[STORY SEEDS] Fixed Points

[Acrobatic Flea]

Can the player-characters do some good when encountering these "fixed points in time" without creating paradoxes?

A selection of historical tragedies that your time-travellers could become entangled in, yet are constrained by the boundaries of the established flow of time:

heropresstwo.blogspot.com/2022/03/torn-from-headlines-you-cant-rewrite.html

[grinch]

It's always interesting to me how a lot of these fixed points in time are always focused around the site of some great tragedy or where there is some great loss of life. As well as those historical events you mentioned I imagine the likes of the Sinking of the Titanic or the murders committed by Jack the Ripper would also count as a fixed point in time.

Obviously, this is mainly because it is a ripe opportunity for story potential and more often than not makes for an easy excuse to handwave away any questions such as "Well, why can't we stop the assassination of President Lincoln?" but I think such an idea could make for a good story arc for a more scientific campaign. Just why is that the case? Is it because these tragedies and loss of life have more of a knock-on effect due to the fact they usually involve tons of people whose continued existence could irreparably change history as we know it? Or are these fixed points established in such tragic events by some higher power (The Time Lords?) as a means of universal population control?

[Acrobatic Flea]

My current belief is that it is simply the ripple effects of these "fixed points" are so vast that altering them would lead to potentially catastrophic cascades of rewritten time (both for better and for worse). I consider them "natural phenomena" created by the flow of time, rather than creations of 'higher powers'.

However, once I actually get my own campaign in motion, I suspect all this will become very flexible.

[Catsmate]

Personally I go with the 'vast consequences' reasoning, with increased Temporal Inertia around fixed points so actually trying to alter events becomes more than usually difficult, with 'random' effects conspiring to hinder attempts to change the course of events.

Try and prevent, as an example, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and odd things seemingly conspire to prevent you; the local police believe you are planning something and target you, vehicles won't start, electronics stop working et cetera¹.
Maybe Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were actually killed by tiny meteorites² and the innocent Serb was blamed?

• Of course the historical assassination of Franz Ferdinand could have been the result of an earlier alteration that time was sufficiently flexible to accommodate; perhaps the bombing was originally 'destined' to succeed, without the need for Princip. But then something changed events and the pair were shot.

I also include a form of the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, i.e. what happened, happened (The Observer Effect).
But what isn't known to have happened may or may not have actually occurred. And what isn't well documented has potential for alternate explanations. So when your friend falls over the cliff, don't rush to look down, it makes popping back in your relative future and saving them (a Causal Substitution) that much harder. And if someone dies, examining their body is a bad thing to do in the sense of temporal mechanics; it ‘hardens’ the Observer Effect and makes subsequent alterations to events far more difficult.

• A corollary to this is the Limelight Effect: it's generally difficult to interact with high profile events.
  

Paradoxically, the less accurate historical records are the better it is for time travel


In general it seems that the Whovian default is that time is mutable, with the level of plasticity seeming to be low but variable, so 'fixed points' are spots of higher than normal inertial (or lower plasticity).


To allow for time travel I assume that their is sufficient 'fuzziness' at the quantum level (i.e. around the Planck scale, where quantum gravity dominates the structure of space-time³. 
The "nothing" of the vacuum of space actually
consists of subatomic space-time turbulence at those extremely small distances. At this scale, the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into
particles and anti-particles, thereby producing "something" from "nothing".

At some locations the flow of time may be wide and shallow (to use the traditional aquatic metaphor for the flow of time) allowing for relatively easy minor alternations to "reality" but ones that have little futureward consequences.
Other locations are narrower, deeper and faster flowing parts of the timestream (more like river valleys than flood plains) where it's difficult to alter events at all, but if you do manage it things tend to flood outwards and change reality greatly

From this I extrapolate various other phenomena, such as the tendency for time travellers to 'blend in' when they really should stand out, Fortean Flickers (places or objects where odd effects occur, caused by permanent, or at least long term, alterations to space-time at a quantum level) et cetera.






1. At worst the time travellers run the risk of being 'clockhammered'.

2. As used in Fritz Leiber's short story "Try and Change the Past", set in his 'Changewar' universe of warring time travellers and their human recruits.

If a statistician is looking for an example of a highly improbable event, he can hardly pick a more vivid one than the chance of a man being hit by a meteorite. And, if he adds the condition that the meteorite hit him between the eyes so as to counterfeit the wound made by a 32-caliber bullet, the improbability becomes astronomical cubed. So how’s a person going to outmaneuver a universe that finds it easier to drill a man through the head that way rather than postpone the date of his death?

3. Probably. Try A Universe from Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss.

[Acrobatic Flea]

I knew there was a reason I loved this forum. Thank you so much for sharing that.

[Catsmate]

Mar 24, 2022 22:44:01 GMT Acrobatic Flea said:

I knew there was a reason I loved this forum. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Thanks. I do tend to over-analyse things. Somewhat ironically my interest in the esoterics of theoretical physics was sparked, decades ago, by a certain television series...