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.