Appy-polly-loggies in advance if this turns out to be the wrong forum, but it’s a tricky one to place.
Been watching a lot of Red Dwarf lately so I’ve had time travel and parallel universes on the brain. Had a dream the other night dealing with both of those ideas (it’s freakin’ awesome to be me sometimes). Upon waking I decided to have some fun with the dream and see if I could grasp the underlying idea before it faded into oblivion–it was that cool.
It boils own to an argument that runs counter to “The Butterfly Effect” as it pertains to time travel. “One tiny event can radically alter the course of the future, so tread the past at your own peril.” Instead the dream suggested something more like a “River Effect” which would say that the relationship of time and history is as interdependent as a river is to its bed. While it would be possible to significantly alter the course of history by making changes in the past, it would be extremely difficult to do so. For every change that you make is essentially negated by the near-infinity of randomness occuring at the same time in the rest of the univers. In other words, you’re not likely to change the course of a river simply by stepping in it, or even kicking it vigorously. Sure its possible, but very very improbable. Arguably the water affected by your intervention will forever have a somewhat different course, but the whole river itself will not be perceptibly changed.
So the question: As time travel is not yet something we have managed, The Butterfly Effect remains purely hypothetical. Is there any reason it would be more or less valid than “The River Effect” described above?
I think it depends on how much a given thing would be affected by uh, randomness, or maybe a better term would be how susceptible it was to chaos theory?
Before those more knowledgeable jump all over this, what I am talking about is some things are very much affected by uncertaintly, like a coin going through a panchinko machine, but others not so much, like the flow of the river you mentioned.
The things that go into creating a hurricane are so many, so chaotic, and so varied that we well might use the butterfly effect to get a grasp on it.
Time has to enter into the equation, also. I have read somewhere that if we restarted things at a moment in time a few billion years ago on planet Earth, life today would bear no resemblance to what we now have. Just through the effects of randomness. Yet if we were to restart things from 5 minutes ago, we would still be here today, and dogs and cats, etc. (Though human ova fertilized in those 5 minutes might get fertilized by a different spermie, so we could well have different people beinig born 9 months later…not that we’d realize that)
Hypothetical things like that tend to depend on the scale you’re looking at. I would say that butterfly effect and river effect are not mutually exclusive, and in fact cannot exist without each other.
I would say that the grandfather paradox equivalent of ‘kicking the river’ is going back in time a few decades and killing a few hundred people. You come back, a lot of things are going to be different – but the river still made it to the ocean – sun still comes up, the moon is there, etc.
It also occurs to me that it is vitally important to agree on a model of time/history. For instance, the question becomes irrelevant when you think of time/history as static with our actual progression being merely an illusion (think Slaughterhouse 5).
OK, here’s a question. Suppose, because of your presence on the scene, a man coming home from work gets home a couple of minutes earlier or later than he would have, and as a consequence, he and his wife are, ahem, intimate, at a slightly different time. As a consequence of that, in turn, it’s a different sperm which ends up implanting in the egg, and they end up with a different child than they would have had. OK, one child, that’s still not too much of a difference, right? But what if that child were to grow up to become Albert Einstein, or George Washington, or Hitler, or Mohammad? History would, I imagine, look considerably different without any of those people.
Now, consider how large a change would have to be, to change which sperm out of millions managed to win the race. And now consider that a single such change to a single person would also change all of that person’s descendants, a set which rapidly grows as the generations go by. Now consider that even one such descendant, having any sort of significance whatsoever, will likewise subtly affect the lives of so many others.
I think that the details would be different, but the general history would be remarkably similar. If Albert Einstien hadn’t discovered relativity, somebody else would have and probably not that much later. If Hitler hadn’t been around to make the holocaust, it might have been a different holocaust, but it probably would have happened. Things may have happened in a different order and had different outcomes, but the river would get to a similar place one way or another.
Just wanted to point out here that time travel would have the effect of rendering irrelevant such words as “yet,” which is adequate proof to me that we will never accomplish it. If we ever did, we would’ve heard back by now.
Not necessarily, if at some point time travel becomes possible it may have social or political constraints to returning back here. It could also have technical constraints in that time travel may be possible but only back so far as the discovery of time travel itself. Or perhaps string theory is correct, there are 13 (or more) dimentions and thus at least 3 different, parallel but unique realities. Bending of space-time could drop the time traveler into one of these other parallel realities. Right time, right place, wrong dimention.
