Kevin's Watch

High Lord Tolkien wrote:So says someone who has all these hard and fast "rules" about imaginary time travel.

Well, time travel is an issue of theoretical physics, and then these works of fiction build on that. I don't think time travel is imaginary at all. Indeed, scientists have theoretically figured out ways to do it using two black holes connected by a wormhole. That's not exactly the same as proving that it is real, but it at least has the same status now as black holes themselves enjoyed a few decades ago: theoretical, but not yet proven.

Yet, it doesn't take the reality time travel to point out "hard and fast rules" within a created work. Donaldson set those rules out himself. The Arch can be undermined if time travel results in significant alterations of the past. If crucial events depend upon interference from the future in order for them to happen in the first place, then we can't really take the importance of "linear time" too seriously, because the past would then be dependent upon the future. And that means that built into the very foundations of time's stability would be the very thing which threatens time's stability: nonlinear causality. That's not a paradox, that's a contradiction.

The danger of caesures and time travel isn't merely that the past might be changed. It isn't merely about the results, but also the process. In fact, the process of time and causation moving linearly is more important than the results, because it is the necessity of linear time which makes sense of events, not the other way around. Donaldson has said that linear time is necessary for there to be any meaning at all; causes can't follow their effects, or everything is jibberish.

Therefore, by the rules of his world, it can't make sense that the stability of time's linear nature is supported by looping causation. The past can't depend upon interference from the future in order for time to be stable (which is the whole point here).

My comment about taking the invented world too seriously was in response to: "You're apparently not familiar with Star Trek, then." I'm familiar with it. But just because someone knows more about the details of an expanded universe built up by hundreds of contributors doesn't mean I'm wrong about a continuity problem in that universe. Sometimes people invent these details to "cover up" those continuity problems.

And now I've officially taken this way too seriously.

It's SRD world and if SRD says you can time travel then you can time travel!

So there!! I've said it.

I second what urDead said!

Oh, I'm not against the idea of time travel in Donaldson's books. Nor am I arguing against the rules he created for this time travel. I just disagree with the idea stated here (by HLT?) that Linden's actions might be the reason why certain events happened in the past--"originally." That's an idea invented here, I believe, and it's not yet established that it's a Donaldson idea at all. I think. Did he admit that this was the case in the GI, or something?

Re: If the entire earth had gone through a dark age shortly after Edison had invented the incandescent lightbulb, would an engineer 300 years later remember his name?


Allow me a dissent: We remember the names of Archimedes and Euclid at much greater remove than 300 years, with a Dark Age intervening.

Aleksandr wrote:Re: If the entire earth had gone through a dark age shortly after Edison had invented the incandescent lightbulb, would an engineer 300 years later remember his name?


Allow me a dissent: We remember the names of Archimedes and Euclid at much greater remove than 300 years, with a Dark Age intervening.

The entire world did not go through a Dark Age. Something most people tend to forget is that the Dark Age was largely limited (almost entirely) to Europe. China and the Middle East were doing just fine.

Re: The entire world did not go through a Dark Age.

Actually the entire world did go through a real bad era. About 535AD there was a catastrophic volcanic eruption that created a planetary "nuclear winter" effect. Crops failed all over the world for two years straight. There were frosts in India (!) in summer and snow every month of the year in China. The Turkic tribes migrated west, the Slavs south as a result. A few years later amid the starvation there was an epidemic of plague that took 100 million lives. Some areas recovered faster of course (e.g., China) and some areas took a while (e.g. Europe), but every civilization and every continent was affected. And yet we still remembered Archimedes and Euclid (and Plato and Homer and a bunch of other guys too). Knowledge is actually hard to eradicate, at least where people have writing.
OK, now back to the regularly scheduled discussion about Linden and Berek Halfhand's war.

Aleksandr - just a helpful hint - the quote button located in every post can help you keep track of your replies.