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Author Topic: Figuring out the Quantum Plot Holes in "Why of Fry": My theory  (Read 6790 times)
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Grim

Professor
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« Reply #120 on: 05-03-2003 00:23 »

I think everything has been done in this thread, its not even about the show...

Kristi
Starship Captain
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« Reply #121 on: 05-03-2003 00:30 »

Was it ever really about the show?
Allen

Professor
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« Reply #122 on: 05-03-2003 00:46 »
« Last Edit on: 05-03-2003 00:46 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by Chalic:

Can:
What is your point Allen?  If all scientists were to follow your suggestion and just not discuss thing scientific because they could be proven wrong, where would that get us?  Nixorbania, that's
where, and let me tell you, it's not a pretty sight.  (Anyone playing the nationstates game will know what I mean :P)


It wasn't a suggestion, it was a fact. I'm not suggesting ANYTHING. I'm just saying I'll have to laugh extra hard the day all these theories become obsolete.   :D

It's only too bad I suck at math, I may have understood the interesting article on multiple worlds indentical to this one. Then again Einstein flunked and look where he is.

Have you ever read Stephen King's "The Langoliers"? In this story, there was no past to return to since it was being erased. Logically one can always move foward in time, but we can't go back. It's even been said that something in space slows down the ageing process. Returning astronauts haven't aged much at all while people on Earth continue to do so. You also can't go to the future and meet your future self via time machine or other methods. This is because you actually disappeared and were never seen again to everyone else. Fascinating really. Someone will probably come along in poke holes (as this is what this thread seems to be about.) So until then.
Chalic

Bending Unit
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« Reply #123 on: 05-03-2003 01:49 »

Uhh, I'm not going to "poke holes" so much as just explain a few things to you. 

Number one, theories like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics aren't going anywhere.  At no point will we say "Boy, we were so wrong about that."  This is the most common misconception by non-scientists.  I'm not saying that Einstein and Planck we're spot on dead accurate and that the equations behind them are flawless, I'm saying that princliples like E = mc^2, The Psi^2 equation and so on model the actual universe.  To say that they will someday be disproven is to say that someday, people will prove that airplanes never flew.  We may modify them, or combine them using newer and even stranger mathematics, but their basics will always remain.  So you're likely to be waiting a long time to laugh.

Number twoee, Einstein did not "flunk".  This is a false rumor.  Einstein was a very sucessful student in his university (I don't remember what it was called, something-tech...someone else help me out), but because he felt he was above things like homework, and he asked many questions (back in the days when this was considered rude) his professor decided not to take him as his assistant when Einstein graduated, and that's when he had to get the job in the patent office.

Number three-ee, despite liking Stephen King's works, I haven't read the Langoliers, though I have seen the made for TV movie.  "Logically one can always move forward in time, but we can't go back."  This is pure speculative opinion, which is perfectly fine, but without any sort of scientific knowledge, it's like taking marbles from a bag.  A very big bag with lots of colors.  "It's even been said that someting in space slows down the agin process."  If you even just peruse threads like this, you should at least have heard of "time dialation."  There is nothing out in space that causes it, it is caused by moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.  Your comment about astronaughts is also false unfortunetly.  Not even the Apollo astronaughts were travelling anywhere near quickly enough to suffer any measurable time dialation.  They are perhaps one ten millionth of a billionth of a second younger than they ought to be.  I'm not sure what you're talking about with the disappearing into the future, but one can travel "into the future" simply by moving at a significant fraction (like 90% or higher) of the speed of light.  They will experience less time than the static universe around them, and when they finally stop, they will not be much older, but anywhere from slightly more to vastly more time will have passed on Earth for example.  Obviously if you take off in a fast ship, go very fast, then slow down, at no point can you meet your future self, because you are in the process of becoming your future self.  I've no idea what you're talking about with the disappearing stuff.  I do agree that it is fascinating.

