• Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    17·
    9 days ago

    a knot is still a thread. It can still proceed as normal.

    Also, tangled knots happen in space. What kind of space can time get tangled within?

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
      7·
      9 days ago

      Imagine that humans traveling through time are like ants walking along a thread. If there’s a tangled mess of knots and chaos, the ants could walk all over the place. If the thread is not in contact at any place, the ants would be left with no choice but to keep on going in one direction.

      Knots would serve as time traveling points where you can freely jump from one part of the timeline to another. Depending on how tangled the thread is, there could be multiple time jump opportunities.

      • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        9 days ago

        I don’t think it makes sense to be walking on top of a thread of time, as if we are separate from time. Our being is inseparable from the thread of time. The fibers in the fabric are our experience, we are the fibers, and we still travel through a one-directional thread, no matter how tangled.

        • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
          3·
          8 days ago

          This allegory fails when you start thinking about it a bit more. The point is, that knots and tangles should provide moments when time travel could be possible, but only to a specific point in time. If there are no knots, there is no time travel.

          Well at least, that’s the way I like to think of it if I end up writing a sci-fi book about time travel. Who knows how that would work in real life.

    • ALostInquirer@lemm.eeOP
      3·
      9 days ago

      Also, tangled knots happen in space. What kind of space can time get tangled within?

      Now that’s another fun question! It also makes me wonder, how would space behave in tangly time?

      Would the space in which time gets tangled be primarily around extreme phenomena like black holes, or the very beginnings of the universe (or a universe, if one wants to get into multiverse angles)?

      • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        You can think of space-time as a 4D object. If it’s a flat plane (more correctly, a hyperplane), it could be infinitely big. If it’s s sphere or a torus, it would be finite. It could also be an infinitely long pipe.

        Either way, the shape doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth. A plane can have wrinkles, where two points touch. Likewise, a pipe can have knots and bends. All of this would happen in 4D space, so our 3D brains can’t really visualize any of it.

  • astrsk@fedia.io
    9·
    9 days ago

    Since we would be inside the frame of reference, I don’t think we would know it was happening, like imagine you’re inside a tube that is knotted. You’d go through the tube like a slide at the water park, no way to see that it’s a knot, even if we can detect the turning and tumbling, there’s little we can reference from inside to determine it’s crossing around itself.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    9 days ago

    I doubt the term “time tangled in knots” is sufficiently well-defined for any reasonable answer. At least in terms of real-world physics.

    If you’re talking about scifi technobabble time tied in knots, my answer is “Looper.”

  • spittingimage@lemmy.world
    61·
    9 days ago

    Well, I imagine rule 3 of time travel will apply.

    • Don’t change the outcome of WWII.
    • Don’t kill your grandfather.
    • Don’t have sex with your self from another point in your personal timeline.
    • Don’t add yourself into background scenes on the Death Star in Star Wars.
    • Don’t step on butterflies in the Lower Cretaceous period.
    • spittingimage@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 days ago

      I’ve been downvoted by someone who wants to have sex with their time-clone! Or possibly a kinky Lower Cretaceous butterfly.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 days ago

      I think that, due to the nature of chaos and the butterfly effect, any time travel at all would change the future. Unless it was just closing a time loop that was already present in the current past (which would mean any attempt to alter history would fail because that attempt is already a part of history), or if it’s possible to create new branches in time.

      So these rules are either unnecessary because any time travel automatically causes changes that, it’s not possible to change the past from the past, or it’s not possible to go back to our past, thus nothing you do will affect our present.