Wibbley Wobbly, Timey Wimey
The laws of time – as revealed in Doctor Who – are distinctly confusing. You’d almost think the writers were making them up as they go along. 😀
That said, there are certain discernible rules.
First Rule (to distinguish it from Rule One). Time can be changed.
What this means is that the universe of Doctor Who (the Whoniverse) isn’t deterministic. Events are NOT fixed (unless they come under Rule Two). And since they aren’t fixed, they can be altered – especially by time-travellers.
And what this means for the Doctor is that he has a perfectly free choice about where and when he travels in time. Because events aren’t fixed, it’s possible for a time-traveller to visit a place when – in the original timeline – they weren’t originally present. However, because they weren’t there originally, anything they do will be an alteration of the timeline.
The Doctor: Time travel … is damage.
If they’re careful, however, the scars will heal and the universe’s timeline will revert back to a course that’s barely distinguishable from the original.
To someone who was able to observe from the outside, however, there’d be two different versions of events – one version that happened ‘before’ the time traveller visited, and one version that happened ‘after’. English isn’t terribly good with time travel tenses, so it might help to think of things as sequential rather than before and after in time. The ‘before’ happens first, the ‘after’ happens second. As we see with River and the Doctor, it’s entirely possible for one person’s ‘before’ to be the other person’s ‘after’.
Looking at a non-Moffat story – the Unicorn and the Wasp – the ‘before’ is the historical knowledge Donna and the Doctor have. Agatha Christie once went missing, and turned up ten days later in Harrogate with no idea what had happened.
That’s the original timeline.
The Doctor and Donna turn up and discover that a giant wasp was involved. At this point the timeline goes all wibbley, because while Agatha Christie was a very good writer, she isn’t someone who changes the course of human history. The Doctor and Donna, however, change events sufficiently that it becomes possible that Agatha Christie might die saving the world from the wasp. BUT they all manage to get events back on track – and the universe, despite the wobbly bit, looks much as before their intervention.
Had they not managed to save Agatha, the second line would still look very similar. There’d be a wobbly bit as the universe tackles the differences – but since people would probably pick up a Dorothy Sayers instead, the time-line will still recover.
Second Rule. Some events are fixed points.
Some events, often for reasons known only to the writer, are ‘fixed points’. In some cases it’s fairly obvious why something is ‘fixed’ – Pompeii had a very noticeable impact, Adelaide Brooks’ death inspired interstellar exploration. The Doctor’s ‘death’ (which turns out to be ‘the report of his death’) is something which impacts on Amy, Rory, and River, causes many of the events in Series 6, drastically impacts events with the Silence on Earth – well, you see the point. Take away the belief that the Doctor died, and what you get is something like the following diagram.
But why do you get the above diagram in the case of, say, Lake Silencio?
Once River changes events and doesn’t shoot the Doctor, Amy has no reason to believe the person in the spacesuit is dangerous. She’ll therefore not shoot at the little girl in the spacesuit. This might mean that little Melody is found and rescued by her parents before they even knew she’d been kidnapped. Which means Amy might well be rescued before she gives birth, which means Melody will never be in 1969 in the first place…
Even if they don’t manage to rescue Amy before Melody is kidnapped, they’ve still found Melody age 7, which means she never became Mels, which means Lets Kill Hitler never happened (no cries of ‘Thank God’, please), but more seriously, she may never regenerate into River either, which means that the Doctor may have died at the Library and never got to Lake Silencio in the first place. And there’ll be no River to be at Lake Silencio anyway.
Even if Melody spotted the Silence and decided to run for it, so that LKH and River happen on schedule, if she doesn’t shoot him, the Doctor is unlikely to be told he’s going to die, so won’t go on his farewell tour, so won’t meet Craig and Stormagedden and save them from the Cybermen. In addition, he won’t realise that he needs the Tessalector, because – after all – nobody present but the Doctor knew he was in the Tessalector. So they can’t tell his younger self – and if he isn’t actually shot, why would he need a Tessalector? So he won’t be at Lake Silencio in the Tessalector.
At this point the universe, struggling between all the possible alternatives, goes ‘stuff it. Some other bugger can sort this out. Churchill on a mammoth, pass the popcorn’; and stops the progression of time – thus preventing the infinite oscillation between alternatives.
Third rule: if you know your own future, it becomes a fixed point.
For the Doctor to have free will, he must remain largely unaware of his future. This is the one people are currently having problems with. Why, they cry, couldn’t the Doctor just tell Amy and Rory to book a sea passage to Europe and pick them up there?
Because he knew he didn’t, that’s why. 😀
Let’s look at a simpler example, before we go on to Angels in Manhattan. Suppose the Doctor has read in a book describing his future that he’s going to break his arm on Blackpool beach on November 23rd 2013. ‘Aha!’ he thinks, and makes a note to never go anywhere near Blackpool beach on November 23rd (generally a good plan).
Since he doesn’t visit Blackpool beach on November 23rd 2013, the book he read is never written. How can it be? The Doctor wasn’t there for anyone to write about.
This means that the Doctor has no idea he needs to avoid Blackpool beach on the 23rd. He therefore makes his visit, gets hit by a 20 foot wave whilst battling Zygons, and breaks his arm. Somebody sees him and writes a book about it.
The Doctor reads the book and decides not to go to Blackpool on the 23rd…
It looks a bit like this diagram
Okay, now back to Angels in Manhattan. Why is Rory getting trapped in and dying in New York a fixed point? So fixed that he couldn’t die anywhere or anywhen else?
