isn't conserved somehow, but if matter is conserved, then this thing has effects that cannot be isolated to the laboratory - ie, the laboratory is NOT a closed system.

Or, CoM/CoE is just wrong when dealing with time travel. It's not like anyone has tested CoM and CoE with time travel before.
I don't get this. You're starting from the premise that I send the diamonds back in time, which makes sense because if I didn't, there'd be no chance of finding more diamonds than I had in the first place. In other words if I didn't send them back, nothing happens. So for all intents and purposes in this scenario there's a 100% chance that I send the diamonds back in time. But, according to you, the chance that I start with more diamonds than I began with is not 100%. Instead the chance is only 80%; there's a 20% chance of not having sent the diamonds back.
The 20% includes possible futures in which you found more diamonds than you started with and then decided to go on a shopping spree with them, rather than send them back in time. In those futures, you don't send diamonds back in time so you never found them in the first place. Of course, those futures are dependent on multiple instances of time travel across multiple possible time lines, and so have lower probabilities than scenarios that aren't so spread out.

If you made a rule such that: If you have X diamonds, you send all of them back in time. If you have X + Y diamonds, where Y is less then Z - X and where Z is the maximum carrying capacity of the machine, then you also send them all back in time. If you have Z diamonds, you send Z - X back in time.

Then you would expect the majority of the time to have Z - X diamonds magically appear in your lab...but then not be able to go on a shopping spree with them because you made a rule that you would send them back.

Great questions! This is really helping me get a feel for my own system. One thing though...while I do worry about physical and logical plausibility, I'm more interested in internal consistency and possible unintended consequences. So in addition to double checking my math/logic, if something doesn't make sense, propose a follow-up experiment that would clarify the issue and either force me to contradict a previous statement or show how the differences in the experiments affected the situation.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Siege »

Acatalepsy wrote:That's right, you would (almost) never end up with 1.5 pounds of diamonds - all of the most probable loads of diamonds would be even multiples of the amount you started with. When I say that you get less than a full load, it means that you get less that the maximum carrying capacity of the machine, but still more than you started with, like ending up with 12 * X rather than the 52.6 * X that your time machine is capable of holding when stuffed to maximum capacity.
You mean there's a continuous feedback loop going on, i.e. we're not talking about A1 → B → A2, but something more like A1 → B → (...) → A16 until the safe is stocked to its maximum capacity. I'm not sure your reduction of the loop to 50-30-20 probabilities is workable. It seems arbitrary -- why shouldn't the odds be 60-20-20, or 80-10-10? For that matter, why should there even be a possibility of ending up with the same amount you started with? If the 20% wins out, then there is no loop, so including this possibility when the starting assumption is that the probability of a loop = 1 is self-defeating. Which means the only potentialities are a sloping scale from amount X to Y, in which Y is the safe's full capacity.
As far as Dr.Siege the temporal scientist can tell by looking at the laboratory, matter is popping out of nowhere. That doesn't mean that matter isn't conserved somehow, but if matter is conserved, then this thing has effects that cannot be isolated to the laboratory - ie, the laboratory is NOT a closed system.
Of course it's not a closed system - matter is popping in from the future! Barring some bizarre Time-Lord technology a temporal laboratory pretty much by definition cannot be a closed system. Nevertheless I like the idea of a time machine compensating for displaced matter by drawing energy from the target coordinates somehow. It's neat and elegant, especially since the effects won't bother anyone: when you're displacing to the past, the energy is shunted into a future that is overwritten the moment the transfer is completed, and when you're sending something into the future, you can use the time machine as a perfect matter/energy conversion system (at least until the future sends you a very cross note telling you to stop stealing their power!)

Conservation of energy and matter just makes the whole concept a lot tidier and, if you ask me, believable.
The 20% includes possible futures in which you found more diamonds than you started with and then decided to go on a shopping spree with them, rather than send them back in time. In those futures, you don't send diamonds back in time so you never found them in the first place.
But that's a self-defeating paradox. If going on a shopping spree means you didn't send them back and therefore didn't get the extra diamonds in the past, then you couldn't have gone on a shopping spree in the first place.

Put another way, you can't find more diamonds in the safe, spend them, not send them back, and then open the safe to see they're not there. It doesn't compute: if nothing was sent back that means time wasn't altered; therefore you're still in time-line 1, not the altered time-line 2 in which the Quantum Projector was activated; therefore the experiment did not happen; as Mr. Schrödinger taught us the minute you look in the safe to see the amount of diamonds hasn't changed the probability of the experiment not having happened (and thus the time-line not having changed) rises to 1.

I believe in this thought-experiment the present should be dominant, i.e. if I look in my wallet now and notice the number of bills in there hasn't changed, that means no-one in the future has sent me money. Unless I'm horribly butchering my quantum mechanics the unchanged state of my wallet cannot mean there's only a 20% chance that no-one has sent me money, after all I looked, so the probability of someone not sending me money from the future has just peaked at 1 and become reality.

Before I look is another case of course, I'll grant you that. Maybe there's a thousand Euros in my wallet right now. That would be nice. But I can't tell without looking, and neither should the good temporal engineer working in his laboratory, so who's to say whether the chances are 10, 20 or 90 percent?
Then you would expect the majority of the time to have Z - X diamonds magically appear in your lab...but then not be able to go on a shopping spree with them because you made a rule that you would send them back.
That shouldn't really matter. Once you've got the diamonds you should be free to do whatever whether the safe is full or not: it's not a stable loop, it can't be (because the amount of diamonds keeps increasing every time you reset reality by sending more of them back). You've already got the diamonds, the future ceased to exist as such the minute the Quantum Projector activated, so you're free to either cash in or go through the motions until you (for a given value of 'you') have a safe full of 'em, whichever you prefer. But then I'm a big fan of the uncaused cause: if I went back in time I couldn't undo my going back in time, because I already did. Even if I forcibly restrained 'myself', thus preventing 'me' from entering the machine, I've already gone through so that's not going to do any good.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Acatalepsy »

