Hermione Granger’s time turner:
The concept of time has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. It started from the time turner that Hermione received from Prof McGonagall to attend multiple classes simultaneously. I mean come on, we all know better ways of using it, although being the nerd that I am, I probably would use it for exactly that. Here, Hermione goes back in time and both the past and present versions of her exist simultaneously till she reaches the exact point of time where she goes back in time, that’s when she just takes the place of her past self like it never happened and goes on from there.
So far so good right, but one thing gets me, if you know exactly what you are going to do in the future (because it was in the past and you have already done it) would you still do it that way even if it fails? Can you change the way you do something that has already happened? If not, do you have free will or are you living someone else’s life?
Not only that, how does one age in this case? If you go back 2 hours in time, are you two hours older than you would have been, or do you age according to the current timeline? How would your body know not to digest the food or grow your hair or nails or age in those two hours? That’s not it, what if you go back in time all the time? worse, what if you go back into the same time over and over again? Is there a limit to how many times you can relive the same time? Can you go back in time when you are already in the past time? Does the ministry of magic control all of this?
All these questions from the first ever time I really, I mean really thought about time travel. Before this time travel was a vague concept, I once watched in a telugu movie Aditya 369, which released when I was 20 days old, thankfully I didn’t have to go back in time to watch an old movie. After these first few mentions of time travel, there were multiple other movies like Looper, Predestination, Source code, Back to the future, and even Interstellar. Each with their own ways to deal with time. One thing they have in common is the present, they always and I mean always have a present timeline they get back to.
DC’s TV shows:
Flash and Legends of tomorrow deal with a lot of time travel. Flash, being the fastest man alive, can run fast enough to break the space time continuum and go back in time or into the future. In this story, Eobard Thawne, a man from the future, travels back in time, changes his identity to blend in, to plot a return to his own era. In order to stop him, Eobard’s ancestor Eddie sacrifices himself erasing Eobard from existence. First off, if Eobard never existed, he wouldn’t have gone to the past and recreated the particle accelerator in Star labs, he wouldn’t have killed people, Eddy never had to die to remove him from existence. But wait, if Eddy never had to sacrifice himself, then Eobard would exist and come back.
It gets worse, when Eddy sacrifices himself, Eobard does get erased from existence. But a version of him in the future travels to the negative speed force, which is immune to the timeline changes. So now, he was never born, since Eddy sacrificed himself, but Eddy sacrificed himself because he was indeed born, and even though he never existed, he lives on in the speed force. Ok, this one’s a dozy.
On the other hand, there is legends of tomorrow, where a bunch of superheroes who travel back and forth in time to save the universe from an apocalypse. By themselves, the story makes decent sense, when they go back in time and change things, it changes in the future, stuff like that. When you have a time machine and travel through time, shouldn’t the “present time” be the time that they started off with the project? I mean come on, they have a time machine, they can always come back to it and continue with their life. But no, their “present time” changes with the present time that’s going on, on the other TV shows like flash, arrow, and super girl. Also, they do have a time machine, how do they not know all the problems before hand and fix them all.
Marvel movies:
The concept of time travel starts in Doctor Strange where he finds the Time stone, the eye of Agamotto, and uses it to defeat Dormammu. I really love that name, Dormammu, I think someone asked Munna bhai to name the super villain. Anyway, the time stone continues to appear in the following Avenger movies, till Thanos uses the stones to destroy the stones. Love that symmetry! Ok, back to time travel. In the marvel movies, the concept of time is different from that of the harry potter movies. Here, when they go back in time and change the past, the future changes too.
The gang goes back in time to borrow all the stones from the past and undo the inevitable population reducing snap. In doing so, they spawned off an alternate timeline where the stones go missing, but they swore off to take the stones, defeat Thanos, get the stones back to the past and delete the alternate timeline from ever happening. Simple right? So they go back in time and get the stones, get the Hulk to snap his fingers to get all the people back. But, oh come on, there is always a but, past Thanos comes back to defeat the avengers again and get the stones to snap his fingers. The avengers win the end game and erase him from existence.
This is where my questions begin, if Thanos gets to know about his future, what happens and how he dies, wouldn’t he just stop it from happening in the future? When the avengers get to the garden, he could just have moved to a different planet or sneaked upon them and killed them all. Of course, that doesn’t happen, coz he’s dead. If he went to the future from a past time and died, then he wasn’t alive to snap his fingers the first time around. If he didn’t erase 50% of the population then the avengers would have never gone back in time to borrow the stones, in which case, Thanos wouldn’t have been able to come to the future where he inevitably dies. This loop is loopier than looper.