Well, there could be other reasons; ones that haven’t yet been revealed. But what we do know is that one of the consequences of Rory getting trapped was that Amy left the Doctor to stay with Rory. This caused the Doctor to go and stay near his friends in Victorian London. This caused him to meet Victorian Clara, and start looking for Modern Clara. This eventually means he takes modern Clara to Trenzalore, where she leaps into his timeline.
Which we already know was a good thing, because if the Doctor had never met Modern Clara, Future Clara would never have existed and never crashed onto the Asylum. The Doctor would never have visited it, it would never have been destroyed, and he’d never have been wiped from the Dalek database.
Or, worse, he would have visited it – and without Clara, been killed. Or, even worse, the GI would have decided to take revenge without Clara to stop him.
Whatever. The Doctor may well have not worked out all the details, but I’m sure he learnt the zig-zag diagram at the Academy. Having learnt that Rory and Amy die in New York, he can’t go rescue them. If he does, their gravestone (and the book) will disappear. If there’s no gravestone/book, he has no idea where to start looking for Amy and Rory, so he can’t rescue them. Since he couldn’t rescue them, their gravestone will reappear…
Fourth Rule: changing your own timeline is dangerous.
Your past, like a known future, is a fixed point. The Doctor has crossed his own timeline; but only in certain circumstances. In the Three Doctors and the Five Doctors, it’s a special intervention by the Time Lords. What they were using to hold the time-line stable is unknown – but we later saw the Master convert the TARDIS into a machine capable of holding a paradox stable for over a year, so it’s clearly something they know how to do in emergencies.
In Time Crash it’s clear that Tennant’s Doctor remembers this happening from his first time round. There’s no paradox; Tennant and Davison’s Doctor met in Davison’s period – it’s just that we never saw it until Tennant’s time.
However, if Smith’s Doctor finds himself in his own timeline and changes his own past, he runs the risk of changing the events that led up to him entering his own time line, leading him straight back to the zig zag diagram of the Second Rule.
Final question: when can the Doctor change his own timeline?
- When he doesn’t know his own future. This isn’t a deterministic universe; he’s probably accidentally changed the non fixed parts of his future thousands of times.
- When he realises that the current timeline is NOT the one from his own path.
This is basically what happens in Fires of Pompeii. The contemporary timeline is one in which Mount Etna never erupts; the Doctor and Donna discover that they have to change it so the volcano does erupt. The fixed point was only created in the first place because they changed the time-line.
In order to know what the fixed point is meant to be, the Doctor and Donna must come from the future. The soothseers of Pompeii can only see what the timeline should be, not how it should be changed. Going back to the rules above: since they know the future, that future is, for them, fixed. The Doctor and Donna, however, know Pompeii as a fixed point in their past. The resolution to the contradiction is that the timeline will be/has been altered.
Similarly, if the Doctor’s timeline currently ends at the Smith Doctor, the Smith Doctor can’t change it (once he knows that – see the Third Rule). However, it would be possible for a time traveller who knows the future (either River or a future Doctor) to realise that – from their point of view – the Smith Doctor is not the final Doctor. Again, the resolution to the contradiction is that the timeline will be/has been altered.
But you will need the time traveller from the Doctor’s personal future for anyone to know that. 🙂
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I’m just going to bed, it’s that timey…, but can I just say that this is just genius @Bluesqueakpip . What a great post. If that doesn’t attract every Who fan and every Sci-fi fan to this site I don’t know what will. If I could be bothered with Twitter I’d be tweeting this to the likes of Mark Gatiss and others involved in Who. Maybe I’ll sign up tomorrow and do just that! Fantastic job. Thanks and I hope it gets you a lot of recognition. 😀
@Bluesqueakpip – I love the humour you’ve brought to this (‘Universe gives up and nips out for popcorn’ etc).
Is there going to be a quiz? Because I need to study this a bit longer before answering questions on it. 😀
Is there room – perhaps here BTL – to expand on how the Doctor, seeing as how he’s time-travelled more than anyone else, has cause the universe to wobble perhaps too many times? I understand that saying ‘too many times’ is subjective. But all of the oscillations and ripples he’s created are far more than The Butterfly Effect. Do you see this in the framework of your first image, that is to say, that the timeline always goes back to a soothing solid line, with the ‘wobbly bit’ contained in a restricted space/time, no matter how many times the time traveller intervenes?
Also, ‘Father’s Day’ is a good example of time-traveller intervention – in fact, multiple interventions – in a ‘fixed point’ (Rose’s dad Pete’s death) which can only be resolved by Pete actually dying in the place/time he was supposed to, regardless of the ‘wobbly bit’ in between.
@bluesqueakpip — great post. I mean, just excellent. Love your thoughts on the timeline. It reminds me of something I read a while back — maybe in Paul Davies’s book on time travel or perhaps something by Michio Kaku — that the timeline is never in danger of being changed — fixed points or not — because the act of travelling back in time creates a ‘corridor’ universe, or more like a cul-de-sac that runs parallel to, but does not directly interact with, the original timeline.
I’m guessing that means the alternate timeline with the time travellers in it is hived off and isolated from it so it can do no lasting harm. (A bit like scar tissue, I suppose, or certainly the universe considering time travellers being like a virus that has to be contained and the original timeline kept immunised, as it were…)
@Shazzbot – whether the Doctor-in-the-TARDIS has caused the universe to wobble too many times is really a matter of whether he’s mainly the problem or mainly the solution. That is, when he intervenes, is he mainly causing the universe to go in the direction it should go?
