In another thread which shall remain nameless, it a scenario was posited
in which a time traveller arrives and hands over the winning lottery
numbers to a stranger, said numbers having been dug up from historical
archives in the far future. A great deal of discussion on the other
particulars of the scenario took place and I hope we can avoid repeating
that, but interestingly this aspect was never questioned.

So I shall do that here. Is it actually reasonable to expect the presence
of a time traveler not to alter the outcome of a lottery drawing? Lottery
drawings are, or at leash should be, highly chaotic systems, in the sense
of being highly sensitive to initial conditions. The balls bounce all over
the place, and even the tiniest alteration to a single ball's trajectory
will quickly balloon into a totally different result in the drawing.

But just how tiny is the tiniest alteration? A time traveller arriving
hundreds of miles away has few ways to disturb the drawing directly. His
presence will create sound and electromagnetic waves which wouldn't
otherwise have been there. These get quickly lost in the noise, but that
phrase merely means that it becomes impossible to distinguish them from
the noise, or that they become part of it. The noise itself will be
changed by them, however slightly. Will this result in a different
outcome? Do we even know?

Perhaps worse, the presence of the time traveler alters the way people
behave. This is going to create small ripples throughout society, and
these ripples will travel as fast as people communicate with each other.
This is much more likely to change the environment of the drawing in a way
which, while still extremely subtle, would be a lot stronger than the
direct changes discussed above. Will this one change the outcome?

Any thoughts on the above?

It seems to me that a time traveler is going to have a better time in
sports betting or the stock market. Both of these are chaotic to some
extent but at least in the short term are based on more macroscopic
effects. Small changes in the players' brains won't change the fact that
team A's defense is helpless against team B's offense, or that company X
is going to announce earnings 50% higher than predicted the next day.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software

In Message-ID:<1203133165.303653@nfs-db1.segnet.com>,
Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:

>Is it actually reasonable to expect the presence
>of a time traveler not to alter the outcome of a lottery drawing? Lottery
>drawings are, or at leash should be, highly chaotic systems, in the sense
>of being highly sensitive to initial conditions.
<snip elucidation of the butterfly effect>
>Any thoughts on the above?

I am neither a scientist nor an economist. Take what follows
for what it's worth. (Hint: What did you pay for it?)

The butterfly effect takes time to propagate. If the
traveler arrives sufficiently near the time of the drawing and
sufficiently far from its location, he shouldn't affect it.

Of course, I've use those weasel words. Given the original
scenario (a few hours before and a few hundred miles away), I
wouldn't expect a change.

If this is a time-line traveler, though, I think something
else comes into play. The chance that the "known" numbers will
come up *may* be greater than chance, but they will certainly be
less than 1 just because there are so many "nearby" time-lines.

>It seems to me that a time traveler is going to have a better time in
>sports betting or the stock market. Both of these are chaotic to some
>extent but at least in the short term are based on more macroscopic
>effects. Small changes in the players' brains won't change the fact that
>team A's defense is helpless against team B's offense, or that company X
>is going to announce earnings 50% higher than predicted the next day.

For an extended visit, you're probably right. However,
except for the lottery, it would be hard to make a $65,000,000
swing in a short time. (Sports-team betting is not legal in most
places, and huge wins may not be healthy. The sports betting that
is legal (e.g. horse racing) is pari-mutuel and the bets affect
the payout odds. The stock market is chaotic and may start
varying as soon as a difference shows up.)



--
Arthur T. - ar23hur "at" intergate "dot" com
Looking for a z/OS (IBM mainframe) systems programmer position

Michael Ash wrote:
x> So I shall do that here. Is it actually reasonable to expect the
presence
> of a time traveler not to alter the outcome of a lottery drawing? Lottery
> drawings are, or at leash should be, highly chaotic systems, in the sense
> of being highly sensitive to initial conditions. The balls bounce all over
> the place, and even the tiniest alteration to a single ball's trajectory
> will quickly balloon into a totally different result in the drawing.

Here's how I'd come at it:

Assume zero disturbance. The quantum dice are still being rerolled. That
means effectively there are random changes introduced at the atomic level.