Siege wrote:
Acatalepsy wrote:That's right, you would (almost) never end up with 1.5 pounds of diamonds - all of the most probable loads of diamonds would be even multiples of the amount you started with. When I say that you get less than a full load, it means that you get less that the maximum carrying capacity of the machine, but still more than you started with, like ending up with 12 * X rather than the 52.6 * X that your time machine is capable of holding when stuffed to maximum capacity.
You mean there's a continuous feedback loop going on, i.e. we're not talking about A1 → B → A2, but something more like A1 → B → (...) → A16 until the safe is stocked to its maximum capacity. I'm not sure your reduction of the loop to 50-30-20 probabilities is workable. It seems arbitrary -- why shouldn't the odds be 60-20-20, or 80-10-10? For that matter, why should there even be a possibility of ending up with the same amount you started with? If the 20% wins out, then there is no loop, so including this possibility when the starting assumption is that the probability of a loop = 1 is self-defeating. Which means the only potentialities are a sloping scale from amount X to Y, in which Y is the safe's full capacity.
Yes, I'm talking about a continuous loop. The breakdown is arbitrary...what the exact breakdown would be would depend on far more specific information, including the researcher's self control!

The question isn't "is there a loop" but "how many diamonds do I find lying around in my lab for no apparent reason". Assuming you plan on doing this experiment, then there is still a very real chance that you find no diamonds lying around in your lab - if, for instance, after doing the experiment through one loop you'd have gone and spent them, then the loop is not complete and it is unlikely that the diamonds would appear in the first place.

The question is really "what happens if a researcher tries to induce a paradox", either by refusing to send diamonds back when he receives them or choosing to send them back when he doesn't. If that's what he's trying to do, then the loop simply doesn't work. He will almost never receive any diamonds at all no matter how many his possible future self disintegrates.
Siege wrote:
Acatalepsy wrote:As far as Dr.Siege the temporal scientist can tell by looking at the laboratory, matter is popping out of nowhere. That doesn't mean that matter isn't conserved somehow, but if matter is conserved, then this thing has effects that cannot be isolated to the laboratory - ie, the laboratory is NOT a closed system.
Of course it's not a closed system - matter is popping in from the future! Barring some bizarre Time-Lord technology a temporal laboratory pretty much by definition cannot be a closed system. Nevertheless I like the idea of a time machine compensating for displaced matter by drawing energy from the target coordinates somehow. It's neat and elegant, especially since the effects won't bother anyone: when you're displacing to the past, the energy is shunted into a future that is overwritten the moment the transfer is completed, and when you're sending something into the future, you can use the time machine as a perfect matter/energy conversion system (at least until the future sends you a very cross note telling you to stop stealing their power!)

Conservation of energy and matter just makes the whole concept a lot tidier and, if you ask me, believable.
I do agree, but to be honest I'm still working out the specifics of that - I think that the amount of energy needed by a time machine is going to be related to the mass of the transported object; and it's going to power itself at least part of the way by turning the target into a gaseous cloud. In theory with enough power, you could send the object back in time without destroying it in the present, so that one copy goes back in time while the other continues a more continuous life.
Siege wrote:
Acatalepsy wrote:The 20% includes possible futures in which you found more diamonds than you started with and then decided to go on a shopping spree with them, rather than send them back in time. In those futures, you don't send diamonds back in time so you never found them in the first place.
But that's a self-defeating paradox. If going on a shopping spree means you didn't send them back and therefore didn't get the extra diamonds in the past, then you couldn't have gone on a shopping spree in the first place.

Put another way, you can't find more diamonds in the safe, spend them, not send them back, and then open the safe to see they're not there. It doesn't compute: if nothing was sent back that means time wasn't altered; therefore you're still in time-line 1, not the altered time-line 2 in which the Quantum Projector was activated; therefore the experiment did not happen; as Mr. Schrödinger taught us the minute you look in the safe to see the amount of diamonds hasn't changed the probability of the experiment not having happened (and thus the time-line not having changed) rises to 1.

I believe in this thought-experiment the present should be dominant, i.e. if I look in my wallet now and notice the number of bills in there hasn't changed, that means no-one in the future has sent me money. Unless I'm horribly butchering my quantum mechanics the unchanged state of my wallet cannot mean there's only a 20% chance that no-one has sent me money, after all I looked, so the probability of someone not sending me money from the future has just peaked at 1 and become reality.


The present is always 'dominant' in that sense, that it determines what has actually happened. But the future still matters. You can say, that because I have these extra diamonds that means that I MUST have these extra diamonds, and therefore can do whatever I want with them. And you are correct...except that if in every possible situation that was your response, then you will never receive any diamonds. If you receive the diamonds, there must be a very good chance that you will send them back in time.
Siege wrote:Before I look is another case of course, I'll grant you that. Maybe there's a thousand Euros in my wallet right now. That would be nice. But I can't tell without looking, and neither should the good temporal engineer working in his laboratory, so who's to say whether the chances are 10, 20 or 90 percent?
Acatalepsy wrote:Then you would expect the majority of the time to have Z - X diamonds magically appear in your lab...but then not be able to go on a shopping spree with them because you made a rule that you would send them back.
That shouldn't really matter. Once you've got the diamonds you should be free to do whatever whether the safe is full or not: it's not a stable loop, it can't be (because the amount of diamonds keeps increasing every time you reset reality by sending more of them back). You've already got the diamonds, the future ceased to exist as such the minute the Quantum Projector activated, so you're free to either cash in or go through the motions until you (for a given value of 'you') have a safe full of 'em, whichever you prefer. But then I'm a big fan of the uncaused cause: if I went back in time I couldn't undo my going back in time, because I already did. Even if I forcibly restrained 'myself', thus preventing 'me' from entering the machine, I've already gone through so that's not going to do any good.
The point wasn't that the rule prevented you from going back, the point was that if you weren't going to follow the rule, the diamonds never would have shown up. Say your time machine has a maximum load of ten pounds of diamonds. When you get up in the morning before you go to the lab, imagine that you have a 99% chance of following the rule and going through with the experiment, even when large amounts of diamonds suddenly appear in your lab. Then the chance of all of those diamonds appearing in the first place is relatively high, around 38%. If, prior to going to the lab, your chance of following your own rules is around 75%, then the odds of all of those diamonds appearing is much lower, around 8%. There are of course greater probabilities associated with having some diamonds, but not the maximum your machine can carry.