Is he positive feedback or negative feedback? Positive feedback, once a wobble has started, will tend to increase the wobble – it puts more stress on the system by increasing the force behind the wobble. It’s a bit like your Doctor deciding to react to dangerously high blood pressure by giving you drugs that’ll raise your blood pressure still further.
Negative feedback, however, is like your Doctor reacting to dangerously high blood pressure by giving you drugs that will bring the blood pressure back down.
Time Lords (and TARDISes!) are very sensitive to time. It might be that the Doctor, affected by his knowledge of the future, often acts as ‘negative feedback’. He knows how the future ‘should’ go (if he doesn’t know in detail, his sensitivity to time means he can ‘feel’ the correct direction), and he changes things so that they go in that direction. Instead of increasing the wobble, he’s The Doctor – bringing the high blood pressure back to a normal level.
Even when he’s the cause of that wobble, that Time Lord sensitivity to time means he could adjust his actions to keep things within a safe limit. The danger in time travel is that he doesn’t have to.
I think we saw the beginning of a major wobble in The Name of The Doctor; the GI changes the Doctor’s time line – and various stars start to go out and people begin to vanish. In that case, the ‘negative feedback’ is provided by Clara. She knows how the future ‘should’ go (or rather, she knows that the GI ‘shouldn’t’ intervene) and acts to stop it.
@Bluesqueakpip No time to comment properly at the mo but just wanted to say LOVE it! Will come back when my brain is less of a big ball of wibbly wobbly… stuff! ( @Craig – great idea re Twitter to Mark G – just done it! (Mind you he’s got nearly half a million followers so there’s no saying he’ll see it))
@Bluesqueakpip You explained Angels in Manhattan better than Moffat did!
This post should be handed out in handy pamphlet form to all those who struggle to understand the timey-wimey complexities of Moffat Era stories.
Do you think I’ll I be castigated if I let slip that I actually like ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’?
Did you know that Popcorn is roughly 7000 years old?
@Wolfweed – Personally, I like many parts of Let’s Kill Hitler. Though I think it would’ve gone down better if it hadn’t been the first episode after what felt like a very long wait.
7000 years? Does the archaeological evidence for ancient popcorn include any discarded bow ties, or marks where a blue police box might have rested? 😀
@wolfweed – “Did you know that Popcorn is roughly 7000 years old?”
@Bluesqueakpip – “Does the archaeological evidence for ancient popcorn include any discarded bow ties, or marks where a blue police box might have rested?”
Ha ha – there are endess chipped-tooth gags waiting to be written (by those much more clever than I!). All I can say is, the last batch of microwave popcorn I made left what seemed to be far more ancient unpopped bliblets at the bottom. (When they’re still warm, you still can kinda try to chew them. Please, children at home, don’t try to chew the cold ones. 🙂 That way lies expensive dental caps. )
Bluey – your post was so extremely well thought-out that it’s hard to find a chink in the armour to nip into (chipped teeth, again). So, I’ll bit on this:
But that was a Claricle – and she did indeed ‘crash onto the Asylum’ in her Alaska cruise liner as a Junior Entertainment Officer. But, she wasn’t ‘Future Clara’. Just a Claricle with some sort of trace memory of Carmen’s Bizet, and souffles, and her Mum.
@Shazzbot – err, yes. Sorry, that was me trying to distinguish between the Clara’s of Asylum, The Snowmen and S7.2 by calling them Future Clara, Victorian Clara and Modern Clara. I don’t particularly want to use the ‘Claricle’ terminology because I’m unsure that Modern Clara is, in fact, the original. All three Clara’s might be Claricles – a leaf off an as yet unseen parent tree. Modern Clara may well have caused her own conception as a Claricle in a spectacular display of the Stable Time Loop. 🙂
But currently, that’s just a Bonkers Theory. And I’ll save the Stable Time Loop (amongst other paradoxes) for the discussion of The Big Bang.
@Bluesqueakpip. That was sheer brilliance. I think I need to re read several times to fully absorb it. I love all the diagrams, especially the bits where the universe gives up.
Thanks for sharing.
cheers
Janette
@Bluesqueakpip
Fantastic. I even think I understand it (well maybe).
I think fixed points are a matter of perspective as much as anything else, which is a subtly different way at looking at your Rume 1 and 2.
If you are a time traveler from the future of planet X then surely all points in your history book (which by definition makes them rather major events in their own right) must essentially be fixed. You already know the event happened. If you try and change it then you are essentially creating a type of Grandfather paradox that has long been discussed both in fiction and philosophically.
I don’t think there is any generally accepted solution to the Grandfather paradox concept (none that I remember anyway) although the one that tends to be most widely accepted (?) is that you can’t actually change your own past or you could never be there to change it in the first place. I think this is the view Who has followed in most if not all of the historical stories present (@HTPBDET ?)
In my view, this doesn’t mean a time traveler with knowledge of the event can have no effect at all, just nothing of historical significance (remembering that at an individual person level, most people leave no or virtually no footprint visible for more than a few years anyway).
Of course, I think this can only be true from an insider standpoint.
For an external stand point there are no fixed points in history at all. For example
If an outsider (the Doctor if you like) came to planet X without any knowledge of planetary history regarding the so called “fixed point” and then changed it how would anyone from planet X know the past had changed in the future. For them, the past would be what it had always been.
If you give the traveler any specific knowledge of the event itself then it must become a fixed point in time from the travelers perspective as well. The traveler can presumably still change the past even though it has become a sort of Grandfather paradox BECAUSE for the traveler the personal effect will be non-existent or small anyway. A wise time traveler would surely avoid making this sort of change anyway, because of the potentially wide scale impact both on planet X and the potentially the wider universe.
