A call out to the blogosphere: how come the pictures fade?
Let's take the Back to the Future version: if you go back in time, then come to the present, but mess something up in the meantime, then you'll know this because the images of those from the past will start to fade away from photographs in the present. Like, oh no, Mom's fading out of this picture, and little Suzy too, and oh I wish I wish I hadn't sat on that fish when I travelled back in time! Why oh why did I ever...
Admittedly, I was flipping channels last night and caught a few minutes of Family Guy, where they did a Back-to-the-Future parody, which had me re-thinking this. If you mess up the future by traveling back in time, then why the hell doesn't the entire photgraph disintegrate, or at least why doesn't the entire scene in the photograph go away How could it be that only the people *in* the pictures fade away? Why not the things the people are sitting on, or the sidewalk they're standing on, or the clouds in the sky, or whatever?
Besides that photograph-fading part, though, I have no problems with the plausibilty of time travel. Everything else seems adequately thought out. It's just that one thing that gets me.
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The person disappearing from a picture is an old storyteller's gimmick that dates back to late in the 19th century. In those old stories, somebody was warned not to do something that would upset the natural order of things, and then, as clear and convincing proof, the storyteller would say that the person looked at a picture and one or more of the people were now missing, proof that the foolhardy someone went against nature.
For a real kicker, the storyteller could get out the photograph and show that the missing person indeed was not there. The stunned audience could look at the picture and see for themselves -- by golly, they're not there!
This goes back to when the belief that cameras don't lie was widespread.
Around that same time, some girls took a picture of themselves with some paper cutouts of fairies and used this picture to convince a number of otherwise thinking adults that this was proof fairies existed.
This storytelling gimmick was picked up and used as a visual device as a way of comparing the original past with the revised past. It's worked well in print, not just in movies.
Nowadays, we are used to the idea that cameras always lie. Thanks to television advertising, we take nothing seen on a camera as real.
I guess one could postulate that when you time travel, you bring a bubble of present time with you. However, when in the past, present and past time slowly diffuse into each other. Thus, the photo that one brought with you would slowly fade into the current timeline.
I figure that if you go back in time, you can do anything you want and it will turn out exactly as you remember. Because, obviously, you already did and here we are.
But that doesn't make for very good stories. Much more entertaining/worrying is the idea that when you change something, you split off another thread, as the the protagonist of Heinlein's Door Into Summer speculated at the end.
I was reading a book that mentioned that the average height of women (in England) around th 1870's was only about 4'9" or 4'10". I would certainly imagine that the fellows were similarly vertically challenged. Most of us are well aware that people today are bigger (and taller) than ever, but for some reason, when a modern person travels back in time in the movies to, say, the middle ages, he/she don't appear to be surrounded by midgets. Admittedly, Michael J. Fox is no towering colossus, and the 50's weren't so long ago, but a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court would have made quite an impression.
Oh Glory be to God, Gray Geezer. You couldn't be more wrong, or more ill-suited to answer, or more alliterative. (I'll concede you that last one.) Not only does it have nothing to do with cameras (they are a figment of your own divining, they don't really exist, it's all been a scam), but it has nothing to do with media. Just bad imagination. Thoroughly.
decrepitoldfool wrote:
Of course, Heinlein also wrote two time-travel classics that comport with your first paragraph, in which the protagonists really do act things out the way that they did act things out. And Heinlein makes it utterly believable.
First there is By his Bootstraps, which spans decades, and of course there is that utterly solipsistic All You Zombies, which takes the concept to the Nth degree.
I have always suspected that a similar constraint is what leads to quantum collapse. If you've looked at the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, you know that the quantum waves can be considered both advanced (traveling forwards in time) and retarded (traveling backwards). My guess is that what we see as quantum collapse is nothing more than the retarded waves from the far future enforcing a zombie consistency on the universe.
There's a story by Isaac Asimov (I think) called Red Queen's Race that takes the view that it doesn't matter if we go back in time and try to change things. Any changes we succeed in making have already happened - thus the title, the race where you have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are.
Time Travel boo boos
Thing happened.
Have photograph of thing happened.
Go back in time and unhappen thing that happened.
Come back.
Hollywood style - photograph fading away-cliche
Logical - if thing did not happen, how can anyone take a photograph of it, if no photograph of thing can be taken it cannot exist in any point in future, so no photograph, no fading , no distintegration.