Time Travel as Music

 

Time travel has underlying physics to it. Like most things. Really complicated, barely understood and often contradictory physics. Imagine the double slit experiment, but instead of getting an interference pattern from a pair of slits, you’re getting it from shapes in 4 dimensional space.

Any time you send something back, you have to make sure that sending it back won’t eliminate the possibility of having it in the future. So apart from the rather obvious not killing your ancestors, you have to make sure that nothing interferes with any of the hundreds of dependencies of running any kind of lab experiment a set amount of time in the future.

Thanks to butterfly changes, the further back you go, the larger the amplification of effects could get. Making someone five minutes late for a certain meeting likely won’t likely matter much to them tomorrow, but if it means they meet a new person that gets them fired in a year and they have a different career path in three years, suddenly things are quite a lot removed from where you started.

Hence the need for change dampeners. But what do you dampen out, and how? Reset too much and there’s almost no point in you going back, unless you simply want a time window, but then why not just do that? No, you need some changes to persist, but not be amplified beyond reason.

Time travel is less about the physics, as it is about the finesse of it. Making changes in the time stream is more like writing a symphony. You need a hundred different things to go right, and single bad ‘note’ will send the whole thing crashing down.

In the movies, people can get away with playing ‘jazz’, improvising the whole time, missing notes and picking up any old instrument and bashing out a tune.I suppose if your time machine can hold off the waves of entropy long enough that might be feasible.

It’s not what I’d do though. I’d have a whole pattern of micro changes cued up and a really competent team of ‘mixers’ who can dial up and dial back the effects while the whole thing is still forming. You’d probably need a whole team on the ground though. People anchored at increments away from your change and your future base of operations. Teams that can pick up and take over if anything breaks the chain of causality that you’re taking a swing at.

That would probably look more like an orchestra in a wave pool. You won’t necessarily ‘see’ everyone at the same time, but as each team crested you could get a solid reading on what page of the music there were on. To really conduct it well, you’d need to be in a time-neutral location, one that’s somehow equidistant from all points in time that you have teams.

Say your change was in 2010 and your main station was in 2050. You have teams every 5 years but you have signal boosters for the earlier years that can get the readouts from 2015 back at the same time as the stuff from 2045.

I’m assuming of course, that the changes don’t all propagate instantly, or if they do, you can some how turn them off and on in a pattern than can constructively or destructively interfere with itself, like that double slit experiment in the beginning. Well, that’s how I’d do it.