This thread was originally about discussing the plot integrity of "The Why of Fry."  It has however metamorphasized into a topic on time travel, modern physics, and just lately, chaos theory, which I'm happily participating in.  If you're interested, stop in and read what people have posted.  If you're not, please don't come here just to tell people ~Hey, you can't prove anything, and there's no point to talking about this stuff~ because it's obvious we wish to discuss it, and it may just be possible that some people here know what they're talking about. 
Grim

Professor
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« Reply #124 on: 05-03-2003 03:43 »

u know I havent actually read any post fully in this thread since about early on the 2nd page lol
payn
Bending Unit
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« Reply #125 on: 05-04-2003 00:13 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by CyberKnight:
I always thought the traditional representation of chaos theory went like this:

Say you want to create a simulation of something, for example, a model to predict the weather. Now suppose that this model is perfect except for 1 single detail; as stated, the butterfly flapping it's wings somewhere in South America. Over time, this model would become less and less accurate, for failing to take that particular item into account. It wouldn't make much of a difference for predicting the next day's weather, or even the next week's, but when you start moving into longer periods of time then the changes become apparent. Thus, chaos theory states that creating a 100% accurate simulation of any real-world model is impossible due to the inter-connectedness of all things, thus meaning that the only true model of reality is reality itself.

That's the "Jurassic Park" version of chaos theory, and it's completely true, but it's really not chaos theory at all.

Most non-linear systems can be approximated by linear functions over a small area, but when you go beyond that area, the approximation is useless. Why? Because factors that seem tiny (like the butterfly wings, or microscopic flaws in the pipe the water is flowing throw, or whatever) will eventually magnify to the point where they make the whole system unpredictable.

Every meteorologist, hydraulic engineer, etc. knew that in the 1960's, before chaos theory.  Theoretical physicists never worried about this much, because Heisenberg had already told them that  they couldn't get more than half the initial data anyway....

One of the major breakthroughs in chaos theory was the discovery that you can estimate how far the linear approximation will go. With Langton's Ant, it will almost always be a few hundred turns before it goes chaotic, no matter how you set the initial conditions. With weather systems, it will almost always be 4-6 days before it goes chaotic.

This was the first part of chaos theory to be useful. We can now predict these "prediction horizons." No matter how much data we gather about the weather, we can't predict beyond about 5 days before some butterfly-wing effect makes our predictions useless. Not that this has stopped some news stations from announcing 10-day forecasts recently, but it has meant that those 10-day forecasts are no better than you could do with basic knowledge of large-scale annual patterns and a pair of dice.

The more interesting part of chaos theory is the part with the strange attractors and (approximate) emergent regularities within chaos. Again, Langton's Ant is a great simulation of this. Weather patterns aren't predictable 10 days out--but on the large scale, all the unpredictable differences average out, so that climate patterns are predictable over decades. We know that New York is going to get somewhere around a certain amount of rain in May, even if we don't know how much they're going to get next week.

And the really cool thing is that the same thing happens again on the next scale up. Beyond the climate prediction horizon, things get chaotic--but there's an even larger-scale regularity; we can model the flow of ice ages reasonably well for millenia before turbulence factors cause problems. In the other direction, predicting where a given cloud system is going to go over the next day is pretty much impossible, but it's easy to predict over the next half hour. Predicting where individual water dropless will go over that half hour is impossible, but predicting them over a few seconds is easy.

And the pattern of near-linearity breaking down into chaos resolving into approximate regularity is the same at every level--and, in fact, it's the same as in countless other natural systems. This is where the spiffy fractal pictures come in.

 
Quote
Anyway, back on the subject of time-travel...

Before we begin, keep in mind that most science fiction gets this all wrong, in various contradictory (and even self-contradictory) ways. The only exceptions, other than a few hard SF books that tend to be really boring, come from places like Futurama and Discworld, where getting the story right and making the explanation entertaining are all that matter. So, whatever you learned from Back to the Future or Star Trek is completely useless--except where it's entertaining, which is useful in itself.

 
Quote
The instant you travel backwards in time, you leave your home reality behind. Forever. Period. Because as soon as you reach the past, your very presence there alters the future (even if no one sees you).

There are two ways to deal with time travel, and you've chosen the first: "You leave your home reality behind." There are two ways to interpret this.