You are correct that once the diamonds show up or not, you are free to do whatever the hell you want. You could choose not to send the diamonds back, and that would still work. But if you weren't going to send the diamonds back when they showed up, then it is very, very unlikely that they ever showed up to begin with.

You can come out ahead, of course. But assuming you are following the 99% rules, at the beginning of the day there is only at most a 1% chance you'll come out ahead, and the real probability is worse. With the 75% rules, it's actually better - your odds of coming out ahead are about 2%.

(And yes, I actually did the math on this one.)
Last edited by Acatalepsy on Fri Jan 15, 2010 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

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Would it be silly and unhelpful to point out the answer can only be: Whatever you want to happen happens. As time travel is impossible; the only rules are the ones that you choose to follow. There can be no 'real' logical answer.

Now really you have several popular options: branching timelines; one unalterable timeline; one alterable timeline.

In the first as soon as you send the diamonds back; a new time line is created. At twelve o'clock in the original timeline you find only your diamonds. In the new timeline, some luckier version of you gets two sets of diamonds: one set from his timeline and one set from yours. From a multi-universal perspective energy conservation is obeyed. Kinda.

In an unalterable timeline; at middy there are two sets of diamonds in the vault but it doesn't matter because you have to send half of them back come the afternoon. Circumstances will somehow conspire to stop you keeping them. (this system doesn't work very well for this example. but does work well in stories such as the original Terminator.

In the last option: anything goes. As soon as you sent the diamonds back the timeline ahead of the point of the diamond just gets wiped. (like the diverging time line example except the original time line ceases to exist ) meaning the dude suddenly has twice the amount of diamonds can do whatever the hell he wants with them. This is pretty much Back To The Future and pretty nonsensical as far as actually science goes. You've added a pound of mass to the universe for example. (That's work aroundable if you design your timetravel system properly i suppose. Like have it needing a device in both time periods; the past machine sucking up massive amounts of energy to created the object that's gone back in time; which is less 'time machine' that 'replicator')
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Re: The Chrono Lab

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Booted Vulture wrote:Would it be silly and unhelpful to point out the answer can only be: Whatever you want to happen happens. As time travel is impossible; the only rules are the ones that you choose to follow. There can be no 'real' logical answer.
Yes. It has already been pointed out multiple times. I get that time travel is impossible. Magic is also impossible, as is FTL. Yet people have 'verses here with FTL and magic.

My goal, as stated previously, is to create a system in which time travel is possible, useful, and consistent.That's the goal of this thread in particular - for people to propose "experiments" with time travel so I can apply my system to situations that I haven't thought of, and people can critique my responses.
Booted Vulture wrote:Now really you have several popular options: branching timelines; one unalterable timeline; one alterable timeline.
All of which are unsatisfactory, which is why I made my own system. Now I'm trying to test my system to see if it produces the results I want.

The Terminator example in particular illustrates my problem. First of all, across the three movies the "rules" change. Second, even under original Terminator rules (future causes the past) there is no answer about what happens if you start trying to make the rules break. In the field, there's enough going on to put stuff down to coincidence. But in the lab you have to make things testable and repeatable - again, hence this thread.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Booted Vulture »

This thread's purpose is silly. Lab and experimentation only work when you already have rules, experiments don't create rules they discover them. What happens to the diamonds depends entirely on rules you haven't defined. So I gave you several options based on some common ideas on the subject.

You seem to be pretty self-contradictory here: You say you know Time travel can't make sense but you are asking for use to make you some rules that do make sense and when you rejected to prior proposals you don't give any reason except: 'These aren't good enough.' Sorry but unless you explain why you think that rules can adjusted to your liking.

So again: in the end the answer is whatever you want it to be. And in the end it doesn't matter what you rules you use. The interesting part isn't the rules themselves it applying their implications to universe properly.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

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This thread's purpose is silly. Lab and experimentation only work when you already have rules, experiments don't create rules they discover them.
In real life, yes. But for me the purpose of this thread is to figure out if the rules I have created do what I want them to do in situations I haven't thought of yet. I chose lab experimentation as the theme because if you try and frame things in a story perspective, people (including me) start thinking narratively instead of mathematically or physically. That leads to telling the same time travel story, using the same, ultimately inconsistent rules.
What happens to the diamonds depends entirely on rules you haven't defined.
I have defined the rules, or at least most of them.
So I gave you several options based on some common ideas on the subject.

You seem to be pretty self-contradictory here: You say you know Time travel can't make sense but you are asking for use to make you some rules that do make sense and when you rejected to prior proposals you don't give any reason except: 'These aren't good enough.' Sorry but unless you explain why you think that rules can adjusted to your liking.
My last response was a bit vague, so I apologize for that. Also, I just updated the FAQ/Intro thread, so that might explain a couple extra things. Briefly:

1) branching timelines - Can't be used because it violates my goal of having time travel be useful. To frame it in terms of the diamond problem, you've given an alternate universe version of yourself some diamonds. This does nothing to help you, and in general time travel is useless except for a few situations. You also have almost no interaction between time travelers, which is another goal of this 'verse.

2) one unalterable timeline - Can't be used for the same reason. It not only runs into the problem of uncaused causes (an acceptable but grating problem), but even in situations where time travel is used, what's the point? Time travel is useless because you can't change a thing, no matter what. Since one of the goals is to allow the past to be changed, this doesn't work.