One other way of looking at fixed points is that they have such a massive impact. If you take Vesuvius erupting as an example, then the event alone must have killed 10 of thousands in Roman times. Subsequently the effect of changing the past event might appear smaller scale (all those docu-dramas, history books, and tourist visits to Pompeii and Herculaneum), but even so, the effect may be much larger than we might think. For example, the historical knowledge that something this major happened in the past may save many future inhabitants of Naples next time it happens. The butterfly effect arising from making such a change in the historical records is therefore quite uncertain, but could be very significant. It is something that you would choose not to do lightly if you have knowledge that the event had already happened from your perspective.
Hope this makes sense !
Nick
@Nick
Judging by The Wedding of River Song, fixed points are a fact of temporal physics. That is, if you change one too much, time itself will cease. So it’s only a matter of perspective in the same way that the importance of a nuclear meltdown is largely a matter of perspective – the most important perspective being ‘am I at a safe distance?’ 🙂
Not in the Whoniverse. Sorry. I picked the Agatha Christie example quite deliberately; it’s a matter of historical record. It is, however, not a major event. It was also, according to the Doctor, not a fixed point.
Similarly, you might well be able to claim that Darwin’s Origin of the Species was a major event – it’s certainly in the history books – but would it be a fixed point? Probably not; Darwin wasn’t the only naturalist to be working towards finding proof of natural selection.
It’s been reasonably clearly established in the Moffat era that it is indeed possible to change your own timeline – it’s just that if you do, you might blow up the universe. And you can’t change your own future; only your own past. (Oh, and if your past happens to be a fixed point – you’re stuffed).
Amy changes her past timeline twice; in one of the DVD extras she remarks that she remembers both versions of her past, the one with parents and the one without. Later, her future self changes her own past – and so stops herself existing.
Similarly, we have a very nice example of the Grandfather Paradox in The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang – but we’ll discuss both of those when we get there. Amy’s changing of her past, especially, involves more diagrams. 🙂
Waters of Mars, from the RTD/Tennant era. The Doctor can and does change history – a history he knows well. A history, in fact, that will have affected his own timeline, because some of the people he’s met and the adventures he’s had depend on the human development of interstellar travel. Part of the reason for the story was that Russell T Davies wanted to show that the Doctor can change any events he wants to – it’s just that he normally knows he shouldn’t (owing to the destruction of the universe thing).
By Hide it’s obvious he’s learnt that particular lesson; with Hila, he does what he should have done with Adelaide, Yuri and Mia. Namely, he saves her life, but makes sure the historical ‘missing, presumed dead’ record is left intact.
Your account makes perfect sense: the only problem with it is that it’s not the laws of time as revealed in Doctor Who. Which is a fictional universe where time travel is possible – and the Whoniverse doesn’t quite follow our laws of physics.
@Bluesqueakpip
Absolutely – the Who universe works in its own way. A couple of clarification from me and questions for you.
Not in the Whoniverse. Sorry. I picked the Agatha Christie example quite deliberately; it’s a matter of historical record. It is, however, not a major event. It was also, according to the Doctor, not a fixed point.
I understand you completely, but I’m not sure I was clear enough in the first place. I was arguing that changing what is KNOWN (to you) history is possible so long as the event itself was small scale. Your Christie example is sufficiently small scale to have no or very limited consequence whereas changing the cause of WW1 would be the exact opposite. However, if you have no knowledge at all of the HISTORY then you can change anything as for you there are no fixed points (even if there would be for a different traveler). An explanation that relies on Fixed points being hard coded events in the fabric of the Universe becomes problematic as sooner or later you’re going to find one and accidently destroy the Universe. Less likely with the Doctor, but Daleks and Time Agents ?
The same point applies to ideas/concepts as you show with your Darwin example. The idea of evolution would have come about whatever. There were several individuals before and around Darwin who had the same idea. Darwin wins out because he presented the idea with strong supporting evidence not because he was the first one to do so. However, if you switch the concept to anti-Semitism (for example) would that still be true ?
So the problem we have is how can you rationalize RTD’s apparent view here (the Doctor can change anything even the things he’s aware of) and RTDs/SM’s explanation that can’t if its fixed. The problem is that there is no mechanism you or I can look to that explains why point 1 (Pompeii) is fixed in time and point 2 (Waters of Mars back story) is variable [other than it suits the writers narrative to do so]. I have attempted to use the Lake Silencio example in the companions thread to explain my (half formed) opinion in more detail.
Amy changes her past timeline twice; in one of the DVD extras she remarks that she remembers both versions of her past, the one with parents and the one without. Later, her future self changes her own past – and so stops herself existing.
The question I want to ask is why do you think Amy changing her past so that she didn’t exist didn’t mean that she didn’t changed any fixed points in time ? Since Amy directly and indirectly impacts the Doctor, who by his travels has a wide ranging influence on the development of the Universe, anything she does which changes her personal time line must impact on the Doctor somehow and therefore at worse is likely to have a high probability of impacting on a fixed point ?
The reason I’m debating this is that I’m yet to convince my self that RTD/SM has quite thought the fixed idea concept well enough. Its like the Tardis point we discussed previously in the Companions thread. Its not the idea which is a problem for me its just that consequences of bringing in the concept can seem like they open bigger problems than they solve sometimes.
