Howling:What crashed the Byzantium?

The Howling → What crashed the Byzantium?

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Angel Bob, of course. Well, he did. But there never was an Angel Bob anymore, yet the Byantium remained crashed. As someone here pointed out, when things are remove dform time, time rewrites itself around the remove person or event. As noted in Flesh and Stone, time is unwritten, and then rewritten. We know the Weeping Angels along with a bunch of Clerics were unwritten, but we don't know how time wrote around thair lack of existence so that the consequences remain the same or similar.

As theoriesed, with Rory having never existed, time would have rewrote around Amelia's childhood The Eleventh Hour, The Vampires of Venice, Amy's Choice (which may be gone completely, as it was only a dream involving Rory, not a real, major event), The Hungry Earth, and Cold Blood. For example, the Atraxi would have been stopped differently, and so would have all other enemies in stories featuring Rory. It is like when the Doctor tried to changed a fixed point in time in The Waters of Mars - he changed the event, but time rewrote around it so that the consequences remained the same - Adelaide's granddaughter still goes into space and all of that.

It should be noted that, even with The Stolen Earth/Journey's End out of history, all evnets that happened after it (including stories set after it in the spin-offs) will still have happened the same, or very similar, as the consequences are barely affected. The only difference would be small, such as in Planet of the Dead, all Dalek invasion references would be gone. The Waters of Mars (oh dear, a fixed point in time is retconed again!) would have been rewrote, too. Adelaide would no longer have met the Dalek or lost her parents (or so we think), but time would make it so that she stills goes to Mars and all of that business, but the events leading her there would be changed, with the same sort of consequences.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Time is unwritten (people of events, or both), but then is rewritten so that not much is changed. My big question, however, is what has time done concernignt eh crash of the Byzantium? What has crashed it in the absense of the Weeping Angels who fell into the crack? Delton Menace 22:14, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

What we also need to consider is that the cracks erasing people are not the same as changing the future by manipulating the past. If the Doctor time travels to the past and stops Hitler from being born, the future changes, though someone may take Hitler's place in order to maintain a fixed point in time. The cracks however, erase people completely. Whether this is the same as changing the past is not known. That's something we need to take into consideration as well. The Thirteenth Doctor 22:20, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

The simply fact is that the past is changed, whether we like it or not. Amelia never had a childhood friend called Rory, meaning, as the Doctor confirmed, her own history has been changed. That means, when she would look back at stories that had Rory in, things would have happened differently. The cracks unwrite time, and then the timeline itself seems to have an instinct to rewrite around what has been removed. Delton Menace 00:11, June 4, 2010 (UTC)

I always assumed the peoples actions still occurred, but no one remembered them. Even though Rory was sucked into the crack, his act of preventing the Doctor from being shot still happened, otherwise the Doctor'd be dead.82.23.86.207 16:49, June 6, 2010 (UTC)Ghadius

Remember, there's not just one simple, linear timeline. For the Doctor's, all those events with Rory still happened in his personal past, even though Rory has been erased from the past of all non-time-travelers. For, say, the Northovers, history may look contradictory and paradoxical, but they don't really know enough to be sure that's true. And for most other time travelers, there's no way they could possibly discover the paradox in the first place. And that's probably "good enough" to keep the big ball of timey-wimey from collapsing and destroying all history and causality.

And when you look at the Byzantium, it's the same. Who knows that the Byzantium crashed? The Doctor, Amy, and River still remember the Angels, and the Clerics, so the story is perfectly consistent for them. The original Angel made the Byzantium crash, before it was removed from history. For the people coming to take River away, her story won't make any sense, because that Angel never existed. But they don't have enough information to see that there's anything paradoxical. And for the rest of the non-time-travelers of the 51st century, that's even more true.