3) one alterable timeline - In a roundabout sense, this is more or less what I'm going for now. The problem with simple alterable timelines - poof and you're done - is that it downplays the interaction between timelines, which is something I really wanted to happen. My way of getting around this is to say that there's not just one possible future - there are many possible futures, any one of which could choose to send time travelers back. It also helps temper the consequences of the tons of time travel going around - you can do all of the ridiculous things that one can do with time travel, but there are naturally built in limits.
So again: in the end the answer is whatever you want it to be. And in the end it doesn't matter what you rules you use. The interesting part isn't the rules themselves it applying their implications to universe properly.
The answer is whatever I want it to be, but what I want it to be isn't necessarily the right answer.Or something. I think you see where I'm going with that. ;)

Anyway I do have a lot of cool applications, some clever ways to play around with "low-tech" time travel to get the results you want and some "high-tech" or "meta-tech" time travel that messes around with reality in cool ways.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Underwhelming »

Please keep in mind that mine is a mostly uneducated opinion, but it seems to me that this experiment with the diamonds that you put forward is not a test of the causality of Time Travel itself, with ultimate goal to establish the nature of the Natural Laws of Time Travel, but rather a quite interesting application of those laws to the field of human behavior.

The experiment, as you describe it, is not a test of Time Travel itself or what would happen, but rather a test of the people performing the time travel. I would say that your suggestion of Diamonds as our Time Travel experiment subject is not arbitrary, but rather is intentionally designed to bring human Greed into the equation. This is evidence already that the real experiment here is on human behavior-- if the unknown quantity is the Human element, then we are solving for the wrong variable. But we'll ignore that for a moment.

If we look at the experiment chronologically, the following must happen, in this order:

1) Researcher buys diamonds.
2) Researcher puts diamonds in locked safe.
3) Researcher goes to retrieve diamonds from said safe.

From this point, the experiment can take only one of two paths;

4a) Researcher finds diamonds in locked safe exactly as he left them,

and

4b) Researcher finds more diamonds in locked safe than he initially had.

From this moment, the rest of the experiment is a foregone conclusion. This should not surprise us in the least, as every experiment in the history of mankind has been a foregone conclusion before it was ever even conceptualized-- the trick is to discover the Laws that govern what that conclusion will inevitably and consistently be. An experiment must be Repeatable, else it is invalid and useless.

If step 4 takes variation 4a, then we can conclude with complete certainty that something prevented the Researcher from sending the diamonds back in time at all. We don't even need to know exactly what this is-- if there are no more diamonds in the safe at step 4 than there ever were, then we can deduce infallibly that neither within the bounds of this experiment, nor throughout the rest of all time will (or has) anyone ever sent diamonds through time and into that safe. This could be a result of the Researcher's greed, stealing the diamonds for himself, this could be a result of a technical failure with the time machine (or Quantum Projector, if you must), this could even mean that the Researcher was assassinated by a rival company who wished to delay his research, potentially even a Time Traveling assassin sent back to stop him from making the discovery he is about to happen upon (I take it that is the flavor you are shooting for for this project, yes?).

However, if step 4 takes variation 4b, then we can guarantee that the Researcher will, at some point in time, send diamonds back into that safe. Logic, given the rules that you have provided thusfar, demands this conclusion. This will then enter a stable loop; if we already know that the Researcher will send the diamonds that he has back in time, then we know that when he opens the safe at step 4 he will discover an amount of Diamond equal to his original amount plus the maximum capacity of the Quantum Projector-- the original lump that he had, plus the amount that will be accumulated by the time loop. He will then, inevitably, at a later point in time proceed to send the full capacity of the diamond that can be sent by the Quantum Projector back into the safe, leaving him with the same amount that he started with-- merely aged by a significant amount more than it would naturally be.

But this is not breaking any new ground at all-- this is merely extrapolating out what we already know about Time Travel and applying it in a specific way. What is truly interesting about this experiment is the effect that the Researcher's Intent will have on the experiment. If the researcher intends to follow through with the experiment from the start, it will work. However, if he intends, at any point, to bail out and attempt to keep the Diamonds without sending them back in time, then the experiment is not possible at all. Let me explain that a little better; if the Researcher, at any point, attempts to keep the Diamonds that have been gifted to him through time, then his past self will not find any more diamonds in the safe than he himself bought-- he can't, because at some point through the loop the Researcher ahead of him will fail to send them back.

Let's look at it from the perspective of the timeline when the Researcher is sending the Diamonds back in time instead. At this point we already following either branch 4a or branch 4b. Let's consider branch 4b first, continuing with step b5:

b5) Researcher sends all Diamonds back in time.

Now back at 4b, the amount of Diamond will have increased, which means that the amount of diamond that will be sent back at b5 will have increased as well. This stable loop will continue until we reach the maximum capacity of the machine. At this point, the Researcher will have sent back the machine's full capacity-- which, will then have been added to the amount he originally sent back, which means that the amount of diamond found at step 4b will be the machine's maximum capacity + the amount originally purchased. As a side note, in this way, the amount that the researcher originally purchased is completely irrelevant-- the time loop will continue until the safe reaches the machine's capacity + the amount originally purchased, regardless of how much that was to begin with. This means that at step b5, the Researcher will send back the full amount of Diamond possible in the machine and be left over with exactly as much as he started with-- the rest exists only within the confines of the stable time loop. For the purpose of simplicity, I am not considering multiple Projections, but the end result will be the same (though more drawn out, and with a higher likelihood of something interfering to cause variation 4a instead of 4b, which can be considered failure).

The other option is:

a5) Researcher does not send diamonds back in time (cause irrelevant).

Scenario a5 is more difficult to think through, but let's try it. Scenario a5 follows after variation 4a, specifically, the researcher opens the safe to discover that the amount of Diamond in the safe has remained unchanged. Under this scenario, we can determine that something has prevented the researcher from sending the Diamonds back at all. There is no scenario under which the diamonds are looped two or three times before something interferes with the loop-- this all happens simultaneously, so anything that would prevent the second or third Projection is the same as interfering with the very first one. If the experiment is to fail at all ever, it will fail the first time (and the third time and the ninth time, as a matter of fact, because they are all simultaneous). If the Researcher tries to steal the diamonds, he will only have the same amount of diamond that he himself originally bought to steal-- he will not have sent any Diamond back in time, because the first, second, third, and fourth loops are all simultaneous. If he pulls out of the first one, which is all of them, he will not have sent any at all, and therefore he will not have any more than he started with.

Therefore, the eventual results of the experiment are guaranteed as soon as we see step 4.