Nick
@Bluesqueakpip–
Do you think the Silence appreciate the irony of this? If they hadn’t tried to kill the Doctor, he might have been killed by the Vashta Nerada years earlier, because the Silence’s assasin wouldn’t have been there to save him.
@Bluesqueakpip –
On the other hand, if the Doctor never went to Victorian London, the events of The Snowmen would never have happened, so the GI might never have tried to take revenge at all.
Sure he can. He just needs to make sure to bring them back in time to die. Or at least in time to be buried, since the headstone only listed their ages, not the dates they died. Or really, just in time to put up a headstone, since we don’t really have any proof that they’re actually buried there.
Mount Vesuvius. Mount Etna’s on Sicily.
@Nick–
Not necessarily. There’s an old saying – “History is written by the winners” – books aren’t always accurate depictions of what happened, especially if there’s politics involved.
There’s also the multiverse theory. An event that would create a paradox actually creates parallel universes, one where the event happened and one where it didn’t. If, for example, Melody had actually killed Hitler, there’d be one universe where Hitler died & WWII didn’t happen and one (the one Melody, Amy, Rory and the Doctor came from) where he lived and it did. That’s why the time traveler would continue to remember it – because it still happened in “their” universe.
This would work fine for anyone except a Time Lord. they know where/when all the fixed point are.
@MadScientist72
Yes, exactly. And if the GI’s revenge is in some way necessary to the Doctor’s future (for example, it’s vital that the Doctor enter his own timeline), then we go all Churchill-on-a-mammoth again.
Vesuvius, yes, drat. Y’know, I had a funny feeling I’d written down the wrong volcano.
And then he never goes to Victorian London, because he never got depressed, because his parents-in-law are still travelling with him. Churchill. Mammoth.
Rory’s death in New York at that age is a fixed point. We’re pretty clear that it’s a fixed point because he couldn’t die anywhere or anywhen else. Given that the Doctor is a trained Time Lord, I suspect he knew perfectly well why Rory cheated death so often.
I don’t say we’ll never see Amy and Rory again. The method of getting them out of the show does allow room for manoeuvre. BUT – if the Doctor had rescued them, would they have really ever died in New York? No – for one thing, he knows Brian is waiting for their return back in his own time.
Therefore, given the Doctor’s character, the point that there is a gravestone suggests very strongly that he didn’t rescue them. That’s the future. Since he now knows the future, changing it takes us back to the zig-zag. He rescues Amy and Rory, which means that they don’t live out their lives in New York, which means – since nobody, as you pointed out, knows the year they die – he doesn’t have a clue when to take them so that Rory dies when he should die.
And Churchill gets saddle sores from that ruddy mammoth. 😀
@Madscientist72
Well, yes, theoretically – but think what that entails. He waits till Amy and Rory are old, grey and crumbly, then says “come on, last trip”. And then has to wait till they die and bury them. Or waits till they are dead and then moves their bodies. That would break him 🙁
And what would happen to Anthony (adopted son from the post script) if A & R aren’t around to look after him? And the books Amy wrote – maybe there was something in the time period she flipped back to that was more conducive to her becoming a writer. (Which I’m sure would be a career Moff heartily approved of 😉 )
Never mind inducing massive universe zigzags and poor Churchill’s mammoth saddle sores.
Re fixed points – maybe they are relative
Could they perhaps be “fixed” in respect to the Dr or the particular person who perceives them as fixed? ie if Adelaide hadn’t inspired humanity to do more space exploration AT THE TIME they did, then it could have impacted on the Dr’s PERSONAL history in that encounters he has had wouldn’t be able to happen if humans hadn’t started exploring space again till much later. As it’s the Dr, not having those meetings at those times could have a big effect on the universe as a whole. Lots of potential paradoxes. Big wobble. Stars go out.
Fixed points in other people’s timelines could, if changed, have a disastrous effect on the individual and their immediate circle, but wouldn’t necessarily result in the end of the universe. Small wibble. The universe goes on as normal.
The Dr as a timetravelling timelord, and helped by the TARDIS, has more of an awareness of, and a perspective on, these things than most, of which butterflies are important. But all timetravellers have a bit of it. The Dr tells Amy (in the Big Bang?) that because she has travelled with him then she will be aware of the 2 different realities she has lived through (after she has remembered the universe back)
OTOH it could just be a useful dramatic device for writers 🙂
@Nick –
I’m sure they haven’t thought it through in this much detail, LOL
PS The multiverses theory melts my brain 😀
@Bluesqueakpip –
Could be worse. It could be a rutting mammoth. 😛
Is it? Or did that dissapear with the Angels when he jumped off the building at Winter Quay, creating the paradox. The only thing we really know is fixed is the erecting of the headstone. Rory & Amy could easily have been alive & well (& still young) when that happened, particularly if the Doctor put it up. (He lies, you know.)
@ScaryB –
A couple of possibilities. First option, the cop-out route: since none of this appeared in-show, it would be easy to say none of it ever happened. Second option: Their son-in-law has a time machine. It would be nothing for them to pop over to 1946, nick Anthony and raise him wherever & whenever they want. Amy could still write her novels & the Doctor could take her back to have them published at the appropriate times. If we learned one thing about fixed points from The Wedding of River Song, it’s that they’re full of loop-holes, so what’s fixed is what you see, not necessarily what you get.
I’m not sure they really qualify as fixed points unless they’re of the “big wobble, stars go out” variety. If they don’t have that cataclysmic universal impact, then there’s no reason why those “things must stay exactly the way they are” (from the Doctor’s ‘definition’ of a fixed point in Cold Blood). Changing the “small wibble” points might be devastating for those directly involved, but the universe couldn’t care less.