As for Adelaide, I don't think that was time rewriting itself around the Doctor's meddling. If time just naturally fixed itself, nobody would have to do that. Let the Daleks beat the Nazis for Churchill in 1941, or let the War Chief win WWII for the Nazis, and who cares? The reason the Doctor had to fix those things is that time _doesn't_ naturally sort itself. In this case, just take what Adelaide said at face value--she knew that what he was doing was wrong (even if she didn't understand completely _why_ it was wrong), so she was trying to undo it, of her own free will, and succeeded. --Falcotron 03:00, June 7, 2010 (UTC)

Two Levels

I think you should look at the cracks on two levels:

First (for 'normal' viewers) they are simple enough for normal people to understand so they erase events but the consiquences are minor so erasing the Angels is not a big deal they are gone and local time is affected but stuff they did in the more distant past still 'stands'. Somethings else caused the crash but it isn't important. The Doctor was still summoned by River as she remembers the 'original' events.

On the second level (for the big fans) the cracks really do completly erase events/people except from the memories of time travellers. This means that the Angels never existed at all and the erasure changes every event they have been involved in. None of these events ever happened. The universe has substantially changed. The remaining clerics came to investigate a crash but this was not caused by the Angel; the retconned universe has adapted and only allowed the least possible change for the conclusions of the versions to both be the same. All of the specialist team (that died) did no come at all; only a crash investigation team. The lives of most of them continue as they were somewhere else. Those that actually got erased may now be 'unerased' as they would not have visited the site to be erased. Alternativly they came with the normal team and in events we did not witness get erased anyway (and do did not come to the site and get erased!). That is, there are erasure conflicts and the final erasure of the Angels may overwrite the erasure of the clerics. This allows revisions of revisions (good news for Rory fans?).

The consiquence of the second level is that there are conflicting versions of events and the events we see are only 'true' to us as we share the POV of the time travellers. We are time travelling observers just as the Doctor is so we match up with him. This does not mean that we, or him, are right. The conflict between versions may be resolved in the end and what we have seen may not be the 'final' reality. Jack Chilli 08:44, June 9, 2010 (UTC)

But we never see history right itself this way on the show (except in terms of further erasures, like Amy in Template:VG if you don't build the chronon blocker). The Doctor or someone else has to either stop the change before it happens (Template:DW), undo the change through further time travel (Template:DW, Template:VG), or introduce a later change that undoes the most dramatic effects of the change in history (Template:DW,

). Why bother with all of this if history could just fix itself?

Similarly, why did the Time Lords have to create and maintain the Web of Time? It's stated pretty clearly that without this, history would be fragmented and inconsistent and causality would not hold.

I don't think history in the Whoniverse rewrites itself to stay consistent; I think it just becomes inconsistent for non-time-travelers. If nobody could ever discover the inconsistency, maybe this is OK (as far as the Doctor is concerned; the other Time Lords might disagree if they were still around), but if it's a major hole in history, it has to be fixed manually, or else. --Falcotron 09:34, June 9, 2010 (UTC)

I am not suggesting that the timeline fixes itself. Reality is fixed by the observers observing it and creating the reality from all of the possible ones. There are an almost infinite versions of events generated by quantum mechanical processes and then an observer causes a collapse of a ‘wave function’ that sets the actual event. What we are seeing is different resolutions being caused. For the clerics the past is a different version to that of the doctors but the final result is the same: a crashed spaceship. This is a conflict because there is no final resolution; there are two (or many) explanations of the events. These are only at odds in the intermediate observations and memories of the participants. It may be perfectly fine for this to stay this way or it may be a very bad thing. The reality for one observer may not need to match the reality for another except at points where they interact with each other directly.

I have not read any of the novels so an unaware of the much of the web of time but isn’t the key to maintaining it to see that the events happen. Perhaps the Time Lords enforced consensus about events and their consequences. The things between these key events may have happened differently for different observers. Now, with no Time Lords there is no consensus and the whole of reality is mutable, the fixed points are not fixed at all and reality is literally whatever you think it is even if you think it is a fairytale. Jack Chilli 10:59, June 9, 2010 (UTC)

To clarify I am suggesting that the conflicting realities are resolved by concious beings (one of the most popular QM interpretations in fiction but not in real physics). When changes happen then the confliticting reailties intersect in such a way that they are compatable. This happens when one concious being interacts with another. If the doctors talks to a cleric at the end of the story then the reason the cleric is there will not match the Doctor's but all of the evidence present would match ethers history: there is a crashed spaceship. The cleric may say that it crashed because of an asteroid impact and the Doctor an Angel; they are both correct. The realities have to be compatable or the conversation cannot happen because the realities are not compatable so no communication can take place. The 'histories' of the two are as similar as possible (the spacehip has crashed) because this is the most compatable set of versions. Jack Chilli 11:21, June 9, 2010 (UTC)

