The Book I really want to Read

Okay, so Somerset is pretty darn fun. I've played a lot of games this last week because I've played with a student after school for a couple days and during my break period I played a couple 3-player games. Tweaking the rules here and there, trying to make it balanced and even and tomorrow I'm going to be e-mailing Alan Bahr about meeting up with him to pitch him the idea. Below are the instruction videos I made about the game (although a few minor things have changed since then):

Video 1:

Video 2:

Video 3:

Explanations of the symbols: (although I changed the Roadbuilder's Store to also give you a coin when you land on it, and in Merlin's track the last two tiers are: +3 crystals or +1 crystal and cast two spells, and then +4 crystals or +2 crystals and cast two spells. Lancelot's last one has you looking at 4 instead of 3 cards now.

Time Travel. Okay, so it's been proven that if faster than light travel is possible than one can travel backwards in time (due to the geometry of causality, blah blah blah link to a video). And Brandon Sanderson has said that in the Cosmere faster than light travel is possible and will be done in the third Mistborn trilogy. When asked about if backwards time is possible, he said: Sanderson's answer.  And I'm like, well you know faster than light travel travel is possible so of course backwards time travel must be possible in the Cosmere.

Now, we don't live in the Cosmere. We live in, what do we even call this thing? "The Universe"? What an unoriginal title. Okay, so the Universe. (Speaking of unoriginal titles, guess what the scientific name for the moon is? Yeah, that's right, Moon.) So in the Universe faster than light travel seems to be impossible. But faster than light communication? Based off of quantum mechanics, two particles that have become entangled can "communicate" with each other over super long distances, because they have to have opposite spins. If I change the spin on particle A, then the spin on B will immediately change to the opposite, even if it is on the other side of the galaxy. At least that's the theory. 

(The best part about all this stuff is everyone in my family already knows all this.)

So if I could communicate faster than light, isn't that just me talking backwards in time? Short answer: yes. Okay, so what about cause and effect?

Okay, so the trip up with backwards time travel has always been that pesky little thing known as cause and effect. If I do A I cause B, which causes C, which causes D. But what if D killed your dad, so you went back in time (I'll call this event E because event D caused it) and stopped event A from happening? Well, A was the cause of event E, but if event A no longer happened, than neither did event E. Ah, you see the problem here, because event E was THE CAUSE of event A never happening (which I'll call event F for frustrating). So event F (also known as event A never happening) means that B didn't happen, or C, or D, or E. But we just said that E was the cause of F, so where does that leave us? In a paradox.

Okay, so how do we overcome time travel paradoxes? Depends on the book or movie (and I say book or movie because all instances of this have been fiction: there hasn't been (as far as I know) a single real event that has caused time travel paradoxes. 

Back to the Future: You change the future sure, but you slowly fade out of existence, giving you time to try to fix things. So at least a part of event A is there, coexisting for a short time with event F until one of them wins out in the end.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: If you change the past the future changes too, but when you return to it you only have your memories from your previous timeline, not this new one. You have changed time, but I guess in this new timeline you don't even need an event E, you don't even need to go back and change stuff because someone from another timeline parallel to yours did it for you.

Ah yes, parallel universes. Where if I change something that could be the event E, but instead of saying that events A and F happen on the same tie stream just split them up into two different time streams, two different universes.

Don't even get me started on the butterfly effect.

Lost/Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban/Interstellar: Everything that has happened has already happened and cannot be changed. You going into the past means that you already were there. You can't do anything about it. This gets rid of all paradoxes at the cost of something far greater: free will. How can free will exist inside a universe like this? If I choose to go back, it isn't because I chose to, it's because I HAD to because it's already literally happened. I don't think anyone who chooses this version of time travel actually addresses the question of free will. They should.

This kind of brings me to the title of my blog post today, which is the book (trilogy actually) which I really want to read some day. The author spent literally hundreds if not thousands of hours researching the information needed. The book, of course, is Things That Don't Even Come Back Around (TTDECBA for short).

Now, part of this book involves changing history; changing myths and fairy tales and what not; changing time. And how that works is that when it happens it's as if the world has always been like that. Except for the memory of the person that changed it, I guess? Or else hey we could be living in that type of world right now but never know it because once we change it our memories will be wiped and replaced with the memories we would have had if the world would have always been like that. 

Plus, there's this whole going back in time thing involving a mole and I can't really remember the details but the question the author (Eric) brought up was on the idea of free will and time travel.

So how do we have free will and backward time travel? How can you change the past without creating a paradox?

My opinion is that the universe would try to right itself as much as humanly (universely?) possible, taking out all butterfly effects from that person somehow, like the universe affecting air currents and what not so that the butterfly effects from eh time travel never happen. My idea breaks down on a large scale level though: what if he kills somebody important? Would the universe just grab somebody else, person B, to replace their position in the future? But who would take person B's spot? (Ideas of this kind discussed in this video here.)

Okay, so you could go all multiverse style and say that the instant you appear in the past you have literally just split the universe into two parallel universes, and that every time time travel occurs it splits its time stream into two. Gets rid of paradoxes, because even if you killed your grandfather in this world who cares? You didn't even come from this world, you came from one that you could. . . never. . . get. . . back to? Could you? Or are you forever stuck in this time stream? And in the previous time stream once you go back in time you are never ever coming back--you just disappear? Or could you jump back into universe A from universe B, but only after you jumped back in time? So they see you disappear, and then a little bit later they see you reappear from universe B, if you wanted to return? Has anyone asked those questions yet? Besides Eric, I mean, who probably has.

So how does time travel work in TTDECBA? Does free will exist? Did it ever exist in Interstellar or Lost or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? (Tangent: they totally messed with time travel with Cursed Child, so I don't know which category the Harry Potter universe falls in any more. Heck, I bet you J. K. Rowling doesn't even know any more.)

It has been hypothesized that you cannot travel back in time further than when time travel was first invented. I like this idea. Get a wormhole, keep one end and have the other end sit near a black hole. 100 years later and you got yourself a time machine. But you can only go back 100 years, no further. And even if you did go back 100 years, which category of time travel would that put you in? 

Anyway, I have a ton of other thoughts about time travel but I've gone on long enough.  What's your opinion on time travel? Is it possible to create a loop like in this video? Leave a comment in the--what am I doing? This isn't some youtube video. I don't care if you like or subscribe. Man, I've been watching way too much Super Carlin Brothers recently. . .

Anyway, Things That Don't Even Come Back Around. It's going to be good. Maybe I'll even get a copy from the future. Yeah! And then I'll give it to Eric so that he actually won't have to write it, and then in the future he'll just take a copy of that and give it back to me in the past. . . so where did it come from in the first place? Is it then just self existing? How does entropy affect it? Will that compass from Lost ever be free?