@MadScientist72 and @ScaryB
Unlikely – the ‘fixed point’ appears to be that he has to die in a particular time and place, presumably of old age (since his age is given). The gravestone plus the book plus the unfilmed Internet extra have him still alive in 1949. The events at Winter Quay are 1930’s.
The creation of the paradox makes perfect sense if you presume Rory isn’t supposed to die at Winter Quay. You’ve then got a situation – when he dies of old age the first time at the wrong time-point – where the initial paradox (Rory hasn’t died where he’s supposed to) can still be fixed. But when he jumps off the roof with Amy, you’ve not only got an internal paradox within the time loop, you’ve got an external paradox with his death of old age. And the only way it can be fixed without time collapsing completely is to snap the Angel Time Paradox shut.
I suspect the point that there’s an age, but no date, is a message to the Doctor. Don’t try and rescue them, because you didn’t. Either River or Anthony (or both) would likely have arranged that gravestone – and it gives absolutely no co-ordinates that the Doctor can lock onto.
I don’t think fixed points are relative, though I am sure that a fixed point is basically dependent on what the writer of that episode wants to call a ‘fixed point’.
Very interesting stuff. The issue of fixed points goes back to very first discussion of changing history in The Aztecs. Aztec human sacrifice, a truly horrific practise, is in no small part what led the Aztecs’ subjects and rivals to side with the Spanish, facilitating the smallpox epidemic that crippled Aztec civilisation and enabled the Spanish conquest of Mexico. It’s an event of massive historical importance, basically establishing the future of the entire American supercontinent.
That’s why Barbara fails. Any attempt to stop the Aztecs gruesome religion and their brutal demise is bound to fail. The future of the planet would be completely different. It’s also why the Doctor had to stop the Monk: he was trying to prevent another atrocity — and it’s hard to see how England grained from the Harrying of the North — but messing with the history of such a historically significant country is just too dangerous. The falls of Aztec Mexico and Anglo-Saxon England are fixed points.
But Barbara does succeed in changing history for one man, Autloc. Aztec society carries on without him, and history plays out as before. Autloc is just a replaceable High-Priest. So I think Hartnell-era s dealings with such matters backs up some of your main points.
(With regards to the Doctor knowing his own future and trying to change that, I haven’t seen the Space Museum, and don’t know much about it. But I understand that has quite a lot to say on the issue. I think I’ve worked out which story I want to watch next!)
@Arkleseizure
I accept your points, but not your reasoning regarding the “fixed” tag. In BG who it was a generally accepted point that you shouldn’t fundamentally change the historical past (on Earth anyway) in any major way (minor changes are perfectly fine) and that you couldn’t change your personal past (Adric’s death for example). The Doctor always referred to the Laws of Time, but it makes perfect sense that any major change in the historical past would have unintended consequences in the future (and possibly to you yourself) which would be better avoided (this is conceptually the heart of the Grandfather paradox concept).
To my mind, this doesn’t mean that the Monk or Master’s various plans to change the future of Human history could not have worked in reality if the Doctor hadn’t stopped them. In fact you can argue that the fact that they tried shows that none of the things they attempted to change could have been fixed points as we now understand them in AG Who. I don’t think either of them wanted to destroy the universe (at the time anyway).
That fact that Barbara couldn’t change the future is an example of just how resilient the “web of time” (or whatever its been called in Who over the years) actually is and just how much difficult it is to fundamentally change the known future for an ordinary person. You need special (timelord) abilities such as Doctor 10 (eg end of Christmas Invasion, Waters of Mars) to succeed. You have to end up with there being a pretty small number of fixed points in Human history at the end of the day to reconcile Who’s history.
Nick
@bluesqueakpip
I think @arkleseizure observation that the Doctor does indeed change his own (known to him) future in the Space Museum does need some elaboration on your point 4 above.
Nick
@Nick – when the Space Museum first broadcast I was very busy with complicated matters. Like managing complete sentences, though I believe I had ‘No’ and ‘Mine!’ down pat. 🙂
@HTPBDET might be better at this one. My understanding from the various novelisations and plot summaries is that that particular story is another example of a time loop. There’s actually a better example of a time loop in Day of the Daleks, where the Doctor averts a predestination paradox by travelling to a future that – by the end of the episode – has never happened.
Interestingly, the various plot summaries of the Space Museum don’t have the Doctor succeed in changing his OWN future – it’s the rebels, the people he’s managed to influence, who change THEIR behaviour enough to rescue him and his companions.
Going through all the possible varieties of time loops (the stable ones, the ones where there are two alternative futures) will take another blog post. And I’d frankly rather wait until we’ve reached The Big Bang, because that’s got some great examples.
@Bluesqueakpip @Nick @Arkleseizure
I don’t think The Space Museum really helps.
There are two solutions offered there. The Doctor speculates that the traveller’s interactions with the people they encounter may have changed their future because the people make different choices.
Equally, the Doctor produces a piece of circuitry from the TARDIS and says it malfunctioned and they “wandered around on a different time track” until the circuit clicked into place.
The story definitely plays with the notion of altering futures, but seems to me to be firmly rooted in the “alternative universes” camp.
Well, this has certainly thrown up some fascinating conversations. Kudos to @bluesqueakpip for this post. It’s a belter and one of the best I’ve seen.