Suppose the timelines diverge at the instant the lottery draw starts.
Bouncing balls are a chaotic system. What's the doubling time? Suppose
one bounce doubles the mass/kinetic energy affected. We start with say
one atom's worth of randomness/difference, we need say 1e24 atoms to put
a ball in a different place. That's what, something like 75 doublings?
Do they bounce the balls 75 times in a lottery draw? Is my guess of one
doubling per bounce an over or underestimate?

If the timelines diverge earlier, then you'll have differences
introduced by tiny air currents and by human movements due to timing
jitter in neurons, so there'll be more head start.

> It seems to me that a time traveler is going to have a better time in
> sports betting or the stock market. Both of these are chaotic to some
> extent but at least in the short term are based on more macroscopic
> effects. Small changes in the players' brains won't change the fact that
> team A's defense is helpless against team B's offense, or that company X
> is going to announce earnings 50% higher than predicted the next day.

Agreed.

Michael Ash schrieb:

> Any thoughts on the above?

The added gravity of the visitor would have some impact on the lottery
mechanics - determinating if this influence changes the outcome would
depend on how stable the original solution was.
Given the total number of highly random interactions even this minimal
influence has a fair chance of affecting the outcome.

Adding rippple changes like the conversation our guest has delays his
victim a few minutes, this disturbs the traffic pattern, leading to an
entirely different distribution of vehicles - talk about changes, your
lottery drawing gets quite different seeding values.

Wasn't it Michael Ash who wrote:
>In another thread which shall remain nameless, it a scenario was posited
>in which a time traveller arrives and hands over the winning lottery
>numbers to a stranger, said numbers having been dug up from historical
>archives in the far future. A great deal of discussion on the other
>particulars of the scenario took place and I hope we can avoid repeating
>that, but interestingly this aspect was never questioned.

I've heard it said that if you consider a frictionless snooker table
with perfectly spherical snooker balls and track 100 collisions, then
the outcome is so sensitive to the initial conditions that the
gravitational effect of a single electron at the distance of Alpha
Centauri can completely alter the result.

Each sphere-on-sphere collision that the cue ball experiences doubles
the difference in the angle, so after 100 collisions, the change in
angle is multiplied by 1.2*10^30 which is enough for extremely tiny
changes in the initial conditions to become significant.

Things might possibly be different in a lottery machine which
experiences friction and is subject to quantum effects, but I suspect
that the gravitational effect of the time traveller's body would be
sufficient to scramble lottery results.

Quantum effects might act in two different directions. If a difference
in position is less than the Planck Length, then I guess it would cause
zero effect and the lottery results would be unaffected. The uncertainly
principle causes tiny differences in the motions of the balls, which
when amplified might be sufficient to scramble the lottery results. This
might mean that a lottery machine would produce different results even
if the initial conditions were *exactly* the same.

--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

On 2008-02-16, Robert Martinu <invalid@invlid.invalid> wrote:
> The added gravity of the visitor would have some impact on the
> lottery mechanics - determinating if this influence changes the
> outcome would depend on how stable the original solution was.

Lottery drawings are designed to be exceedingly unstable. Here they
tend to involve many thousands of ball-ball collisions as well as
turbulent airflow. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they magnified
even single atom changes up to affecting the final outcome.


- Tim

In article <1203133165.303653@nfs-db1.segnet.com>,
Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:

> Any thoughts on the above?

I don't think it has anything to do with a lottery. It really sounds
like that's just a plucked example from the position that time travel
*must* change the past. From a plot device standpoint, the question is
whether it changes history like a pebble in a stream, or more like a dam.

> It seems to me that a time traveler is going to have a better time in
> sports betting or the stock market. Both of these are chaotic to some
> extent but at least in the short term are based on more macroscopic
> effects. Small changes in the players' brains won't change the fact that
> team A's defense is helpless against team B's offense, or that company X
> is going to announce earnings 50% higher than predicted the next day.