Given alternate dimentions and alternate realities I suppose it would be possible to travel back in time, cause a catastrophic event, return to the original set of dimentions and reality and notice no difference. That set of dimentions being mathematically related to ours would also continue as if nothing happened lending support to the River Effect.
Although I don’t have the math I would expect the inverse to have the exact same probability.
A time traveler could land in an alternate reality, do exactly nothing in no way what so ever, return to the original reality and find chaos has ensued.
It is also possible that once we fully understand the nature of reality it will immediately disappear and be replaced by something infinately more complex. This may have already happened a number of times.
I just wanted to toss in that the phrase “butterfly effect” is associated with chaos theory, but there was a sci-fi story with a butterfly effect where a time traveler returned from a trip to prehistoric times to discover a dead butterfly on the bottom of his boot, and discovered that a different candidate had been elected, which would cause huge political upheaval, something like Hitler being elected, or something like that. I know that there are people reading this who will know the title and author immediately. I think I read it about 30 years ago. Well, I mean, I read it yesterday while I was in the year 1978
It seems to be a case of this pet theory or law I have. That events further back in the past have a larger effect on the present than more recent events. Unless, of course, it has no effect at all.
In biology, for example, if you go back in time so many generations, eventually you will find that one person is the ancestor of every human alive today, while all of his contemporaries have had their families die out before now. Or in the stock market, you can go back in time and buy yourself stocks that will make you wildly rich when you return to the present – unless you spend all your money on a thousand shares of General Typewriter Corp. Look at the effect Robert Johnson has on modern popular music compared to any other juke-joint playing poor git-fiddlers of the time.
I guess your river analogy works. I imagine that even a little step into that river will produce a fairly large local effect that might not but probably will die out before the river reaches the ocean. But if you go back far enough, and step in it the right way, you might be able to change its course.
Well, I think you’re underestimating the scale of a river. We are entirely insignificant on such a scale. You could probably go back a few hundred million years and make all life on Earth completely extinct, and I’d still argue that you didn’t really change the course of the river even a little bit – it’s still flowing where it’s flowing. The effects outside of Earth would be insignificant and most of the universe would be as is.
In a lot of ways, some events that make up the “big picture” in human society are net mass effects of many individual events. (Much like your river is made up of many molecules of water.) You can change a molecule or two, but the net “average” effect of humanity may still make some events ultimately inevitable.
For example, you could go back in time, and kill Hitler the boy. But World War 2 may still happen (due to events beyond even Hitler’s control), even if it doesn’t quite have the same flavor. (Different cronies would get appointed to political posts in Germany.)
But I also agree with DrCube and Chronos that if you go far back enough (upstream of your river), the ripple changes in time make have a magnified effect on your future “point-of-reference” time. Small changes made today don’t effect time much (because of the inertia of surrounding events) tomorrow, but they effect stuff 1000 years from now more. heh.
Imagine that the Universe as a static “book”. All events and things, past, present, and future, all “exist” simultaneously. If you were a seperate observer, and stood “outside” of the Universe, and was able to observe the greater whole, the past/present/future may all appear to exist/occur simultaneously. Each past/present/future item and event may all appear to be a piece of a greater whole, like a granite molecule in a (unchanging or everlasting) mountain.
In such a Universe, a time traveller has/is/will already go back in time and do his/her thing. Nothing really changed, or will change, because it was/is/will be a part of the greater “symphony of the History of the Universe”.
This would imply that there is no “free will” for us little humans, that are part of, and subject to, the Universe. It’s all “scripted”, from our point of view.
But would the absence of that tiny critter necessarily result in the demise of the fish? Or would the fish just grab another critter and then survive to be taken by the same bear at the same scheduled time?
It’s a possibility that the fish was on its last legs (so to speak) and that eating that critter saved its life just long enough for the bear to hove into view and kill it
It also has to do with your importance or influence with the world or with the forces that run things. As Q once pointed out to Picard in a similar time-travelling adventure (and I’m paraphrasing here): “galaxies are not going to explode because of anything you do. To put it mildly: YOU’RE NOT THAT IMPORTANT”. I think it applies here. Unless you cause some major event to happen say to your family that will have a major domino effect or play a role pretty far up on the totem pole of politics or some other influential or leadership position, it’s very unlikely that you’d change the outcome of a war or turn the world upside-down. If you go back in time and pop a soda out of a vending machine that was meant to be bought by someone else, it’s pretty likely that the machinations that be would readily compensate for the extra purchase without skipping a beat.