Kevin's Watch

First, hail to all posters and readers! I take spells in which I spend a considerable number of hours just reading and I rarely post. Most of the time I throw in my thoughts way after everyone else has provided theirs. This is really no exception.

Elsewhere in this forum and in the GI on Donaldson's site the topic of paradox has come up. After some reading in the GI today something has occurred to me. It felt like it needed a special thread. Forgive me if I have assumed wrongly.

Cosider the 'necessity of paradox' from the perspective of storytelling. Donaldson has indicated that he prefers stories where the characters and environments (contexts, situations,etc.) are externallzations of conditions within the main characters. Events in the Land are reflections of the internal struggles of the main POV characters. Hopefully I have understood this and not simply read into the logic of Donaldson's world-building.

Those of you that are more adept at physics, logic, and thoughts of paradox may wish to jump in and correct this, but here it goes. If, in this world, I invented a time machine and went back and changed something major there seem to be two possibilities:

(1) The change would not result in paradox if it was of just the right kind becuase then the world would experience events as they transpired from the point of the change onward and would be none the wiser.

(2) The change would result in some kind of paradox which was relative to the creation of the time machine itself. For example, I invent the time machine and go back and change events such that the time machine was never invented so that I would go back and change the past....

And just maybe I need to brush up on the physics of time-travel.

Anyway, sans TC and LA in the story, I don't think time travel would present a problem. Unless the AoT is like a device that records events once and can't be changed I think that the main reason that the Worm would be roused by the use of time travel is that our POV characters, LA and TC, would see a change in the way that they had experienced events. In short, if someone goes back and changes things to the extent that the experiences of TC or LA were erased or severly modified then the Worm would be roused because the story is tied to how LA and TC experience events in the Land's earth.

This is all just a random thought, nothing terribly insightful here. This also begs the question of how time travel is tied to the idea of TC = Foul.

IMO: I think that the proper approach to this question is to consider what Time, as the Creator created it, was *for*.

Time demands that things done may not be undone. That's how it's phrased in the story in several places. And the purpose of Time (and the Arch) is to preserve the Earth against chaos. So: having things undone once done would lead to a chaos that the Earth could not withstand.

If you look at the paradox example you've posted, you can see the done/undone pattern cycling. You invented a time machine. Then you didn't. But then you did. But then you didn't. Over and over.

So it's not hard to imagine why a time paradox is dangerous to the Earth. It's unleashed chaos.

Donaldson's Time has some power to heal itself, to regenerate. There're a couple other threads in the FR forum about this. But notice that it's the small changes to history, the ones that don't create big ripples, that can be handled by the system. It's the ones that splash so big that the ripples cannot be contained, but instead oscillate out of control -- done, undone, done, undone -- that threaten the Arch.

Erasing the memory of TC and LA would be that big. Foul would defeat Mhoram and win. But, having never known of TC and LA, no one would go back in time and erase them. So Foul would be defeated. And someone would go back and erase them. Etc. etc. over and over, ad infinitum. Too much chaos for the Arch to withstand.

So what is a paradox?

Two MD's standing side by side.

Wow... just... wow...

So what is a paradox?

Two MD's standing side by side.

UR_DEAD! I like you...

Skurjmaster...You asked, so the following IMHO ramble where I betray my ignorance is on your head....

From the stand point of physics, the dimension of time in the macroscopic (above what is known as the Planck limit) universe, can be described as the law of cause and effect. Not just in the Newtonian sense (macro), but in the informational sense, as information at the quantum level (micro) universe can never be lost, it can only change form. From this stand point, a paradox such as you outlined is not technically in violation of cause and effect in the macro universe, or the history in the micro, as there IS a cause, it is just out of the proper sequence (or, maybe, insequent? Hmmm...). It IS in violation of the second law of thermodynamics, as pointed out by wayfriend, but that's not important for this conversation, we are just talking about a plot device after all. There really are no physics of time travel, it's a common misconception that Einstein said time travel was possible, but he was talking about relativity. That is, the faster you are moving relative to the speed of light, the slower time moves for you relative to the rest of the universe. If you could move at the speed of light, time would freeze for you but not everyone else. And it would only be possible to go forward. Once you stopped, you would have traveled forward in time relative to the rest of the universe, where time would have kept moving forward. But below the Planck limit in the realm of quantum physics, the law of cause and effect does NOT hold. Things can just happen without any cause at all, so time does not exist. This is also one of the paradox's of time, you and I are a slave to cause and effect, but the very stuff we are made of is not. Another example of this is the Big Bang as posited by Stephen Hawking, among others. Most of the math points to time coming into being at the moment of the big bang, but most experiments indicate time is eternal, having no beginning. The implication is that there was once no time, but once it came into being, there had always been time...

Wait, where am I going with this, I have to go back to read the post..

Oh, right, so to your example, under this reasoning you could propose that actions in the land so far would constitute a bending of the law, but not a breaking. Cause and effect is maintained, and any action taken by LA traveling back in time that changed anything, would have always been once it happened. Her action in summoning Covenant, however, could be the deal breaker. If, as has been suggested in another thread, LA brought TC forward in time from the end of the second chronicles, then the law of cause and effect or time would be broken, as the effects of TC's actions in blocking Foul from the arch after his death would now have no cause, either in the past of future.

The other part of your questions, the "POV" part, begs some nice metaphysical exposition. In the quantum world, according to Schrödinger, the very act of observation determines the state of affairs and there is no possibility of objectivity. So, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, there is no question of whether it makes a sound, as it can't even fall unless someone is there to see it. Nor can it stand. So under this reasoning, not only can LA go back in time, she HAS to....

That's it, I've lost it. I hope to hell that makes some kind of sense.

Wait, what? I thought Information could be lost on the Macroscopic but not on the Plank Scale?

Oops. Typo corrected and thought expanded.