The many-worlds interpretation tells us that there are an infinite number of realities, and you've just gone to a different one. There are an infinite number of realities branching off from that one, but none of them are your home reality, so there's no way to get home. However, your home reality continues to exist, as does the one you're in now. Any talk of one universe becoming "hypothetical" and the other becoming "real" is nonsense; they're both real, as are an infinite number of others.

Most other interpretations tell us that reality is actual a superposition of states, including your original reality and the one that you're in now. But here, something (observation, environmental decoherence, gravitational OR, whatever) reduces that superposition to a simple state where one reality is real.

Under decoherence, this will happen fast enough that we might as well call it instantaneous. Fry arrives in the past, and before he can even notice it, his original reality doesn't exist and never did. Under an observer-based interpretation, the reduction happens when, say, the animators at Rough Draft observe the script.

Either way, the original reality Fry came isn't real. There is no "alternate reality" from which he could have come. So where did Fry come from? From the time machine, of course. (Actually, if the time machine continues to link the future of this modified reality to the past, he may have come from this new future instead, which works just as well.)

If Fry goes back through the time machine, he ends up in the future of the modified (and only) reality--or, given the MWI, in one of the infinite number of futures reachable from the past he left (or, more likely, an infinite number of Frys appear in an infinite number of futures).

Notice that under the MWI, there is no single thing called "Fry." Actually, there are an infinite number of Fry's, having an infinite number of entertaining adventures in an infinite number of realities. Unfortunately, thanks to the application of the Uncertainty Principle to Fox network programming (just as energy and time are a commingled pair, so are quality and timeslot; the more you try to increase the quality of a show, the less able you are to pin down a timeslot for it), we'll never get to see most of them.

There's no need for the universe to extrapolate a future; it gets to the (or to each) future through the normal passage of time.

And there's no need for any concept of hypothetical universes becoming real. Either all universes are always real, or there's a single universe which is all there is.

Fry's memory of another reality isn't really "evidence" of its existence. Unless my memory of my dream last night is evidence that what happened in that dream was real. There's no magic involved, or even deep science; memories are just a collection of neurological states that don't necessarily have any correlation with reality. People remember all kinds of things that aren't real, and fail to remember all kinds of things that are, all the time, with no paradox.

The same goes with photos. A bunch of pixels could randomly resolve into something that looks just like a picture of Amy Wong sleeping in my bed, but that doesn't mean that she really ever was. In the same way, photos (or animation cels or screen captures) of Fry's original reality don't mean that there is, or ever was, such a different reality.

The alternative to all of this is to dispense with the whole notion of changing realities. A time machine creates (or exploits) a closed loop across time--a quantum wormhole, the curved space around a singularity, imaginary-mass tachyons, whatever--and actually sends you back into the past of the same, one-and-only reality that you started from.

This works just fine, except for one thing. There are a number of constraints that we know the universe follows, and if it allows Fry's time travel, then we have to give up at least one of the following:

* Objective reality. There is no such thing as a real universe, in which case all of these arguments are silly.

* Contrafactual definiteness. Any speculation on "what if" is meaningless. If Fry went back in time and became his own grandfather, there is absolutely no meaning to any question about a universe in which he didn't do so.

* Causality. Nothing causes anything else, and we're just incredibly lucky that our illusions of causality allow us to function within the world. Arguing about why anything happened or what it means is pointless.

payn
Bending Unit
***
« Reply #126 on: 05-04-2003 01:43 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by Chalic:
OKAY!  Finally, I have some people to respond to!

Speaking of paradoxes: You didn't have people to before now. And yet you responded to people before now. So, assuming that your behavior can be explained causally, and that what appeared to be responses actually were, there's only one possible explanation: You have a time machine. Which is really unfair, since you should share it with the rest of the class, or at least give us the results of your time travel experiments.

 
Quote
Wow, payn, that's a pretty well thought out post.  In truth, I haven't studied Chaos Theory for that long, and perhaps you are right.  However, I have a Masters in Physics currently, so I'm assuming that either you were saying "This can be explained much better if you know a little physics, but I'm keeping it simple." to everyone else, or you didn't read back in the thread where I said that.  (understandable.)