This brings up a very interesting application concerning Free Will. Can the Researcher really choose Freely whether or not to keep the Diamonds if he has already seen from the safe at step 4 whether or not he will choose to send the Diamonds back at all? The real kicker is, the Researcher himself does not even have to be informed about his choice before seeing the safe for the results to still be accurate. Consider the following; Supercorporation (with access to Time Travel) wishes to determine not only the present, but the future loyalty of a potential hire. They instruct the hire to look inside a locked safe that only he can open. If they find inside it a full load of Diamonds (or other, more likely MacGuffin) then they can automatically know that at any arbitrary point in the future when they wish to test their employee's loyalty, they can give them those same diamonds, that they would have kept specifically for this purpose, and tell them to send them back in time to a specific set of coordinates, without any form of security or surveillance, and in fact every opportunity given to steal the diamonds for themselves, that their employee will choose to send the diamonds back. These diamonds then go into storage for a later date, waiting until the time when the test is needed once more, when they are pulled out of storage specifically for that same employee's testing. This will create a long-term stable loop that guarantees the success of the experiment from the first result of the experiment. This can even account for technical difficulties and unforseen delays-- as long as the Supercorp undertakes the appropriate investigations into the accident and determines that their employee was not to blame, they can then have the employee at a later time send the diamonds back to the same intended destination-- the delay makes no difference to the past. This can even be done posthumously-- the Supercorp has an employee that dies a fine, loyal death in the service of the Supercorp. They then send the diamonds back themselves in order to signal to their past selves that the hire is loyal and to go ahead and hire him.

However, if the potential employee opens the safe and there are no diamonds inside, then the Supercorp knows that he will one day betray them and simply shoot the poor fool in the head.



A more interesting experiment, I think, would be to replicate the above conditions, but instead of sending back Diamonds, the experiment contingent upon Greed, we should send back a Pocketwatch.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Acatalepsy »

Wow, that's a lot of stuff. Thanks for the reply.
Underwhelming wrote:Please keep in mind that mine is a mostly uneducated opinion, but it seems to me that this experiment with the diamonds that you put forward is not a test of the causality of Time Travel itself, with ultimate goal to establish the nature of the Natural Laws of Time Travel, but rather a quite interesting application of those laws to the field of human behavior.

...

This brings up a very interesting application concerning Free Will. Can the Researcher really choose Freely whether or not to keep the Diamonds if he has already seen from the safe at step 4 whether or not he will choose to send the Diamonds back at all? The real kicker is, the Researcher himself does not even have to be informed about his choice before seeing the safe for the results to still be accurate. Consider the following; Supercorporation (with access to Time Travel) wishes to determine not only the present, but the future loyalty of a potential hire. They instruct the hire to look inside a locked safe that only he can open. If they find inside it a full load of Diamonds (or other, more likely MacGuffin) then they can automatically know that at any arbitrary point in the future when they wish to test their employee's loyalty, they can give them those same diamonds, that they would have kept specifically for this purpose, and tell them to send them back in time to a specific set of coordinates, without any form of security or surveillance, and in fact every opportunity given to steal the diamonds for themselves, that their employee will choose to send the diamonds back. These diamonds then go into storage for a later date, waiting until the time when the test is needed once more, when they are pulled out of storage specifically for that same employee's testing. This will create a long-term stable loop that guarantees the success of the experiment from the first result of the experiment. This can even account for technical difficulties and unforseen delays-- as long as the Supercorp undertakes the appropriate investigations into the accident and determines that their employee was not to blame, they can then have the employee at a later time send the diamonds back to the same intended destination-- the delay makes no difference to the past. This can even be done posthumously-- the Supercorp has an employee that dies a fine, loyal death in the service of the Supercorp. They then send the diamonds back themselves in order to signal to their past selves that the hire is loyal and to go ahead and hire him.
I do like the idea of using time travel to vet future employees. Humans aren't entirely deterministic, but they are close enough.

One thing though - this is still about testing the time laws more than anything else. One could do the same experiment with a pile of lead or something; the diamonds shouldn't matter to the probabilities unless there are significant chances of researchers stealing them. If not, then one should get the same results with lead. That in and of itself would be an interesting in-universe experiment to run, running this experiment with diamonds and lead and seeing which has the higher chance of retroactively appearing. In any case it is possible to create a system like the one you describe, but this also requires some very careful planning so as not to cause too heavy of a paradox.

I'm trying to think of an experiment what would test that sort of system, without including a human element. Any ideas?
Underwhelming wrote:From this moment, the rest of the experiment is a foregone conclusion. This should not surprise us in the least, as every experiment in the history of mankind has been a foregone conclusion before it was ever even conceptualized-- the trick is to discover the Laws that govern what that conclusion will inevitably and consistently be. An experiment must be Repeatable, else it is invalid and useless.
This is mostly true, but remember that a "inevitable and consistent" result can include a probability distribution. If one wanted to discover the "rules" for flipping a coin or rolling a pair of dice, one would not expect to come up with the same answer every time. But one would expect to come up with a probability curve, which would hold up over any sufficient number of trials. The rules for time travel in this universe are the same way. One would not be able to expect the same result each and every time, but over any sufficient number of trials, one would expect the same distribution of results.

So if you open the safe, and see no diamonds, that doesn't mean that there is no way that this person sent the diamonds back in time...it simply means you are living in a time line where diamonds do not materialize seemingly out of nowhere into the safe. The two events are correlated, but the correlation is not entirely reliable.
Underwhelming wrote:If step 4 takes variation 4a, then we can conclude with complete certainty that something prevented the Researcher from sending the diamonds back in time at all. We don't even need to know exactly what this is-- if there are no more diamonds in the safe at step 4 than there ever were, then we can deduce infallibly that neither within the bounds of this experiment, nor throughout the rest of all time will (or has) anyone ever sent diamonds through time and into that safe. This could be a result of the Researcher's greed, stealing the diamonds for himself, this could be a result of a technical failure with the time machine (or Quantum Projector, if you must), this could even mean that the Researcher was assassinated by a rival company who wished to delay his research, potentially even a Time Traveling assassin sent back to stop him from making the discovery he is about to happen upon (I take it that is the flavor you are shooting for for this project, yes?).
You can't conclude anything with complete certainty - but you can strongly suspect. If you try it three different time (or rather, with three different safes), and not one of them has diamonds, then you start to get suspicious. You still can't prove anything, but I wouldn't go giving that guy access to company secrets right yet.
Underwhelming wrote:A more interesting experiment, I think, would be to replicate the above conditions, but instead of sending back Diamonds, the experiment contingent upon Greed, we should send back a Pocketwatch.
The results would be more or less the same - the chances of a pocket watch magically appearing are related to the chances of you actually making it disappear in the future. The only difference is that you could "stretch out" time for on particular pocket watch.

