Howling:Revisiting the why of the cracks (view source)
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::::::::::::That's not what Moffat meant, of course, but I've no problem with the changeable history the Doctor described to Amy. It's an old friend. If history in the "Whoniverse" hadn't been like that, the Time Lords wouldn't have needed the Web of Time, etc. --[[Special:Contributions/2.96.31.113|2.96.31.113]]<sup>[[User talk:2.96.31.113#top|talk to me]]</sup> 07:51, September 29, 2012 (UTC) | ::::::::::::That's not what Moffat meant, of course, but I've no problem with the changeable history the Doctor described to Amy. It's an old friend. If history in the "Whoniverse" hadn't been like that, the Time Lords wouldn't have needed the Web of Time, etc. --[[Special:Contributions/2.96.31.113|2.96.31.113]]<sup>[[User talk:2.96.31.113#top|talk to me]]</sup> 07:51, September 29, 2012 (UTC) | ||
::::::::::::::No, I think Moffat really _is_ saying that the past is indeterminate. Admittedly he didn't say that directly, but Paul Cornell did, years ago. I'm pretty sure it was on r.a.dw. Peter Darvill-Evans said something like, "But if it works your way, then the past isn't just unknown, it's unknowable, just like the future," to which Cornell replied, "Exactly," and then went on to give an analogy with Feynman's explanation of quantum physics. To use your switch: If you build a robot arm that flips the switch every time a particle in a lump of uranium decays, then go away for a day, you don't know whether the switch is on or off, and there's no way, even in principle, that you could; there simply is no fact of the matter to discover. Or, rather, the fact of the matter is that the switch is in a superposition of two states. | |||
::::::::::::::So, if history is fundamentally indeterminate, why do history and science work at all—and to the point that the visible indeterminacies are rare and striking enough that we notice them? I think the quantum physics analogy works there again (although as far as I know none of the Who writers have actually used it): The universe really is indeterminate at the microscopic level, and yet the macroscopic universe appears almost perfectly determinate. | |||
::::::::::::::Larry Miles has a completely different answer to that, which ties directly to your "the Time Lords wouldn't have needed the Web of Time". And actually, there are real-world physicists who have brought up effectively the same question and tried to answer it; see Julian Barbour's "The End of Time" for an example. But we've already got enough to deal with. --[[Special:Contributions/70.36.140.233|70.36.140.233]]<sup>[[User talk:70.36.140.233#top|talk to me]]</sup> 20:52, September 29, 2012 (UTC) | |||