But a few, perhaps too flippant for the level of discussion here, questions:
Fixed points in time. What are they fixed to? Or are they more like recognisable landmarks on a map? Perhaps they’re fixed only in the sense that they help Time Lords and others navigate the universes, like Services 3miles signs. Useful but arbitrary symbols.
To me the concept of Fixed Points sounds a bit like a croc and one of those ideas that becomes a headache if you look at it too closely. It’s Destiny dressed up in psuedo-science jibba-jabba (as Mr T Might say). No different to the old Blinvich Limitation Field back in the day.
I wonder if Time Lord history is littered with Chrono-catastrophes, where fixed points were messed with too much before they knew better.
Regeneration. Yes, the concept (and ease) of how to kill one has been left rather vague. For example, if you try to kill a Time Lord and you only succeed in forcing a regeneration, how serious a crime is that? And if you do manage to kill one, are you charged with only that death, or the deaths of the all potential regenerations you’ve snuffed out.
Also is a crap regeneration of a husband/wife suitable grounds for divorce? And do Time Lord shops sell ‘congratulations on your regeneration’ cards?
@Bluesqueakpip – this is brilliant! Thank you!
Really enjoyed this and the comments. Inspired by your original post I came up with a visual representation of Time, that will either help the conversation or be helpfully ignored!
;¬)
However, I don’t have access to anything to allow me to upload a picture of what I’m describing…. (though I couldn’t draw it anyway!) so I’ll have to describe it in words (god help us all).
[breathes in]
Now, imagine a bubble covered with evenly-spaced dots.
Each dot is a possible moment in Time. They are alternatives.
Now, imagine that sphere covered in dots, with another sphere covered in dots just surrounding it (like a bubble in a bubble). And this continues with another sphere just surrounding it, and another and another and another (like skins on an onion).
Each sphere (layer of onion skin) has these dots – possible moments in time.
Now, Time travels out from the centre/ core ‘bubble’, toward to the outer bubble/ skin.
(ie from the heart of the onion out to the outer skin).
Our perception of Time is from one dot/moment on a skin out to another moment on another skin, out to another moment on the next skin and again and again and again.
There are many possible ‘dots’ we could move out to (on the next bubble beyond us) but only one we actually go to.
Our perception of Time is the sequential experience of these dots.
Our perception of Time is from dot to dot; from the inner skins-of-possible-moments out toward the next dot on the next skin-of-possible-moments.
If I have failed to get this image into your head – that’s my fault. And the rest of this will just be silly.
If you were to look at this series of globes with their connected dots, from the centre out to the outer skin, you’d see a wibbly line stitched between dots.
You could say that our Universe, our perception of Time, relies on this wibbly line being adhered to.
That wibbly line is our perception of our Universe.
Now, imagine you’re on a dot on a skin, the most likely next moment to get to, is one of the closest dots on the next skin out. They’re all quite likely. However as you go further and further away across the next sphere out, as you try to leap further across the sky of alternatives, you get to more and more unlikely (but possible) alternatives.
Now, one description of ‘fixed points’ is that you must roughly adhere to the wibbly line of our Universe. Small variations are ok.
But there may be certain moments where, if you went to other dots, then the universe wouldn’t be able to get back on track and will be a different wibbly line.
So what?
Well, you could use this diagram to describe a deterministic perception of Time (you must always follow the wibble) to a non-deterministic (you need to follow more or less the wibble) to multiverses (every dot on every sphere connects to every dot on every sphere and every possible line is followed to create a multitude of Universes).
Fixed points can also be seen as points where many possible Universes travel through (ie important crossroads), or be moments where a particular veering between moments is crucial in the overall direction of the wibbly line of our Universe.
Now, if you’re thinking “but is a dot my moment or everyone’s?” then of course, each dot is in fact the entire universe at that point in Time. The universe moves between moment to moment.
and if you’re thinking “what the hell is he on about with dots and onions and stuff?” then I apologise (but thanks for persevering this far!)
@Whisht – just reading the first sentence of your post, if your visual exists on the internet anywhere, with a URL, you can insert it into a post or comment.
Alternatively, if it only exists on your hard drive, then PM me and I’ll send you an alternative way to upload it.
@JimTheFish
Nowt, really. I think the writers are using ‘fixed’ in the ‘cannot be altered’ sense. Rather than the ‘firmly attached to something’ sense. In BG Who – and did they ever use the term ‘fixed point’ in BG Who? – I think ‘fixed points’ were loosely identified as ‘anything in the history books’.
And that said – while the Great Fire of London might be a fixed point – it doesn’t seem to matter what causes it, so long as it happens on schedule. And that might be the answer to the ‘destiny’ conundrum; there are very few people, in real life, who are genuinely irreplaceable. We happen to be following the story of someone who is. 🙂
I think @Nick is partly right in that a ‘fixed point’ depends on consequences – but I’d disagree with his idea that it depends on knowledge of the consequences. We can now guess that Rory kept coming back from the dead because the date and place of his death is fixed – but at the point it became reasonably obvious, nobody had a clue why that was. His life in New York sounds boringly ordinary, he died of old age, he isn’t part of the historical record. So why is it ‘fixed’?
I made some suggestions above; it may be a ‘tipping point’ – the tiny, seemingly unimportant little pebble that starts a massive avalanche of consequences.
And I admit I have always wondered if Time Lord marriages were ‘until regeneration do us part’. 😀
Hi @Shazzbot – unfortunately that visual lives only in my head!
If I could draw it (like some Buckminster-Fuller sphere enclosed sphere ad infintum) I’d draw it!