Where do you get your information by the way?  Are you a graduate of some sort?  Do you just study Chaos Theory in your spare time?  Are you David Cohen or Ken Keeler here in disguise?

First, most of this I do study in my spare time. I changed majors many times in college (electrical engineering, physics, philosophy, sociology, writing, cognitive science, and computer science, IIRC). I never got beyond intro quantum physics, and there was no chaos theory class for me to take. And even if I did, what I learned in school would be a decade and a half out of date, so you'd have an obvious edge on me there.

So, the "keeping it simple" wasn't for you; it was so that, in the off chance anyone else is still interested in following along, they could do so. I'm pretty sure you understand physics better than I do.

As far as chaos theory, I've been constantly amazed by the fact that so many people--even college professors--think they understand chaos theory, but only talk about things that every hydraulic engineer, metereologist, etc. understood in 1950.

The idea of macroscopic sensitivity to microscopic changes in initial conditions is the starting point of chaos theory, but predates it by decades. Teaching you that and then stopping is not teaching you chaos theory.

Look in an old physics textbook, and you'll find explanations about how certain non-linear processes can be approximated linearly over a certain range, but are completely unpredictable beyond that. Or look at an old hydrodynamic engineering textbook and you'll even see examples of apparently-regular behavior arising out of chaos.

What was missing was the mathematical explanation for how this emergence happens, and how these systems robustly resist  perturbations, and why so many wildly different systems go through the same stages in the same way. (The repetition across different scales, the "fractal" bit, is just a consequence of that fact--if almost all chaotic processes act in a certain way, it's no surprise that individual cloud patterns, larger-scale weather formations, and even larger-scale climate changes all act in that way.)

 
Quote
Concerning my time travel example however, it's important to note that I only stated this as a hypothetical situation, as I am quite aware that most current theoretical models don't support time travel.

To play devil's advocate, most current models don't rule out time travel, they just show that it might be possible to rule it out.

For example, most current quantum physical models allow spacelike wormholes. All we've proven is that, in the absence of large amounts of negative energy, they would collapse too quickly to use. And that even a naive arrangement of negative-energy mass (not that we have any anyway) would collapse. But there may well be other arrangements that do work.

Similarly, while relativistic physicists have shown that a spinning, charged, spheroid black hole does not provide any usable paths into the past, proving the same thing for spinning, charged singularity-containing objects of other shapes (or even weirder things, like vibrating cosmic strings) has so far been impossible.

Also, if one (or, better, two) extra dimension is curled up not at the planck scale, but at something larger, there are all kinds of neat tricks you can do--and the best we can prove so far is that they're all smaller than about 1mm.

In other words, there are all kinds of loopholes in most current theories that would allow time travel.

Even at the most fundamental level, most physicists don't seem to want to accept what Bell's inequality really means. Unless you give up on objective reality or contrafactual definiteness (or on causality), the universe is nonlocal in a way that should allow back-in-time communication.

The orthodox CI gets around the problem by denying any objective reality behind the equations, but nobody really believes in that. And Everett's recent versions of the MWI contradict CFD, and therefore allow us to eliminate nonlocality, but most other MWI formulations don't. Cramer's transactional interpretation implicitly incorporates nonlocality, constrained in a way that would not allow back-in-time communication, but I don't think anyone believes in that but Cramer.

Personally, my gut feeling is that time travel is impossible. At the basic quantum level, probably something like Cramer's TI will turn out to constrain the behavior of advanced waves so we can't use them. Something like Hawking's infinite feedback loop will probably prevent timelike quantum wormholes from working even if we can prop them open. And so on. But that's just a gut feeling.

 
Quote
I *am* avidly reading about a new developing theory regarding wormholes, considering the new consensus regarding cosmology is that yes, in fact this "Dark Energy" (I hate it when they try to make something sound cool.) does exist, and because of that, if we were to devise a way to utilize Dark energy on a smallar scale, with more of an effect, we would be doing the one thing that quantum physicists were saying was impossible.  It could keep the wormhole open long enough to fly though.  Interesting stuff, I plan on looking into it with much more detail after I finish working on my thesis.