The more interesting paradox that you miss is that the effect of small
changes of a lottery has a big ripple effect (turns $1 into $100 million
for one person) while a small change in a stock price has a small ripple
effect (turns $1 into maybe $2). But that only matters to someone
playing the game. When it comes to "proving" a timeline, if you assume
the physical laws of both scenarios are identical, it doesn't much
matter which way you go because the lottery winner will *still* change,
and that will further ripple to change the future in ways you cannot
predict.

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Doc O'Leary <droleary.usenet@1q2008.subsume.com> wrote:
> In article <1203133165.303653@nfs-db1.segnet.com>,
> Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:
>
>> Any thoughts on the above?
>
> I don't think it has anything to do with a lottery. It really sounds
> like that's just a plucked example from the position that time travel
> *must* change the past.

I don't know if you're describing my motivations or just trying to
generalize it, but I said exactly where I got the question from in my
introduction to the post.

> From a plot device standpoint, the question is
> whether it changes history like a pebble in a stream, or more like a dam.

I disagree. There is nothing that says that a time traveler's effects must
be of similar magnitude on a micro and macro scale.

Is history a pencil balanced on its tip? Then the time traveler will have
a huge effect on it no matter what he does. His arrival changes the
lottery drawing which results in a different winner which causes a
different worker to tell off his boss and quit his job which results in
missing a critical fault in a device which gets installed on a submarine
which sinks accidentally when that device fails which triggers a nuclear
war which ends civilization as we know it.

Is history a cannonball? Then the time traveler will have an effect
proportional to his actions. His arrival changes the lottery drawing which
results in a different winner who tells off his boss and lives a life of
luxury for a few years until massive mismanagement and embezzlement by his
financial planner results in him living out his years on the streets of
some major city. The nuclear war happens or doesn't happen pretty much the
same as it did as before.

Personally I believe that history is probably a "cannonball balanced
occasionally on its tip", in that it usually will carry on roughly the
same no matter what, but that there are occasional important junctures
where a small force can produce a major outcome. But any interpretation of
history is compatible with any interpretation of the effects on the
lottery drawing.

>> It seems to me that a time traveler is going to have a better time in
>> sports betting or the stock market. Both of these are chaotic to some
>> extent but at least in the short term are based on more macroscopic
>> effects. Small changes in the players' brains won't change the fact that
>> team A's defense is helpless against team B's offense, or that company X
>> is going to announce earnings 50% higher than predicted the next day.
>
> The more interesting paradox that you miss is that the effect of small
> changes of a lottery has a big ripple effect (turns $1 into $100 million
> for one person) while a small change in a stock price has a small ripple
> effect (turns $1 into maybe $2). But that only matters to someone
> playing the game. When it comes to "proving" a timeline, if you assume
> the physical laws of both scenarios are identical, it doesn't much
> matter which way you go because the lottery winner will *still* change,
> and that will further ripple to change the future in ways you cannot
> predict.

A lottery won't turn $1 into $100 million unless it's an *exceptionally*
large jackpot. As has been mentioned in the other thread, the listed
jackpot assumes yearly payments over the course of many years, and don't
include taxes. If you opt for the lump sum and pay Uncle Sam the way he
likes, you end up with something like a third of the number they
advertise, so you would need a $300 million jackpot. But anyway, that's
just details, you have the right ballpark.

It's interesting to consider that it takes time to actually collect on a
lottery win. If you're able to double your money on the stock market each
trading day, you can turn $1 into $100 million in a little over a month.
Although it will get harder and harder to do this as the amounts get
larger, because trades of that magnitude will affect the market by a
significant amount.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software

In article <1203214846.722159@nfs-db1.segnet.com>,
Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:

> Doc O'Leary <droleary.usenet@1q2008.subsume.com> wrote:
> > In article <1203133165.303653@nfs-db1.segnet.com>,
> > Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Any thoughts on the above?
> >
> > I don't think it has anything to do with a lottery. It really sounds
> > like that's just a plucked example from the position that time travel
> > *must* change the past.
>
> I don't know if you're describing my motivations or just trying to
> generalize it, but I said exactly where I got the question from in my
> introduction to the post.

