Merged Time travel would change the world with the butterfly effect
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Emre_1974tr
Graduate Poster
I opened this as a separate thread but it was transferred to this thread.
If your time machine is not a spaceship, i.e. you have a time machine on a planet, you will probably find yourself pressed in the vacuum of space or inside a celestial body.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
The starship slingshot round the sun is surely (original) Star Trek, which also has another entry earlier in the list.
The Omega 13 is definitely Galaxy Quest, I love that film.
There's several I can't identify, though. Maybe I'm not quite the SF nerd I thought I was.
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A very nerdy one - a pond.
alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
The Time Tunnel (TV show)
The Atavochron (ST:TOS -- All Our Yesterdays)
The Guardian of Forever (ST:TOS - City on the Edge of Forever)
The Tardis (Doctor Who)
A motorcyle (the reference above made me think of this post) (TimeRider)
A DeLorean (Back to the Future)
A train (Back to the Future)
A phone booth (Bill and Ted Adventures)
A coin (Somewhere in Time)
The Time Twister (?) (Harry Potter -- corrected above)
The Time Gem (Marvel Universe )
A Starship using The Slingshot method (STIV:TVH specifically)
A hot tub (It's in the title)
The Omega-13 (Galaxy Quest)
That sounds vaguely familiar -- and I certainly have my Nerd Card.
How about this one? A crowbar. (But it's a literary reference rather than a visual media one).
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W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
Reading on airplanes, when the reading lamp is aimed well enough to permit, I'm about 50 pages in to The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K Le Guin.
It doesn't seem to have anything to do with time travel, but it has everything to do with changing the world. Not just changing the present or future of the world—hey, we can do that much ourselves—but changing the past.
The title comes from Chapter XXIII of the Chuang Tse (Zhuangzi):
As for the mechanism, that quotation offers a vague hint. Here's a more specific hint: Imagine what Nine Princes in Amber would have been like if Philip K Dick had written it.
In another thread, I quoted a paragraph of the book that turns out to have more to do with the topic of this thread than may be apparent.
It doesn't seem to have anything to do with time travel, but it has everything to do with changing the world. Not just changing the present or future of the world—hey, we can do that much ourselves—but changing the past.
The title comes from Chapter XXIII of the Chuang Tse (Zhuangzi):
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
As for the mechanism, that quotation offers a vague hint. Here's a more specific hint: Imagine what Nine Princes in Amber would have been like if Philip K Dick had written it.
In another thread, I quoted a paragraph of the book that turns out to have more to do with the topic of this thread than may be apparent.
sp1ke
Scholar
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That sounds like Catweazle to me.
RecoveringYuppy
Penultimate Amazing
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End then to find out that in the end Alois never did father dear little Adolf.
And the delay leads to the birth of twin Hitlers!
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
This may be true of your time machine, but it's not true of mine. If my time machine is not a spaceship, I will probably find myself in pretty much exactly the time and place I intended to travel to, modulo the demands of the story I'm trying to tell.
Time machines being fictional narrative devices, and all.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Ryan North wrote a Dinosaur Comics strip about using memory as a form of time travel. I can't find the strip itself (the comic apparently doesn't lend itself to easy search engine indexing by topic), but the theory goes something like this:
Listen to the same song all day, every day, for a month.
Thereafter, any time you hear that song, you will be transported back to that month in your memory.
So I'd like to add music to the list of time travel mechanisms.
Listen to the same song all day, every day, for a month.
Thereafter, any time you hear that song, you will be transported back to that month in your memory.
So I'd like to add music to the list of time travel mechanisms.
The pond is how Catweasel travelled to the 20th century.
That's the one.
jrhowell
Muse
Or perhaps Alois was jostled to prevent the birth of Ilse Hitler, the inventor of limitless fusion using common household products which quickly led to the extinction of mankind. The Time Wardens are on the lookout for this discovery since it always leads to the extinction of alien races, explaining the Fermi paradox. Adolph is the lesser of two evils.
Gord_in_Toronto
Penultimate Amazing
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The Lathe of Heaven is one of the very few written SF works that made it to the screen more or less intact. It is "one of the best of all time".
Enjoy.
alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
Totally unfamiliar with that on this side of the pond.
But it does remind me of...
Taking a nap under a tree.
and
a river boat going over a waterfall (though technically, it might have been another world, and not the past, what with the Sleestak and all)
I'll add that certain remembered scents can send one back. I've even swooned a couple times when catching a whiff that reminded me of having been in another country. (Not always good smells, either).
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psionl0
Skeptical about skeptics
Good point. I didn't think of that. Maybe I should hit on Klara Hitler instead. I wouldn't need to be successful to interfere with the sperm race.End then to find out that in the end Alois never did father dear little Adolf.
OTOH If I were successful . . . .
In order to calculate the irony level of the inevitably ironic stable-time-loop outcome, I first have to ask... by any chance are you Jewish?
psionl0
Skeptical about skeptics
I am neither Jewish nor anti-Semitic. But children can sometimes be a bitter disappointment to their parents.
While this is the general definition, as I understand it the signficance of the Butterfly Effect is more than that.
It specifically builds on the 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' when applying to simulations of large-scale complex systems. These simulations rely on discrete data points to run their algorithms on, and there can and will always be tiny features in the initial conditions that are smaller than the resolution of the data points can possibly cover and thus the simulation cannot account for them and thus cannot accurately predict the system indefinitely into the future.
The Butterfly Effect is not merely to observe that chaotic systems are incredibly complex, and small changes in the starting conditions can result in different end points. This would theoretically still allow perfect prediction assuming the starting conditions could be accurately measured and enough processing power applied.
The consequence of the effect is specifically about modelling and simulations - that long-term simulation of chaotic systems is definitively impossible because it is literally impossible to measure every conceivable starting condition with perfect accuracy - the flap of the butterfly's wing is below the sampling resolution of the weather simulation's grid of data points of air pressure, wind speed etc.
The pop science interpretation of the effect has broadened the generally-understood meaning to the point that it is rarely described in reference to simulations, and is just applied to observations of the real world (assuming that's not a simulation, of course) but it loses any real significance at that point. It's a fairly trivial observation to say that apparently small actions can result in larger consequences later on down the line - rightly, this is more the Snowball Effect - but without any ability to see what would have happened differently should the starting action have been slightly different, it doesn't tell you much. The vast majority of flapping butterfly wings probably have no effect on the weather in general, but it's impossible to tell.
If systems like the weather truly are unpredictable however many supercomputers we throw at the problem, then that is the real meaning of the Butterfly Effect.
Papilio tempestae