Is "dark energy" just the new term for "exotic matter" (matter with negative mass)? And does it have anything to do with the idea that the reason the ZPF is over 100 orders of magnitude too large to provide the cosmological constant is that there's negative zero-point energy that almost-but-not-quite cancels out the positive energy?

Also, from what I've read, work on incorporating gravity into the SE tensor (or, in quantum terms, letting gravitons gravitationally attract other particles) shows that possibly gravity can be negative in certain cases even without negative energy, which might be another trick to do it.

And by the way, even laws can be proven wrong; a law is just a theory with tons of evidence; if it's something we can prove, it become a theorem. (In fact, often a law isn't even that; it's a systematic regularity that we've observed that doesn't have a good enough explanation to call it a theory--but that's a whole other issue.)

For example, the law of conservation of mass (or matter) has been disproven. We disprove it kajillions of times per day in fission reactors. Matter can both be converted into (or from) other forms of energy (thanks to Einstein's e=mc^2). So the law of conservation of energy still stands, but the law of conservation of mass has been disproven.
payn
Bending Unit
***
« Reply #127 on: 05-04-2003 02:03 »

One more thing:

 
Quote
Originally posted by Chalic:
Are you a graduate of some sort?

Yes, I am a proud graduate of junior high school.

However, I am a high school, college, and grad school dropout.

This means that on the census forms, I get to check both "did not complete high school" and "completed more than one year of graduate school" and confuse the central bureaucracy. And as a role model, I'd just like to say, "Stay in and out of school, kids."

Also, before you ask, I'm 32, so a lot of what I learned in college is a decade and a half out of date anyway.

Also, I've spent my professional life working as a software developer/analyst/architect, network security consultant, concert/tour/club promoter, journalist, musician, fiction writer, and music publicist (in roughly that order, if you break it down by money earned in each field), so in all of these discussions, I'm not speaking as a professional.

Actually, that's not true. As a published writer, I can state that a half-assed, obviously-bogus, but entertaining explanation is a few orders of magnitude better than a 90%-assed, plausible-sounding, but boring explanation that turns out to be riddled with self-contradictions.

In other words, in my professional opinion, Futurama gets quantum physics better than Star Trek, and the only thing that does it any better than Futurama is Discworld.
transgender nerd under canada

DOOP Ubersecretary
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« Reply #128 on: 05-06-2003 03:35 »

Chalic - you asked if I gave in to your ability. No. But I am giving in because I'm bored of this. Let's break new ground We're now just refining and rehashing old posts. We've even dragged other people into explaining their understanding of Chaos theory (and they do it better than me anyways).

Lets go to a new thread, and then do to that one what we've accomplished here.
transgender nerd under canada

DOOP Ubersecretary
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« Reply #129 on: 05-06-2003 03:40 »

By the way, I'd just like to say that payn, if you give up Contractual whatisitsness, my posts are all still valid. If you give up one of the other two, they're still valid, but so are posts by other people.

Does this need a  :p smiley, or do you all know me by now?
Nixorbo

UberMod
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« Reply #130 on: 05-06-2003 03:42 »

tnuk, if it's circular arguments you want, there's always the abortion thread.
transgender nerd under canada

DOOP Ubersecretary
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« Reply #131 on: 05-06-2003 03:50 »

What the hell is a circular abortion?
JDHannan

Bending Unit
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« Reply #132 on: 05-06-2003 14:34 »

*awards Payn the longest ever posting on the internet award*
oy, circular abortions? i think if they aborted fry, that would kill his father so fry couldnt have been conceived, if he wasn't conceived he wouldnt be aborted
there, thats a mostly complete arc if not a circle
NibblerJr

Liquid Emperor
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« Reply #133 on: 05-06-2003 20:16 »

ohh yes! (What did he say? I stopped understanding after 'I just'.....
PCC Fred

Space Pope
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« Reply #134 on: 05-06-2003 20:37 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by CyberKnight:
The instant you travel backwards in time, you leave your home reality behind. Forever. Period. Because as soon as you reach the past, your very presence there alters the future (even if no one sees you). Thus, a new reality is formed, at this point, virtually indistinguishable from the original (depending on how far back in time you go, this will become progressively less true).