EDIT: Messed up with the quote button, fixed now.
Last edited by Acatalepsy on Sat Jan 16, 2010 8:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Underwhelming »

Acatalepsy wrote:This is mostly true, but remember that a "inevitable and consistent" result can include a probability distribution. If one wanted to discover the "rules" for flipping a coin or rolling a pair of dice, one would not expect to come up with the same answer every time. But one would expect to come up with a probability curve, which would hold up over any sufficient number of trials. The rules for time travel in this universe are the same way. One would not be able to expect the same result each and every time, but over any sufficient number of trials, one would expect the same distribution of results.

So if you open the safe, and see no diamonds, that doesn't mean that there is no way that this person sent the diamonds back in time...it simply means you are living in a time line where diamonds do not materialize seemingly out of nowhere into the safe. The two events are correlated, but the correlation is not entirely reliable.
I think this is the primary reason you've gotten so much resistance from now three different people. You're not telling us all of the rules. What you're saying right there is that even in tightly controlled, as sterile as possible, Laboratory conditions, there is still a significant chance of the Quantum Projector just... not working? In a word, Why?

Or in other words, Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do. ;)
Underwhelming wrote:The results would be more or less the same - the chances of a pocket watch magically appearing are related to the chances of you actually making it disappear in the future. The only difference is that you could "stretch out" time for on particular pocket watch.
Correct-- but the interim time is what is interesting, not the final result. If we create a Stable time loop, as with the above, we will find a pile of pocketwatches, however many are created by the time loop, each one progressively timed later than the next. But here's the trick; the distance of time between each iteration of the pocketwatch will tell us, specifically, how long it will be until the pocketwatches are sent back in time by your future self. Think about it. I open the safe door to find a whole pile of pocket watches instead of just the one that I know is the Prime iteration. I can then lay those pocketwatches out in order of which 'happens' first, even though they're all 'happening' simultaneously. The Prime iteration will continue as normal from when I last saw it, for sake of explanation we'll say it started at 0:00:00. This clock will continue ticking as long as I deal with it, and I cannot know how long it will continue to do so before I send it back in time later to myself in the past. But, if I look at the next pocket watch in line and see it to be 24:00:00, then I can guarantee that at exactly 24 hours, through a course of events yet to be determined, I will send the Pocket Watch prime back in time exactly 24 hours after I retrieved it from the safe. This will be confirmed by each progressive step of the pocketwatch through the more 'aged' iterations of it; the next pocket watch will read 48:00:00, because it has 'existed' through the Prime iteration and through the first loop, 'now,' for this iteration, being on the third loop. By doing this, and no matter how long the interval is, I know beforehand how long it will take me to send these pocketwatches back in time, creating the stable time loop in doing so. Thus, I have predicted the future with complete certainty; at exactly 24 hours, through whatever course of events will have happened at that point, I (or even someone else, I don't know that for certain) will send the pocketwatches back to myself through time.

Now the problem becomes the Alterable timeline. By the very basis of your attempt to create a logical, internally consistent universe in which time is Alterable, someone could, potentially, use Time Travel stop me from sending the pocket watches back to me at all, even though I already have evidence, nay, Proof that excluding Time Traveling interference, I will send the pocketwatches back to myself. Obviously in order for this to be possible Cause and Effect must be completely rewritten, or possibly discarded entirely, because Cause and Effect as we currently understand it does not allow this sort of interference, for the Cause to be aborted and the Effect hold true. How do you explain this possibility without your world devolving into an impossibility of logic?
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Acatalepsy »

Underwhelming wrote:I think this is the primary reason you've gotten so much resistance from now three different people. You're not telling us all of the rules. What you're saying right there is that even in tightly controlled, as sterile as possible, Laboratory conditions, there is still a significant chance of the Quantum Projector just... not working? In a word, Why?

Or in other words, Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do. ;)
The reason is that the universe - even our universe - Does Not Work That Way. At one point we thought it worked that way, but now we know better. Take, for example, the famous electron single slit experiment. There is absolutely no way to know, even setting up all things exactly the same, where any given electron will end up after passing though the slit. That does not mean that we can't understand what's going on, though. Given what we know of physics, we'd expect that over a sufficiently large number of electrons passing though a slit, the pattern they make will conform to certain parameters. In other words, we don't know where the electron will go, but we do know where it will probably go.

The same principle applies to time travel in this 'verse. Any one experiment may simply...not work. But over a sufficiently large number of experiments, you can generally expect a certain distribution of result.
Underwhelming wrote:Now the problem becomes the Alterable timeline. By the very basis of your attempt to create a logical, internally consistent universe in which time is Alterable, someone could, potentially, use Time Travel stop me from sending the pocket watches back to me at all, even though I already have evidence, nay, Proof that excluding Time Traveling interference, I will send the pocketwatches back to myself. Obviously in order for this to be possible Cause and Effect must be completely rewritten, or possibly discarded entirely, because Cause and Effect as we currently understand it does not allow this sort of interference, for the Cause to be aborted and the Effect hold true. How do you explain this possibility without your world devolving into an impossibility of logic?
One of the things that's happening here is that you - and other people - are conflating logic with causality. Or rather, your logic includes an implicit assumption of causality, which is obviously false in a universe that permits time travel.

"Logic" says nothing that would contradict this - unless you have an unstated premise that all causes must be preceded by an effect. But this premise is false. In this universe, there is only a weak causality, rather than a strong causality like in our universe. You do not have absolute proof that you sent diamonds back in time. You simply have a strong indicator. As Siege points out, once you actually have the diamonds you can do whatever you want, possible futures be damned.