Well, the Web of Time was also mentioned on TV, and, although they did go into more detail in the novels, they've discussed all kinds of related things--in particular, the idea of "fixed points in time"--quite a bit on TV, even (maybe even _especially_) in the post-Gallifrey universe. And yes, the key to maintaining it is, essentially, making sure the important thing happen--because they're not going to happen on their own.

The fixed points were never fixed in the sense that they were _impossible_ to change (although Template:VG implies that they're _difficult_), but that it was a very, very not good idea to change them. Again, watch Attack of the Cybermen and play City of the Daleks for similar pre-LGTW and post-LGTW examples. Even the Trickster can't just change things willy-nilly; he has to use his mostly-undescribed but apparently-super-powerful abilities to fix things up around his changes, and, as Template:DW proves, even he can't always pull it off.

Meanwhile, your idea that conversations can't happen between people on incommensurate timelines is directly disproven by the conversations that Amy has with the Clerics in Template:DW ("Who's Pedro?", etc.).

The question is, when Crispin and Phillip were erased, did the other Clerics have a brand-new history created for them, which was self-consistent but inconsistent with Amy's history? Or did they just have a self-inconsistent and paradoxical history and not notice?

I understand your point about strong-Copenhagen QM; I just don't think it's relevant here. It doesn't explain where this other history would come from and what would make it consistent. Nor does it explain why anyone would bother trying to keep history consistent if there were already a process that does it automatically.

The simplest answer is that there is no such process. The Clerics' new history is the old history, minus Crispin and Phillip. It's inconsistent and paradoxical, but nobody noticed. If Amy had pushed them, if she'd asked, "Why can you only remember 18 clerics when Bishops always command 20?", that would have exposed the hole in their history. (Sure, their brains would probably fill in a reason, but that would be pure confabulation, with no ontological substance, and it would likely be different for each one of them.)

This is exactly what happens in Template:DW--Amy is sad, but her sadness is a secret even to her, and in her Rory-less timeline, there is no reasonable explanation for it, so she just doesn't believe that she's sad--and yet, she is. --Falcotron 12:55, June 9, 2010 (UTC)

The conversation about Pedro is compatible. The cleric has arrived at that point without the need for Pedro to exits by mechanisms we have not seen (a different personal history). Any has arrived through the history we have seen. Both are there and Pedro isn’t. Amy can explain this because she knows that Pedro has gone off and been swallowed or killed or something, the cleric can explain it because he knows that there was never anybody called Pedro there first place. They are both right. The only thing that need to be consistent between then is that they are there and communicating (although it is worth thinking about the source of the radio Amy has).

As for the Universe fixing itself it is actually the conscious entities that are resolving the reality by observing it. When reality collapses due to the erasures they resolve the reality differently (but close to the ‘original’ as this is the most likely state of collapse that is consistent with their histories) The other histories are generated to explain the current state; a kind of Final Anthropic Principle thing (the universe is only in existence because it has been observed by conscious entities and therefore consciousness is a necessity for the universe to exist at all. So the think that is remaking the universe (but differently) is everybody; the universe itself does not need to.

So there is no consistent history only a personal history. These do not have to be consistent except in explaining the present moment as being consistent with some kind of past.

If Amy were to challenge the clerics then they would have a perfectly good explanation of why they were there; probably far more sensible then hers. Their history is exactly as real as hers but obviously they are not compatible.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to say “It’s inconsistent and a paradox but it’s OK because it is ignored’. This means that the Clerics have no idea why they have gone to investigate the ship or why it crashed. Paradox builds upon paradox. You might as well stop speculating because you can just go with ‘everybody forgot’ without explaining why they forgot – what thing/mechnism cleverly gave them new memories? Jack

Amy is sad because some part of her remembers Rory. The TARDIS she was dragged into may have helped her to keep a tiny inconsistency. Something tiny was preserved and I am sure we will see how soon.