This isn't neccessarily true.  Assuming time travel is even possible, it could be that any journey you made into the past forms part of the history you knew to begin with.  I don't think it's possible to change history, because that would result in a paradox:

You aged 25 travels back in time to shoot yourself aged 23.  23 year old you dies, and thus 25 year old you never existed => PARADOX.

You aged 25 travels back in time to shoot yourself aged 23.  An old injury to your hand causes you aged 25 to be slightly off target, shooting you aged 23 in the hand.  Two years later, you aged 25 travels back in time to shoot yourself aged 23...
CyberKnight

Urban Legend
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« Reply #135 on: 05-07-2003 07:32 »

That's entirely possible. However, what happens when you travel back in time and kill your father? You'll never exist, etc etc etc.

Paradoxes are inherently unstable and stable at the same time. Although the state is constantly changing, it oscillates between two or more states i.e. death->life->death->etc. Assuming this process in some way affects the underlying structure of the universe, this instability would be devastating eventually. Thus, by using the "jumping between alternate realities" explanation, you eliminate these problems because in effect, in your example, you would not be killing yourself, but an alternate version of yourself.

Plus, why would I want to kill myself aged 23?  :p
PCC Fred

Space Pope
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« Reply #136 on: 05-07-2003 09:15 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by CyberKnight:
That's entirely possible. However, what happens when you travel back in time and kill your father? You'll never exist, etc etc etc.

Your father won't die.  You might wound him, you might miss him altogether, the gun might jam, but he won't die.

 
Quote
Paradoxes are inherently unstable and stable at the same time. Although the state is constantly changing, it oscillates between two or more states i.e. death->life->death->etc. Assuming this process in some way affects the underlying structure of the universe, this instability would be devastating eventually. Thus, by using the "jumping between alternate realities" explanation, you eliminate these problems because in effect, in your example, you would not be killing yourself, but an alternate version of yourself.

True, but in the end it amounts to the same thing - it's impossible to kill your past self.

 
Quote
Plus, why would I want to kill myself aged 23?   :p

To see if any of the above actually works in reality.
transgender nerd under canada

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« Reply #137 on: 05-07-2003 18:10 »

It would be better to travel FORWARD in time at age 23, and kill yourself aged 83. then travel back, and wait for yourself to arrive and kill you.
PCC Fred

Space Pope
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« Reply #138 on: 05-07-2003 19:32 »

It'd be funny if you aged 23 travelled forward in time to kill yourself aged 83, only to find out you'd died aged 78.
FlyingTigress

Crustacean
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« Reply #139 on: 05-19-2003 22:23 »
« Last Edit on: 05-19-2003 22:23 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by Grim:
The first question- how could fry lack the delta brain wave before he did the nasty in the pasty, is easier explained that he always lacked the brain wave, because his future self was always his grandfather. Enos was never Fry's grandfather, Fry's existence is a paradox in itself.
Fry's grandfather is fry, he came back and existed in 1947 for 24hrs, inwhich he impregnated Mildred, then went back to the future.

I cant stand parallel  timelines, I like Doc brown's time line sqewing explanation better. Something exists even though it came from a point that doesnt exist on the new sqewed time line.

I spose I only support Back to the future style timetravel, makes the most sense IMHO

Edit: My explanation-
1999- Fry (who lacks the delta brain wave because his future-self is his grandfather) is frozen by Nibbler, because of aforementioned lacking brain wave, almost interupted by Fry from 3002 (1) (see below).
3000- Fry is awoken
3001- Fry fights brains
3002- Super Nova + metal inmicrowave
Goes back to 1947.
1947- Enos, who is not fry's grandfather, is killed in nuclear blast. Fry impregnates his grandmother mildred, fulfilling his own existence and returns to the future.
3002 (1)- Fry detonates Quantum interface bomb, events take place that return him to 1999. Almost interupts freezing...

now this is the tricky part. the timeline would continue, all the way to the quantum interface bomb, and fry coming back. at this point the timeline is sqewed. The Fry who comes back can still exist to **almost** interfere, but only for those moments, as although he exists, the time he came from doesnt.