The best way of looking at it is to say that the time travel event - diamonds or pocketwatches or robot death machines suddenly appearing out of nowhere - is caused not by some specific future event, but by the possibility that it might be sent back. Of course, just because something might be sent back doesn't mean it will. But the more likely a future in which the object is sent back is, the more likely the object is to spontaneously appear in the present.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Underwhelming »

Ok. Allow me to summarize the conversation thusfar.

You have proposed an experiment involving Diamonds, with a result (or rather 'probability of results') that doesn't make much sense to the rest of us-- well, No. I won't go that far, I don't know what anyone else thinks. It makes no sense to me, or what little sense it does make is not sufficient to be believable.

You have either denied or re-written Conservation of Mass/Energy, which, and again I cannot speak for the others, but I personally do not understand in the least. 'Borrowing' of Mass/Energy from other time periods or even alternate timelines I can manage, with a little polish on the details. Pulling something out of nothing and claiming it's still Science not Magic breaks the deal completely.

You have denied or re-written Cause and Effect, stating that, in practice, something can happen for absolutely no reason, or rather it can happen now just because I can't prove that it cannot. Kurt Gödel is right now, I'm sure, either wishing he could shake your hand, or rolling over in his grave. I am quite honestly not smart enough to decide which.

Then, finally, you have denied Logic (or perhaps merely averted it... I'm not even sure). I don't think you can do that, at least not while at the same time stating that your intention is to create a universe that makes sense. Magic I can handle. It at least admits that it makes no sense. Is this supposed to be Science?

How am I supposed to react to this? You have stripped away every tool or mechanism I have for understanding anything that you're talking about, and the only things you have replaced it with is Quantum physics, which the rest of Humanity still has not figured out how to tie together with the rest of "Physics" as we think we know it, I hasten to remind, and "I have it figured out. Mostly."

Due respect, I'm inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt that you really have thought this through to something approaching a sufficient degree, but something has seriously fallen apart when it came to communicating all that to me. I don't mean to presume, but I do have to wonder who you intend this project for-- obviously for yourself first, but I wonder how much you expect mere mortals to be capable of appreciating. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my understanding of 'Science,' such as it is, is at least pretty close to being Average. And I am completely lost (possibly not irrevocably, but I don't have overmuch hope...). I'm going to continue to watch this discussion with hopes that some semblance of sense will come out of it, but until that happens I myself will be bowing out of the conversation.

Best wishes, Gentlemen.
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Re: The Chrono Lab

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Oh yeah, welcome to O1, Underwhelming! :D
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Acatalepsy »

Underwhelming wrote:You have either denied or re-written Conservation of Mass/Energy, which, and again I cannot speak for the others, but I personally do not understand in the least. 'Borrowing' of Mass/Energy from other time periods or even alternate timelines I can manage, with a little polish on the details. Pulling something out of nothing and claiming it's still Science not Magic breaks the deal completely.
First of all, I did say conservation of energy / mass is being preserved. My statement was that a scientist in this 'verse would not be able to detect where exactly that energy was being taken from - but it was being taken from somewhere.

On a related note, I do sort of think the charges of "it's just magic!" are unwarranted. In our universe, everything we know eventually boils down to "just because" eventually anyway. The reason we say that one thing is "magic" and the other is "science" is that with magic, the universe itself responds to your desires and not just your actions, with science only your actions matter. So while the physical laws in this universe are different, that does not make everything that happens as a result of those differences magic. Again, in this universe causality is weak, so that means that certain physical laws can't work quite like we would expect them to in this universe.
Underwhelming wrote:You have denied or re-written Cause and Effect, stating that, in practice, something can happen for absolutely no reason, or rather it can happen now just because I can't prove that it cannot. Kurt Gödel is right now, I'm sure, either wishing he could shake your hand, or rolling over in his grave. I am quite honestly not smart enough to decide which.
Well, sort of. This 'verse can only work if causality is weakened, because in order for some of the paradoxes to resolve themselves without much fuss, something has to happen without what explicitly caused it necessarily happening. The catch here is that causality has not been deleted. If one removed causality entirely, and made time travelers all be cause-less, then there is no basis for not having random things show up at random times. This is the reason I rejected my earlier idea of making time travelers cause-less in my initial thread.

Instead, causality is weakened. In strong causality (in our universe), something that has no cause is impossible. Under weak causality (in this 'verse), something that has no cause is improbable.

Look at it this way. Suppose you have a box, and a time machine that can send your box back in time. You are close to 100% certain that at 9:00 sharp, you will send that box back to 8:00. At 8:00, the box appears. What caused it? The best way to think about it is that it was not caused by something that happened at 9:00 (because that hasn't happened yet), but rather it was caused by the state of the universe at 8:00 being such that you had a 100% chance of sending it back. Cause still more or less precedes effect. If the universe was 100% deterministic - everything was either certain to happen or impossible - then there could be no change to the time line, and time travel in this 'verse would look a lot like Terminator 1 time travel.

The thing is, though, that this universe (and our universe for that matter) is not deterministic. There is no such thing as a 100% chance. So let's try that same experiment with the box again, but with only a 99% chance of you actually sending it back. At 8:00, does the box appear? Yes, it probably will. But do you have to send it back? As Siege points out, you don't have to - the box is there. But 99 out of 100 times, you will send it back - that was a precondition of this experiment - and more importantly, the instance in which you don't send it back is not the same instance in which you receive no box. At 8:00 on that time, it has the exact same chance of appearing as it did on all of the other times. The fact that you don't eventually send that box back in time does nothing - what caused it to appear at 8:00 was not something that happened at 9:00, but the state of the universe at 8:00. So in one out of a hundred situations, something apparently impossible happens, and in one out of hundred of those situations, your time travel fails to produce the expected result (because you fail to find an extra box at 8:00) . If you weren't going to do the experiment in the first place, NO boxes would show up - so causality is preserved, if weaker than it is in our universe.
Underwhelming wrote:Then, finally, you have denied Logic (or perhaps merely averted it... I'm not even sure). I don't think you can do that, at least not while at the same time stating that your intention is to create a universe that makes sense. Magic I can handle. It at least admits that it makes no sense. Is this supposed to be Science?
Ok, this is where I think there's been a serious misunderstanding. Logic is the art/science of coming up with true conclusion given true premises. It always works, in any possible universe - even a universe where magic exists, logic will work. I would only be failing at logic in this universe if somehow true premises could not be used to come to true conclusions. This is not the case.