I'm aware of the original thread, and I've avoided it because it seemed
like pointless nitpicking. Yes, I'm going for a general principle since
that is the only scientific approach to something as "impossible" as
time travel.

> > From a plot device standpoint, the question is
> > whether it changes history like a pebble in a stream, or more like a dam.
>
> I disagree. There is nothing that says that a time traveler's effects must
> be of similar magnitude on a micro and macro scale.

There's nothing that says *anything*. That is why you have to establish
a scientific hypothesis in the first place. So the author has to decide
early on how things work and stick to it or risk ruining the story.

> Personally I believe that history is probably a "cannonball balanced
> occasionally on its tip", in that it usually will carry on roughly the
> same no matter what, but that there are occasional important junctures
> where a small force can produce a major outcome. But any interpretation of
> history is compatible with any interpretation of the effects on the
> lottery drawing.

You can attempt to use that as a plot outline, but how well it works is
up to the reader. Another oversight of yours is claiming to know what
is "important" to an anthropomorphic history. Just because the time
traveller goes back to stop a nuclear war doesn't mean that event is
significant. You assume that the big stuff is stable and the chaotic
stuff has a tipping point, but it may be a better story to display the
exact opposite behavior.

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Doc O'Leary <droleary.usenet@1q2008.subsume.com> wrote:
>> > From a plot device standpoint, the question is
>> > whether it changes history like a pebble in a stream, or more like a dam.
>>
>> I disagree. There is nothing that says that a time traveler's effects must
>> be of similar magnitude on a micro and macro scale.
>
> There's nothing that says *anything*. That is why you have to establish
> a scientific hypothesis in the first place. So the author has to decide
> early on how things work and stick to it or risk ruining the story.

But I was talking about a lottery, not history. When judging the
plausibility of a time traveler still being able to predict the winning
lottery numbers, the question of whether history is chaotic is irrelevant.

>> Personally I believe that history is probably a "cannonball balanced
>> occasionally on its tip", in that it usually will carry on roughly the
>> same no matter what, but that there are occasional important junctures
>> where a small force can produce a major outcome. But any interpretation of
>> history is compatible with any interpretation of the effects on the
>> lottery drawing.
>
> You can attempt to use that as a plot outline, but how well it works is
> up to the reader.

I'm not attempting to use anything. I'm just curious as to just how
sensitive lottery drawings are to initial conditions.

> Another oversight of yours is claiming to know what
> is "important" to an anthropomorphic history. Just because the time
> traveller goes back to stop a nuclear war doesn't mean that event is
> significant.

Where did I claim to know anything? I said "I believe", and it means just
that. I claim no knowledge whatsoever. Furthermore, the word "important"
was only intended to be defined as, basically, points which are sensitive
to initial conditions.

> You assume that the big stuff is stable and the chaotic
> stuff has a tipping point, but it may be a better story to display the
> exact opposite behavior.

This is completely nonsensical. I'm using "chaotic" in the mathematical
sense of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. It has a tipping point
*by definition*. It can't display the exact opposite behavior, because if
it did it wouldn't be chaotic anymore.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software

Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:

>So I shall do that here. Is it actually reasonable to expect the presence
>of a time traveler not to alter the outcome of a lottery drawing? Lottery
>drawings are, or at leash should be, highly chaotic systems, in the sense
>of being highly sensitive to initial conditions. The balls bounce all over
>the place, and even the tiniest alteration to a single ball's trajectory
>will quickly balloon into a totally different result in the drawing.

Yes.

Unless the time traveler inserted himself into an earlier time of the
same universe that he left. That is, the future that he knew contained
all the consequences of his visit to the past already. This assumes that
past details that are not in the historical record are in some sense
undefined.

I recall a news item in the New Scientist which reported that a scientist
had suggested that the act of sending somebody back to the past would
select the appropriate pattern of quantum-level events that would ensure
that the known future happened. Thus the time traveler would have to
carefully act in a way that would not clash with his known future, not
because he could change anything, but because random events would seem to
conspire against him, possibly involving nasty accidents.

