The Quantum Orrey of Time

Linear time worked the same way Newtonian physics worked. As long as you weren't doing anything too interesting – it was sufficient. That really wasn't good enough. Saying everything was always happening, and time is just the space between it – might be a little more accurate. Again, it was missing something.

One way to imagine it would be as a complex orrery, with different events and actions swinging other events and happenings into alignment. It was quite easy, with this kind of model in mind, to picture how time travel could easily be overlooked, or in some cases, overwritten.

Of course, this shape again is based on classical physical shapes. As with anything, the shapes are actually probability functions, and subject to interference and collapse if any direct measurement/observation is made. So, assuming there's an overriding observer with an omniscient, but not all revealing viewpoint, what can we say?

One might imagine that the landmark conditions for time are visible from this viewpoint, but the details are – while not exactly obscured, are chosen to be not known. Would this mean that time travel is impossible? Not necessarily. The past would be, not fixed, but limited to certain constraints, with certain channels (in the hydrological sense) being immutable, if the exact details again being immaterial.