Howling:If the doctor never existed...: Difference between revisions
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Yes. They behave consistently and we can predict with fair confidence what will happen if a given person is swallowed by a crack. There are a few exceptions that have showed up (time travellers remembering when others don't) and even exceptions to the exceptions (even a time traveller will forget if the person was important enough to his/her life) -- but these also follow an understandable pattern. That's enough to let us say the cracks behave like a natural phenomenon. We don't fully understand it, of course, because we don't have enough observational data. The behaviour is unexplained but it's '''not '''nonsensical. --[[Special:Contributions/78.146.182.145|78.146.182.145]]<sup>[[User talk:78.146.182.145#top|talk to me]]</sup> 20:03, February 2, 2012 (UTC) | Yes. They behave consistently and we can predict with fair confidence what will happen if a given person is swallowed by a crack. There are a few exceptions that have showed up (time travellers remembering when others don't) and even exceptions to the exceptions (even a time traveller will forget if the person was important enough to his/her life) -- but these also follow an understandable pattern. That's enough to let us say the cracks behave like a natural phenomenon. We don't fully understand it, of course, because we don't have enough observational data. The behaviour is unexplained but it's '''not '''nonsensical. --[[Special:Contributions/78.146.182.145|78.146.182.145]]<sup>[[User talk:78.146.182.145#top|talk to me]]</sup> 20:03, February 2, 2012 (UTC) | ||
One more observation - before the cracks appear we have a relatively speaking stable universe to describe. After the cracks appear, the universe is unstable and marching relentlessly towards complete destruction. A universe in the chaotic throws of cracks in time and space would be an ever moving target to describe like any other chaotic system. Saying that a person falling through a crack in time would "never have existed at all" could be followed by "and shortly after the entire universe would have never existed at all." It might be impossible to define the rules of a universe after the cracks appear and the Doctor gave an explanation that would give a little reason to an otherwise indescribable moment. | One more observation - before the cracks appear we have a relatively speaking stable universe to describe. After the cracks appear, the universe is unstable and marching relentlessly towards complete destruction. A universe in the chaotic throws of cracks in time and space would be an ever moving target to describe like any other chaotic system. Saying that a person falling through a crack in time would "never have existed at all" could be followed by "and shortly after the entire universe would have never existed at all." It might be impossible to define the rules of a universe after the cracks appear and the Doctor gave an explanation that would give a little reason to an otherwise indescribable moment. Or another way of saying this is, after Amy's parents pass through a crack, a time traveller could not go back in time to watch Amy's birth because that part of the universe no longer exists to someone in a part of the universe that could think about such an attempt--[[User:ANone|ANone]] <sup>[[User talk:ANone|talk to me]]</sup> 09:41, February 3, 2012 (UTC) | ||
Although we've not had anything in the show to confirm directly that "a time traveller could not go back in time to watch Amy's birth..." etc., it's a reasonable speculation and fits with what we do know. By that, I don't mean only that it fits with what we know of the cracks and the other effects of the TARDIS explosion (which it does) but also that it fits with other things we know about how time and time travel work. We already know that it's possible for events to become unreachable via time travel because that's what the time lock on the Time War does. We don't, in either case, know the underlying temporal physics, so we can't know how similar or different the mechanisms are, but we do know that that particular effect is possible. There are situations in the shows universe where "you can't get there from here". --[[Special:Contributions/2.96.29.31|2.96.29.31]]<sup>[[User talk:2.96.29.31#top|talk to me]]</sup> 14:29, February 3, 2012 (UTC) | |||