I tried a few googles of “sphere-within-sphere-where-the-dots-on-one-sphere-connect-to-the-dots-on-another” but couldn’t find anything (unsurprisingly!!).
Maybe I’ll get the pencil out if anyone thinks its worth it -if its all a bit “meh” I’ll save the energy and spend the time talking about McCoy and Ace on another thread!
😉
@bluesqueakpip
I’m not sure I think that differently from you, although I’m certainly using a different description. I do think you have to treat time travelers separately from the rest of us. As you stated above (somewhere) Amy can remember the two versions of her life both before and after her time line was changed. The fact that have traveled in time has a physical effect on them somehow.
My point is that the future (for an individual or a society/planet) can be represented as an (virtually) infinite set of consequences with a probability attached to each. Near events have a high probability that they will happen, future ones are winning the lottery type events. for most of us there is a relatively narrow high probability path into the future (you know wake, work, home, sleep). Of course if you meet a time active force (such as the Doctor, Master, Monk, Rani (hello Shazzbot) time traveling Dalek etc) then strange things can happen and your personal and society/world’s future can be moved (shoved) to a different probability path than that which was most likely to happen before the interaction. I think that this is pretty much what changing the future is. The time traveler and you yourself don’t know that the future has changed and actually it hasn’t, it is just different from what was most likely to happen before.
[the concept of the future as a series of probabilities comes from one of Alastair Reynolds Quantum murder novels, but it is the best description that makes the most sense to me I’ve come across. Sure there are others though].
From this perspective I find it hard to see why some specific points should be “fixed” events either in the cannot be altered or physically attached to the time/space universe. This interpretation seems to be correct in most instances in the Who universe as it allows the Doctor to go back in time and attempt to stop the Daleks being created at all (surely The Daleks must be considered one of the major forces in our Galaxy if not the Universe as a whole and to have an impact ?) without risk of the universe coming to an end. You can go through BG and AG Who and list a number of such attempts to change the Earth’s future by many forces (Monk, Master, Rani, Daleks spring to my mind). By inference none of these events can be Fixed in the way AG Who appears to describe them ?
Of course I believe that some events are so pivotal to the development of a planet or person that the consequence for changing those events are so enormous that any sensible time traveler would never even attempt it. However, we only know this, because we can know our past. Taking Hitler or Stalin as example. If you travelled back to 1920 (say) and met either of them, could you even have an inclining of how they would personally develop over the next 25 to 35 years and the havoc they would individually create ? Probably not. So if you didn’t already know the future would you have any reason to attempt to assassinate them ? Again probably not.
However, as a time traveler you do know the past and might want to change it by assassinating either or both of them. As a Human time traveler given the personal effect it could have on you (you might no longer exist after the change in time and would almost certainly be a different person anyway, let alone family, friends etc) it would be foolish to try. But if you did could you ? The answer is nobody knows but there is a school of thought that suggests that history is fixed and you wouldn’t succeed (ie your failed assassination attempt is already part of history).
However, as an external time traveler the effect on you personally is likely to be small or non-existent. So, if the Master (say) wanted to assassinate Hitler and replace him as the head of Nazi Germany, I don’t see any reason why he couldn’t. The consequences on the immediate future would be huge but 1,000 or 2,000 years later there’s a strong probability that things would be pretty similar.
It seems to me that in the Who universe, that the effect of events like this are sometimes determined to be so enormous that changing it results in the destruction of time. This is why the event if referred to as being fixed, not because it is in an absolute sense, but because the effect of changing it is too significant to even think about making such a change. I find this explanation easier to accept personally, but since I tend to forget all those little throw away explanations in Who, I’ll not be at all surprised to find that my explanation misses out some critical element, which invalidates it completely :). The narrative problem with Who (if you choose to be bothered by it) is that some events that you think ought to be fixed (eg the creation of the Daleks) aren’t and others (the eruption of Vesuvius) are. As you say above, it seems things are fixed points when it suits the writers to state that they are rather than on the application of a particular rule. Obviously this can be frustrating.
One thing I will add, is that it also makes perfect sense to me to think that the rules which apply to Time Travelers (and especially the Doctor who is now the most travelled individual in the history of the universe) are going to be a bit different. The Doctor’s personal time line has him “interfering” throughout time and space, so anything which impacts him is going to have a potentially universe spanning impact.
Nick
@Bluesqueakpip re Space Museum
You have the edge on me. I was -3 months old at the time although I may well have listened to the story. I have never watched it either (although I will have read the book in the month/year it was originally published) and have pretty much no memory of the story. Thanks @HTPBDET for reminding us.
Thanks again for the original post. I know I would never have articulated my thoughts (whether right or wrong) if you and the other posters hadn’t provided something for me to think about.
Nick
@Whist
I think you have explained this very clearly. Essentially the only difference to the version I described is to bring in the concept of probabilities being attached to each of the possible future points.
Nick
@Whisht rather
Thanks @Nick – I kinda like the visual of multiple lines as it also gets over the Grandfather Paradox.
Basically a person can have been in a Universe along a wibbly dot-to-dot track, have travelled back to a dot/moment and killed their grandfather and thus taken a different track. They would remember everything, and they would have simply come from an alternative track, from a moment in the future. I’d never thought of a multiverse like this before, but kinda makes sense.
Also, fixed points could be those moments from which, due to a swerve between dots, it becomes hard to get back on track from (from a time-traveller’s interfering perspective).
Now all I have to do is describe a Time Lock with it, but I think that’ll be easier using 2D lines (though I still won’t get the elegance and fun @Bluesqueakpip managed!).