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Howling:What crashed the Byzantium?: Difference between revisions
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:: I am aware that I am misusing the ideas of Eugine Wigner (“the silent genius”) but it’s only TV. I’m only suggesting it because of what he did with the original Angels; this was a similar concept in some ways. Imagine Moffat trying to explain the suggestions I’ve put forward! That would be impressive telly. [[User:Jack Chilli|Jack Chilli]] 16:16, June 9, 2010 (UTC) | :: I am aware that I am misusing the ideas of Eugine Wigner (“the silent genius”) but it’s only TV. I’m only suggesting it because of what he did with the original Angels; this was a similar concept in some ways. Imagine Moffat trying to explain the suggestions I’ve put forward! That would be impressive telly. [[User:Jack Chilli|Jack Chilli]] 16:16, June 9, 2010 (UTC) | ||
:::OK, what you're missing is that you can't just uncollapse Ben's current state to give him a consistent personal history; you'd have to uncollapse every state he collapsed in the past, and that would affect everyone he'd ever interacted with in the past (probably just everything in his past light cone, period). (Also, as a side note, if the erasure is actually removing eigenstates from the vectors, then the _Doctor's_ collapsed state is no longer compatible with the superposed state that preceded it--you can collapse "A-or-B-or-C" into A, B, or C, but you can't collapse it into D.) | |||
:::And, again, your second paragraph contradicts what we've seen. You say that Ben can't vanish from in front of you. And yet, Amy vanishes from in front of the Doctor in ''City of the Daleks''. (In the "canonical version" of the story, of course, the Doctor builds a "chronon blocker", which prevents her from completely vanishing, for just long enough to undo all the changes to history. But if you screw that up, Amy does completely vanish. And, even if you get it right, she's gradually being erased from history the entire time, becoming less visible and less able to interact with everything else.) | |||
:::Nobody ever said the Web of Time is necessary for the universe to exist. (Although a few times, the Doctor has said that damaging it could cause damage to the continuum itself, you could argue that this just means the Time Lords have sort of nailed it down to the fabric of spacetime or something.) What has been said is that it's necessary for history to be consistent and causality to work. | |||
:::And if there aren't multiple universes, how do you explain the travel between parallel universes that has been seen on the show, both pre- and post-LGTW? | |||
:::If you want to say that everything the show ever said about any of this was wrong, you can--but in that case, you're really not talking about Doctor Who; you're talking about another show someone else could have written. I'll agree that there are all kinds of ways time travel can be fit into science fiction--but not all of them are consistent with what we know about Doctor Who. | |||
:::Finally, it's not so much that you're misusing strong-CI (which, by the way, Wigner was arguing _against_, not for, with his thought experiments)--I agree that the kind of misuse you're suggested is common and maybe even reasonable for pop sci-fi--as that you're trying to have strong-CI (observer-dependent collapse) and MWI (the combined state keeps developing forever because there is no collapse) at the same time, which to quote Pauli, is not even wrong. --[[User:Falcotron|Falcotron]] 18:40, June 9, 2010 (UTC) | |||