3002 (2)- this is the sqewed event, fry escapes quantum interface bomb, and they all live happily ever after... or do they...

Or, Leela will walk into the bathroom, find Fry in the shower -- at which point he will say "I just had the weirdest dream that I've ever had!   :laff:


------------------
BLERRRRRN....
Nixorbo

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« Reply #140 on: 05-20-2003 12:16 »

Worst thread zombie EVER.
faz

Crustacean
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« Reply #141 on: 05-20-2003 15:03 »

i heard of a theory that states that you wake up each morning in a different universe with a set of memories for that universe. I'm not clever enough to go into this further.

I also heard that there are some particles that come into existence travelling at the speed of light and that this has something to do with time travel in some way.

i don't seem to be doing very well at this science lark. could someone give me a simple explantion of the chaos theory please i cant get my head round it.
PCC Fred

Space Pope
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« Reply #142 on: 05-23-2003 19:09 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by faz:
i heard of a theory that states that you wake up each morning in a different universe with a set of memories for that universe. I'm not clever enough to go into this further.

Wasn't this the principle behind Quantum Leap?
Jolly Mon

Bending Unit
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« Reply #143 on: 06-05-2003 01:10 »

If you went back in time, wouldn't you grow younger?  And the same with traveling into the future, wouldn't you grow older?
To me, It seems the only way you could go back or foward in time like that would be to remove youself from time altogether.
Gocad

Space Pope
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« Reply #144 on: 06-05-2003 04:01 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by Jolly Mon:
If you went back in time, wouldn't you grow younger?  And the same with traveling into the future, wouldn't you grow older?

No.
Nixorbo

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« Reply #145 on: 06-05-2003 13:06 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by Jolly Mon:
traveling into the future, wouldn't you grow older?

Isn't that kinda what we do normally?
CyberKnight

Urban Legend
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« Reply #146 on: 06-05-2003 13:23 »

That's the "theorem" they used on Thunderbirds. (At least in the comics). I suppose you could think of time as an infinite video cassette. And a time machine would be a VCR  ;). Then you'd effectively wind events forwards and backwards.
Gleno

Liquid Emperor
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« Reply #147 on: 08-19-2004 12:36 »

Meh this thread seemed the most relevant....I just re-watched this ep today for like the jillionth time and there's something that's always bugged me....

When Fry learns the truth about Nibbler pushing him into the tube he is upset because his life was taken away from him....

But when he goes back in time to stop Nibbler from doing it, and the convo goes like this....

FRY "Why didn't you just ask me?"
NIBBLER "We were afraid you might say no"
FRY "Of course not, I love the future"

Obviously Fry only knows he loves the future after having been frozen, so why would he have said yes if Nibbler had asked him....? Hmm hmm...??  :p

Although, at that point in his life (1999) his girlfriend had dumped him, he had a sucky job etc so I dunno....it just never seemed to make sense to me when he says that line about loving the future....
JBERGES

Urban Legend
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« Reply #148 on: 08-19-2004 12:40 »

I thought that was an intentional joke Gleno.  Fry has no sense of logic, so he didn't quite figure out the whole cause and effect thing.
David A

Space Pope
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« Reply #149 on: 08-19-2004 14:12 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by Gleno:
Obviously Fry only knows he loves the future after having been frozen, so why would he have said yes if Nibbler had asked him....? Hmm hmm...??   :p

When Fry said that he loves the future, I don't think that he necessarily meant that he loves his life in the 31st century so much as he meant that he loves the idea of the future.  I mean, he did want a robot for a friend ever since he was six years old.
VoVat

Bending Unit
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« Reply #150 on: 08-19-2004 20:56 »

The explanation Fry gives in the episode itself kind of makes sense: he wanted Nibbler to have given him the choice.
zomit

Starship Captain
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« Reply #151 on: 08-20-2004 02:40 »
« Last Edit on: 08-20-2004 02:40 »

This is why I don't believe time travel will ever happen.. The events that happen on "The Why Of Fry" after Fry tells Nibbler that Scooty Puff Jr. sucks don't really make sense to me. He got the Scooty Puff Sr. and escaped from the infosphere, so therefore none of the events in the past with Fry happened (including Fry telling Nibbler that Scooty Puff Jr. sucks), so then Fry would have the Scooty Puff Jr. and he would get trapped inside the infosphere again, causing these events to repeat themselves infinitely.
Lrrrr