--
Dave Farrance

Dave Farrance <DaveFarrance@omitthisyahooandthis.co.uk> wrote:
> Unless the time traveler inserted himself into an earlier time of the
> same universe that he left. That is, the future that he knew contained
> all the consequences of his visit to the past already. This assumes that
> past details that are not in the historical record are in some sense
> undefined.

An excellent point, I hadn't thought of that.

If you've invented time travel but somehow still haven't figured out if
it's many-worlds or same-timeline time travel, I guess lottery drawings
could be a quick way to find out. If they match your records, you're not
going to be able to change anything, so gather what info you want for the
future and get out.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software

Michael Ash skreiv:

> So I shall do that here. Is it actually reasonable to expect the presence
> of a time traveler not to alter the outcome of a lottery drawing? Lottery
> drawings are, or at leash should be, highly chaotic systems, in the sense
> of being highly sensitive to initial conditions. The balls bounce all over
> the place, and even the tiniest alteration to a single ball's trajectory
> will quickly balloon into a totally different result in the drawing.

Lottery-drawings are deliberately designed to be highly sensitive and
unstable, to make them unpredictable. I'm pretty sure that most
lottery-drawings are influence not only by the presence of a
time-travelller or not, but by much smaller stuff.

Including stuff that as far as we know is GENUINELY random. Even if two
atoms are in precisely the same state at precisely the same time and
recieve precisely the same stimuli, one of them may still spontaneuosly
split, and the other not.

There's enough atoms around that it's a *given* that several of the ones
that come into contact, directly or indirectly, with the lottery-drawing
will infact do differently.

So, put simply: I find it likely that even -without- the time-travveler
the results would be different.

4 hours of genuine randomness in the environment should cause enough
diversification that the result will be a different one.


Eivind Kjørstad

Michael Ash skreiv:

> Is history a pencil balanced on its tip?
(...)
> Is history a cannonball?

Or is it a -flattened- cannonball; that is one that will tend to stay
pretty much where it is, even when subject to moderate pushes ?

I agree with you; I think most of the time we're a sphere, but sometimes
the sphere is taller and sometimes it is flatter.

The same goes on a personal level: Certain decisions you make
(consciously or not) end up having a HUGE impact on the rest of your
life, others have little impact.

The trick is that I don't think it's possible to know which decisions
belong to which category. You may think a certain decision is trivial,
but choosing a certain way means you never meet the girl who'd otherwise
become your wife, or means you'll be hit by a car and spend the rest of
your life in a wheelchair.



Eivind

Wasn't it Eivind Kjorstad who wrote:
>
>So, put simply: I find it likely that even -without- the time-travveler
>the results would be different.

I was going to say that in my post, but then I got a bit confused about
what the results would be different from. If there isn't a time
traveller, then this isn't two different lottery drawings with identical
initial conditions, it's the same lottery drawing in the same time line.
I can't get my head around what that means in the Copenhagen
interpretation.

In the many-worlds quantum interpretation, a perfect lottery machine
would spawn a new world for every possible lottery result. If we add
back the time traveller into such an interpretation, then the machine
still spawns a new world for every possible lottery result, and the
traveller's information about the result in his timeline is irrelevant.

--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

Eivind Kjorstad <eivindorama@gmail.com> wrote:
> The same goes on a personal level: Certain decisions you make
> (consciously or not) end up having a HUGE impact on the rest of your
> life, others have little impact.
>
> The trick is that I don't think it's possible to know which decisions
> belong to which category. You may think a certain decision is trivial,
> but choosing a certain way means you never meet the girl who'd otherwise
> become your wife, or means you'll be hit by a car and spend the rest of
> your life in a wheelchair.

You can know about some of them, at least.

For example, if I decide to go into the closet and feast upon the various
cleaning products stored therein, I know that my life will be altered a
great deal from the alternative.

But I think you're right, there are a small choices that don't matter and
small choices that do and you don't know which are which. It doesn't pay
to worry about it too much, since you don't know.

