Howling:Amy Pond's existence (view source)
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Where did Amy come from? That's one of those things that people don't talk about. | Where did Amy come from? That's one of those things that people don't talk about. Every family has stuff like that, and sometimes it's because it's a disgrace and sometimes it's because you've talked about it so long that no one discusses it any more. And suddenly, it's a secret. I'm sure the local gossips whispered that Sharon wasn't relly her aunt, while Sharon was too busy to think of these things with a troublesome young niece to add to the worries of an effectively single parent. Besides, she looks like a boozer to me. [[User:Boblipton|Boblipton]] 17:07, September 12, 2011 (UTC) | ||
Well, it certainly never occured to Amy that it was odd that she didn't have any parents. One of the effects of the crack seems to be that people don't notice the paradoxes it creates. One would think, for example, that the last cleric to be erased would find it weird that he was left alone with Amy, or that at the end of the episode they would be wondering why they went to that planet in the first place, but the cracks seem to somehow stop them from realizing the inconsistencies it creates.[[User:Icecreamdif|Icecreamdif]] 18:52, September 12, 2011 (UTC) | Well, it certainly never occured to Amy that it was odd that she didn't have any parents. One of the effects of the crack seems to be that people don't notice the paradoxes it creates. One would think, for example, that the last cleric to be erased would find it weird that he was left alone with Amy, or that at the end of the episode they would be wondering why they went to that planet in the first place, but the cracks seem to somehow stop them from realizing the inconsistencies it creates.[[User:Icecreamdif|Icecreamdif]] 18:52, September 12, 2011 (UTC) | ||
<p style="margin-left: 40px; ">Obviously, it was a paradox. That's how the Doctor spotted it in the first place. But paradoxes are not impossible in the Whoniverse. They're sometimes hard to create, hard to maintain, dangerous, unpleasant for Time Lord and TARDIS senses, etc., but some of them aren't even that. In this case, the effect was noticeably wrong to the Doctor, and it required something new in the Doctor's experience for it to happen in the first place. And, as Icecreamdif said, the paradox was apparently not just invisible to normal humans, but caused them to not notice the effects that should have been visible. None of this contradicts anything else we've heard about how paradoxes work in the Whoniverse.</p> | |||
<p style="margin-left: 40px; ">Basic time travel into the past inherently is a paradox, but only a primitive time machine is needed to pull this off, it's not dangerous, and even the Doctor can only detect someone who's traveled to the past by using fancy equipment. On the other hand, the Toclafane going back in time to exterminate their own ancestors required a paradox machine to sustain, and the Doctor could immediately sense that something was wrong. Having two copies of Amy from two points in her own time stream around would take a tremendous amount of energy to sustain, and would be painful to both the Doctor and the TARDIS. Rose changing her father's past was more than the TARDIS could possibly sustain, so it tore a hole in the universe that the Reapers came to cleanse.</p> | |||
<p style="margin-left: 40px; ">The rules about exactly how different kinds of paradoxes work are presumably beyond the understanding of 21st century humans (although that's probably as much to do with our lack of education as with anything innate; Jack, the human Time Agents from the novels, and even Amy after 36 years of studying a temporal engine seem to understand them much better). And of course the writers sometimes use that to weasel a bit, knowing that we can't call them on it. But there are some things that are reasonably consistent—and sometimes (although not always) even consistent with the bulk of science fiction and with what physicists have speculated.</p> | |||
<p style="margin-left: 40px; ">Amy's existence is an ontological paradox that doesn't involve a closed loop and involves actual matter as well as information, so you'd expect it to be worse than River's name, but not as bad as meeting your past self or changing your own history, and that's pretty much what we see. --[[Special:Contributions/50.0.128.155|50.0.128.155]] 22:51, September 12, 2011 (UTC)</p> | |||