Bending Unit
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« Reply #152 on: 08-20-2004 05:22 »
« Last Edit on: 08-20-2004 05:22 »

Well here's my theroy on what happened (I am just saying what I think will explain this, basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm putting in my two cents in as well)

What we know as "Fry (A)" in SP3K is really "Fry (B)". So therefor "Fry (A)" ,the original Fry, got frozen before "Fry (B)" giving time to do "The Nasty in the Pasty" resulting in a missing Delta Brain Wave in "Fry (B)". "Fry (A) didnt have to deal with the Brain Spawn they were not a facter at the time.

there might be quite a bit of plot holes still left unsolved in my thory but TNUK's  thory pritty much sums it up (if that just made sence)
Gleno

Liquid Emperor
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« Reply #153 on: 08-20-2004 10:53 »

The whole thing is very confusing....but it's still one of the coolest plots in a TV show ever....
Evil Abe

Bending Unit
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« Reply #154 on: 08-21-2004 01:19 »
« Last Edit on: 08-21-2004 01:19 »

I think there is only one Fry and it is explained because one of those pre-destination paradoxes.  That Fry was destinated to go the future, travel back in time become his own grandfather and thus a paradox. 

Because when he meet with the nibbloians the said "Oh my. Anyway, your immunity is due to the fact that you lack the delta brainwave. [He presses a button and an image of Fry trying to eat a pineapple on a rope comes up on the screen.] It's a genetic abnormality which resulted when you went back in time and performed certain actions which made you your own grandfather." From the Neutral Planet website

He does not say when you altered the timeline.  This also explains why Philip J. Fry not anyother Fry was taken and frozen.  The rest of the family has the delta brain wave but this could explain fact that the Professor says insanity runs in the family.
passerby

Crustacean
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« Reply #155 on: 08-21-2004 13:28 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by Chanukah Zombie:
 See, that's the big problem with Ockham's Razor.  Everyone agrees it's a good rule of thumb.  No one agrees on when to apply it.  On the other hand, Nix would have a tough time pushing it past the Philosophy Department to argue that "X was present but partly restrained" is a simpler statement than "X was not present." 

The reason I didn't translate Ockham's Razor is that it's another thing the philosophers don't agree upon. 

Here is one English rendering: "Plurality should not be posited without necessity." 

And here is another: "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.''

It is sometimes called the Law of Parsimony and also appears in Latin as, "Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem."

Personally, I prefer the common notion of the Razor as "The simplest explanation consistent with the facts". With ALL the facts, mind you.

And yeah, there is debate, partly because intuitive terms like 'simplest' are debatable. Its one of those things in science that ultimately comes down to a judgement call, rather than a hard and fast definition. Sort of like what constitutes 'repeatability' in terms of a scientific experiment.

As for the nibbler problem, i believe it can be resolved by:

1. You made a logical error by saying "...in the absence of any evidence to the contrary...", but 'The Why of Fry' shows the same situation at the same point in time and space as 'Space Pilot 3000', and hence is the evidence to the contrary that you seek.

2. 'AOI1' was a simulation generated by the What If machine, and can be explained as not having access to said extra information.

3. Futurama's a top notch show, but its continuity is frequently terrible, and

4. I sense the presence of a wizard of near unimaginable power.  :p
passerby

Crustacean
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« Reply #156 on: 08-21-2004 13:31 »
« Last Edit on: 08-21-2004 13:31 »

 EDIT: Sorry, double post  :(
mpbx3003

Crustacean
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« Reply #157 on: 08-23-2004 12:08 »

I've always said that the nibblonians forsaw it by virtue they caused it... the created the brain wave problem by sending him forward, to go back etc...
Evil Abe

Bending Unit
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« Reply #158 on: 08-23-2004 22:12 »

I thought the Nibblonians knew because of a prophecy pure and simple.  Some sage saw the future by using a crystal ball or a nibblonian wizard did. 
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