Without being able to tell ahead of time and without being able to make a
second attempt the distinction is pretty academic, though.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software

In article <1203276894.857769@nfs-db1.segnet.com>,
Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:

> Doc O'Leary <droleary.usenet@1q2008.subsume.com> wrote:
> >> > From a plot device standpoint, the question is
> >> > whether it changes history like a pebble in a stream, or more like a dam.
> >>
> >> I disagree. There is nothing that says that a time traveler's effects must
> >> be of similar magnitude on a micro and macro scale.
> >
> > There's nothing that says *anything*. That is why you have to establish
> > a scientific hypothesis in the first place. So the author has to decide
> > early on how things work and stick to it or risk ruining the story.
>
> But I was talking about a lottery, not history. When judging the
> plausibility of a time traveler still being able to predict the winning
> lottery numbers, the question of whether history is chaotic is irrelevant.

Uh, before the scientific hypothesis comes observation. Are you
claiming you've observed time travel such that you can state what is and
isn't relevant? It may very well be that our current understanding of
chaos is no better than classical mechanics, and an Einstein-like
insight is necessary in order to achieve time travel. I do like the
idea of using such events as a potential test of the many-worlds theory,
though. It all comes down to how much the details would benefit a
story, because there is a real possibility of losing the audience when
you go into Trek-speak about fictional technology.

> > You can attempt to use that as a plot outline, but how well it works is
> > up to the reader.
>
> I'm not attempting to use anything. I'm just curious as to just how
> sensitive lottery drawings are to initial conditions.

Then you need to ask a question that makes sense. In reality, it's an
untestable system (which you can take to mean very sensitive). In a
fictional reality with time travel, it is up to the author to pick
something that works for the story.

> > You assume that the big stuff is stable and the chaotic
> > stuff has a tipping point, but it may be a better story to display the
> > exact opposite behavior.
>
> This is completely nonsensical. I'm using "chaotic" in the mathematical
> sense of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. It has a tipping point
> *by definition*. It can't display the exact opposite behavior, because if
> it did it wouldn't be chaotic anymore.

The only thing nonsensical is you trying to reconcile classical chaos
with time travel. All I'm saying is that you need to take your
curiosity another step. If you are willing to discard your notion of
what time is, you should be willing to discard your notion of what chaos
is. Sometimes a butterfly is just a butterfly.

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Doc O'Leary <droleary.usenet@1q2008.subsume.com> wrote:
> In article <1203276894.857769@nfs-db1.segnet.com>,
> Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:
>
>> Doc O'Leary <droleary.usenet@1q2008.subsume.com> wrote:
>> >> > From a plot device standpoint, the question is
>> >> > whether it changes history like a pebble in a stream, or more like a dam.
>> >>
>> >> I disagree. There is nothing that says that a time traveler's effects must
>> >> be of similar magnitude on a micro and macro scale.
>> >
>> > There's nothing that says *anything*. That is why you have to establish
>> > a scientific hypothesis in the first place. So the author has to decide
>> > early on how things work and stick to it or risk ruining the story.
>>
>> But I was talking about a lottery, not history. When judging the
>> plausibility of a time traveler still being able to predict the winning
>> lottery numbers, the question of whether history is chaotic is irrelevant.
>
> Uh, before the scientific hypothesis comes observation. Are you
> claiming you've observed time travel such that you can state what is and
> isn't relevant?

I never said I was making a scientific hypothesis. I was engaged in
speculation, pure and simple.

I wish you would stop putting words into my mouth. This is the second time
you've accused me of claiming to have observed things when I've made no
such claim. I'm not putting forth any fact, or basing any of my
speculation on things I've personally seen. I'm just asking a question
about real-world chaotic behavior and how much a small effect can disrupt
a macroscopic system in a short period of time. I don't know what your
problem is with me, but that's all I'm doing.

> It may very well be that our current understanding of
> chaos is no better than classical mechanics, and an Einstein-like
> insight is necessary in order to achieve time travel. I do like the
> idea of using such events as a potential test of the many-worlds theory,
> though. It all comes down to how much the details would benefit a
> story, because there is a real possibility of losing the audience when
> you go into Trek-speak about fictional technology.

