People often come with me with questions about how time travel works. They watch a movie about it, and are confused on the timeline. Sometimes I can help them, because I’m fairly well-versed in the subject of time travel in fiction, but sometimes it’s done so horribly, or confusingly, that even I can’t follow it. A lot of writers seem to keep making the same mistakes, and I would like to clear some of them up. First, you can’t have an event in one moment of time have some effect on an event in another moment without impacting the time in between. If today you went back to when you were in first grade, and stopped yourself from cheating on a test, you would not suddenly feel the effects of that once you returned to you own time. A whole bunch of other things happened in between. While we’re on this subject, you can’t return to your own time anyway, or rather if you did, you would find yourself in an alternate timeline. You would have to deal with the version of yourself who is living there. A single timeline simply does not explain the point of divergence, for if you succeed in stopping yourself from cheating, Future!You would have no reason to go back and change it, which would leave it unchanged, which would give you a reason to go back and change it, and so on, ad infinitum. Alternate timelines are the only logical consequence of any time traveling event. Writers also try to bring in bogus tropes that make no sense. They have timewaves, which somehow affect the timeline at a different rate than the flow of time itself. This allows people to see the changes that are being made all around them, and maintain their memory of how things were before. But this is impossible. Like I’ve said about the alternate timeline, as soon as you go back to first grade, everything changes, from that moment of egress, onwards. One may be able to jump from one moment in time to another, but that does not stop time from moving forward at a constant. Now, this constant gets a little more complicated when you factor in relativity, but it is still always moving forwards. Time doesn’t change, only an observer’s perspective of it. I could go on about the issues I see, but no one has time for that. There’s a lot we don’t know about how time works, but by as much as I write about it, and the manipulation of it, there is one undeniable truth that must not be ignored. Time travel can happen by one of two ways: it either can not, or should not.
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The Advancement of Mateo Matic
Now that the lineup has been irreversibly established, and their reliance upon the direction of any external force removed from the equation, Team Matic must decide for themselves what missions to take. As they approach the year that changes everything, they may find themselves on a long detour.
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My name is Nick Fisherman III. It's not my real name, but that's not because I'm trying to hide from my former agency, or something. I named myself after someone I've known for most of my life, and he chose it in honor of his late best friend. I took up writing when I found myself failing 8th grade science, and realized I might never reach my dream of becoming a biochemist, a meteorologist, and a quantum physicist. I started developing my canon after a scouting trip to an island inspired what I thought would be my first novel. I founded this website upon the advice of many people, who told me I needed to get my work out there, and not wait for an agent to accept my manuscript. You can expect one new story every day. Weekdays are for microstories, which are one or two paragraphs long. They're usually only thematically linked, so you won't have to read one to understand another, but they do sometimes tell a combined story. Sundays are for my continuous longer story, The Advancement of Mateo Matic, which I started in the beginning, and won't end until 2066. Saturdays are for long series, most of which take place in the same universe as Mateo, and add to the larger mythology.
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Microstory 763: Time Travel
Labels:
alternate reality
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causality
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fiction
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future
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memory
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microfiction
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microstory
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past
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reality
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relativity
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school
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science fiction
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spacetime continuum
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time
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time travel
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