I think you are confusing science in general with the laws of physics. Science isn't a set of rules, but a way of figuring out those rules. The laws of physics are the rules. I can change the laws of physics, and science, logic, etc, still work. It still makes sense, you just have to stop assuming that all of the physical laws are exactly the same. To the extent that I can, I want to keep as much of the physics as possible the same. But where the physics stops the time travel, I modify the physics so it is still consistent but allows for time travel.
Underwhelming wrote:How am I supposed to react to this? You have stripped away every tool or mechanism I have for understanding anything that you're talking about, and the only things you have replaced it with is Quantum physics, which the rest of Humanity still has not figured out how to tie together with the rest of "Physics" as we think we know it, I hasten to remind, and "I have it figured out. Mostly."
I'm using the quantum stuff mostly as an analogy. The important thing I was trying to show was that the real universe does behave probabilistically, so there should be no issue with this universe behaving probabilistically.

Also, while we don't have a theory of everything (yet), quantum mechanics do produce good predictions for everything that isn't either extremely massive or moving at extreme velocity. It's hardly something that's a complete unknown.
Underwhelming wrote:Due respect, I'm inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt that you really have thought this through to something approaching a sufficient degree, but something has seriously fallen apart when it came to communicating all that to me. I don't mean to presume, but I do have to wonder who you intend this project for-- obviously for yourself first, but I wonder how much you expect mere mortals to be capable of appreciating. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my understanding of 'Science,' such as it is, is at least pretty close to being Average. And I am completely lost (possibly not irrevocably, but I don't have overmuch hope...). I'm going to continue to watch this discussion with hopes that some semblance of sense will come out of it, but until that happens I myself will be bowing out of the conversation.

Best wishes, Gentlemen.
Alright, I had trouble enough explaining this concept to people in person. After going back and forth across more than a few examples they got it, but I imagine its even more difficult over the internet. Welcome the the O-verse 1 and best wishes.
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Underwhelming
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Underwhelming »

Acatalepsy wrote:Well, sort of. This 'verse can only work if causality is weakened, because in order for some of the paradoxes to resolve themselves without much fuss, something has to happen without what explicitly caused it necessarily happening. The catch here is that causality has not been deleted. If one removed causality entirely, and made time travelers all be cause-less, then there is no basis for not having random things show up at random times. This is the reason I rejected my earlier idea of making time travelers cause-less in my initial thread.

Instead, causality is weakened. In strong causality (in our universe), something that has no cause is impossible. Under weak causality (in this 'verse), something that has no cause is improbable.

Look at it this way. Suppose you have a box, and a time machine that can send your box back in time. You are close to 100% certain that at 9:00 sharp, you will send that box back to 8:00. At 8:00, the box appears. What caused it? The best way to think about it is that it was not caused by something that happened at 9:00 (because that hasn't happened yet), but rather it was caused by the state of the universe at 8:00 being such that you had a 100% chance of sending it back. Cause still more or less precedes effect. If the universe was 100% deterministic - everything was either certain to happen or impossible - then there could be no change to the time line, and time travel in this 'verse would look a lot like Terminator 1 time travel.

The thing is, though, that this universe (and our universe for that matter) is not deterministic. There is no such thing as a 100% chance. So let's try that same experiment with the box again, but with only a 99% chance of you actually sending it back. At 8:00, does the box appear? Yes, it probably will. But do you have to send it back? As Siege points out, you don't have to - the box is there. But 99 out of 100 times, you will send it back - that was a precondition of this experiment - and more importantly, the instance in which you don't send it back is not the same instance in which you receive no box. At 8:00 on that time, it has the exact same chance of appearing as it did on all of the other times. The fact that you don't eventually send that box back in time does nothing - what caused it to appear at 8:00 was not something that happened at 9:00, but the state of the universe at 8:00. So in one out of a hundred situations, something apparently impossible happens, and in one out of hundred of those situations, your time travel fails to produce the expected result (because you fail to find an extra box at 8:00) . If you weren't going to do the experiment in the first place, NO boxes would show up - so causality is preserved, if weaker than it is in our universe.
After reading back over some stuff a little more and giving myself some time to chew on the concepts that you're throwing out here, I believe that I am beginning to understand what you are getting at, in a general sort of sense. If I may suggest, when it comes to explaining the mechanics behind this universe that you're trying to put together, I would start with the above explanation to make sure that you're on the same page from the start. Multiple times you referenced "Weakened Causality", but this is the first point that I have seen that term defined. I suspected that the rules of Reality in this universe would have to be in some ways different than Real-world physics (obviously-- time travel is not viable in our own reality, so far as we know, so something has to change) but you jumped right into 'lets use SCIENCE! on it' without defining the rules of the game that we're playing by. That made it a little hard to process when you moved straight on to elaborating on a point that I had not even been aware of yet.

...I'm still in lurk moar mode, BTW. :shock:
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Booted Vulture »

Ok, in this proposed 1% time where the diamonds sent back in time but do not appear in the safe at 12 o'clock, what happens to the diamonds? Are they supposed to have disappeared entirely? Lost in the trans-time ether or whatever? Or do they miss their intended destination and really do turn up at 11 o'clock or 1'oclock or a year earlier or something?
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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Acatalepsy »

Generally speaking, they just disappear. This is sort of where the extra mass and energy comes from. Where time travel is involved, there is nothing saying that the universe at any one point must have the exact same amount of mass or energy; but as a rule it tends toward conserved energy over its entire history. The mass for the diamonds that just "appeared" comes from all of the times someone put something in a time machine and it just "poofed" away.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

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Re: The Chrono Lab

Post by Acatalepsy »

I've added a general post for time travel rules. This thread should be for thought experiments, to clarify things that don't make sense or you'd like to know how would work.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

- Bruce Sterling
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