Personally I couldn't care less about how well these ideas fit into a
story, those are better handled over in rasfw anyway. You are of course
welcome to it, but that's not my intent.

>> > You can attempt to use that as a plot outline, but how well it works is
>> > up to the reader.
>>
>> I'm not attempting to use anything. I'm just curious as to just how
>> sensitive lottery drawings are to initial conditions.
>
> Then you need to ask a question that makes sense. In reality, it's an
> untestable system (which you can take to mean very sensitive). In a
> fictional reality with time travel, it is up to the author to pick
> something that works for the story.

Just because a question cannot be tested does not mean that it does not
make sense. Such questions are asked in this group constantly.

>> > You assume that the big stuff is stable and the chaotic
>> > stuff has a tipping point, but it may be a better story to display the
>> > exact opposite behavior.
>>
>> This is completely nonsensical. I'm using "chaotic" in the mathematical
>> sense of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. It has a tipping point
>> *by definition*. It can't display the exact opposite behavior, because if
>> it did it wouldn't be chaotic anymore.
>
> The only thing nonsensical is you trying to reconcile classical chaos
> with time travel. All I'm saying is that you need to take your
> curiosity another step. If you are willing to discard your notion of
> what time is, you should be willing to discard your notion of what chaos
> is. Sometimes a butterfly is just a butterfly.

Why? The interesting thing about the science in SF is taking *one*
interesting change and seeing how it fits into what's known. If I'm just
going to make up *everything* as I go along, I'll move to a fantasy group.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software

In article <1203362504.633495@nfs-db1.segnet.com>,
Michael Ash <mike@mikeash.com> wrote:

> I never said I was making a scientific hypothesis. I was engaged in
> speculation, pure and simple.
>
> I wish you would stop putting words into my mouth. This is the second time
> you've accused me of claiming to have observed things when I've made no
> such claim. I'm not putting forth any fact, or basing any of my
> speculation on things I've personally seen. I'm just asking a question
> about real-world chaotic behavior and how much a small effect can disrupt
> a macroscopic system in a short period of time. I don't know what your
> problem is with me, but that's all I'm doing.

I guess my "problem" is that you're posting in a science fiction
newsgroup with, apparently, no regard for solid science and no interest
in creating fiction. If it seems like I'm putting word in your mouth,
it's only because I'm trying to turn what you're actually saying into
something reasonable. As it stands, all I'm hearing from you is "In a
reality where time travel exists, I expect chaos to operate in a
familiar way." I'm saying you need to prepare to be disappointed,
because if research on very fast/slow and very small/big scales has
shown us anything, it's that classical views of the universe often break
down at the extremes.

> > Then you need to ask a question that makes sense. In reality, it's an
> > untestable system (which you can take to mean very sensitive). In a
> > fictional reality with time travel, it is up to the author to pick
> > something that works for the story.
>
> Just because a question cannot be tested does not mean that it does not
> make sense. Such questions are asked in this group constantly.

They are usually asked with the intent of determining their plausibility
as a plot device. Since your intent is not to work it into the
framework of a story line, the thread has quickly become pointless.

> > The only thing nonsensical is you trying to reconcile classical chaos
> > with time travel. All I'm saying is that you need to take your
> > curiosity another step. If you are willing to discard your notion of
> > what time is, you should be willing to discard your notion of what chaos
> > is. Sometimes a butterfly is just a butterfly.
>
> Why? The interesting thing about the science in SF is taking *one*
> interesting change and seeing how it fits into what's known. If I'm just
> going to make up *everything* as I go along, I'll move to a fantasy group.

I think that is a very good idea for you. The simple fact is that
everything *is* made up with respect to time travel. Everything we
currently know makes it impossible to the point of fantasy. It's all
good and fine to speculate how things might happen, but your odds of
being right are are even less than that of . . . wait for it . . .
winning the lottery! :-) As I originally stated, if the rules of the
universe are such that the mere presence of a time traveller can change
such a chaotic system, then all predictability about the future is out
the window in a flurry of cascading effects. That really boils down the
old idea that the only stable timeline is one where time travel is not
invented.

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