A Beginner's Guide to Temporal Physics
Time Corps Briefing Document. Version 1.6
Copyright © 1997, 2000 Chris Halliday
All Rights Reserved
A Beginner's Guide to Temporal Physics
Time Corps Briefing Document. Version 1.6
Copyright © 1997, 2000 Chris Halliday
All Rights Reserved
by Col. John Temple, 1st Division
Time is a tricky subject, and time travel makes it more so. It's the kind of subject that can have your head aching within a few pages and make you wish you'd stayed in bed instead of coming in to class. Of course, if you can travel in time, you could always wait until the briefing finishes, then go back to last night, give yourself these notes and spend this morning snug between the sheets, right?
Wrong.
The purpose of this briefing is to familiarise Time Corps recruits with the fundamental principles of temporal physics; its dangers and limitations, what you can get away with and what you can't. Confused agents don't last long in the field, and they can screw up the timeline something fierce along the way, so listen up.
The study of the flow of time and history is called Causal Flow Dynamics, and while it is still a science that is barely understood we have identified the basic principles that govern it. Before we dive in though, we'll go over some basic terminology you'll need.
| "Futureward" or "Uptime" | - Toward the future, ahead in time. |
| "Timeline" | - A history, a sequence of events. |
| "Causal Flow" | - The pattern of cause and effect. |
| "Chronoplasmic Shell" | - The 'skin' of a Parallel. |
| "Clock" | - Verb; to travel in time. |
| "Disruption" | - A causal anomaly or change in history. |
| "Adjustment" | - The correction of a discontinuity. |
| "Event Entity" | - An object or being in space-time. |
| "Event Location" | - A point in space-time. |
| "Absolute Time" | - The 'time' in which the rate of historical change can be measured. |
| "Multiverse" | - A closed system of linked Universes and Dimensions. |
| "Omniverse" | - Everything. The Whole Shebang. |
| "Pastward" or "Downtime" | - Toward the past. |
| "Parallel" | - A Parallel Multiverse |
| "Parachronal" | - Crossing Parallels. |
| "Phase Space" | - The void between Parallels. |
These will help you on your way into the maze that we call causal flow dynamics. Now that you’re grounded in the language, I suggest we take a look at the basics.
These are Mother Nature’s rules, kids. You've got to respect them, because
she sure as hell has no respect for you. These are the rules by which we
live and die; which dictate how our reality is made and whether the mission
your friends died on was a success after all. Pay attention, this section
can be hard going, but if you can’t hack this you’re on the wrong team.
Otherwise known as the Principle of Conservation of Reality, this asserts that the causal flow of the timestream tends to resist disruption by altered events and temporal anomalies. The degree of resistance is inversely related to the sum of the degree of Temporal Uncertainty and the magnitude of the disruption.
While this seems like a bit of a mouthful, it simply means that the
lower the degree of temporal inertia, the less likely the timestream is
to successfully resist the change in history, thus increasing the probability
of a temporal disruption (see The Law of Temporal
Discontinuity, below). Temporal inertia is the effect that allows
us to explore the past without causing chaotic changes to history. If a
traveller appears in the past, he disturbs air molecules, adds to the mass
of the planet, treads on grass, all of which would not have happened had
he not been there. However, as far as history is concerned, these changes
are minor. The air molecules will be replaced by others just like them,
the grass will continue to grow or will be replaced by indistinguishable
blades of grass, and the planet's course will go unchanged by the temporary
addition of an insignificant mass. These minor changes will be absorbed
into background noise of history, without affecting the timeline. However,
numerous changes of this sort may have a cumulative effect, potentially
leading to unpredictable changes in the future. Therefore the Corps maintains
a policy of minimal interaction with the past.
The Law of Temporal Uncertainty
The temporal uncertainty associated with a given event location cannot be measured without altering the event, and is an unknown variable in temporal continuity and causal flow.
This uncertainty is the degree of deviation from the original, undisrupted event location scenario, and is expressed as a function of temporal inertia. Absolute determination of temporal uncertainty is rendered impossible by a number of factors; inaccuracy in historical documentation, inaccuracy in research, and the possibility of historical anomalies caused by pastward temporal discontinuities or their adjustments. Generally speaking, the greater the degree of temporal uncertainty associated with a given event location, the more vulnerable it is to disruption.
Basically, this tells us that we are never going to know how far out
of line history has got, because we don't know exactly what the original
history was like. Even if we have a completely accurate record of what
took place, things may still go awry because of a disruption or an adjustment
that took place at some point further into the past. Getting a completely
accurate record of what originally happened in history is impossible, because
the presence of an observer recording the events is in itself an alteration
of what actually happened. The Corps tries to use non-intrusive methods
to accrue historical data, but we have no idea if what we're getting is
close to the "undisturbed" version of events, or has been altered by the
cumulative effect of almost insignificant changes made further back in
time.
The Law of Temporal Discontinuity
In the event of a disruption of a magnitude sufficient to overcome temporal inertia, the displaced inertial force will result in the creation of a new timeline, chiefly governed by the Destiny Effect and the law of temporal uncertainty.
Though history resists change, it can be altered with sufficient effort.
If history is altered beyond the ability of temporal inertia to suppress,
a whole new future is created, based on the altered events. The nature
of that future is a tug-of-war between fate (see The
Destiny Effect, below) and the law of temporal uncertainty. The
upshot of this is that altered futures tend to resemble the old ones in
some very odd ways. Travellers into these "new futures" are likely to find
the same people in roughly the same historical "niche" as they were before
(if they exist at all), with similar patterns of events occurring
The Law of Temporal Preservation
All event entities located pastwards of a temporal disruption will remain unaffected by the results of that change, even if the event entities originate uptime of the point of disruption.
Finally, the answer to the question nearly everyone asks; "what happens if I shoot my Dad, before he fathered me?" Answer; nothing happens - to you. Time has no problem with this kind of paradox (see Appendix 1: The Nature of Time and Paradox). You don't fade away or suddenly vanish in to a loop of eternally flip-flopping events. You continue to exist as you always have existed. Your memories remain the same. Your body and anything you brought back with you remain the same. For you, nothing changes. But when you arrive in your home time no one will remember you, for in the reality you have just created, you were never born.
The effect described above is also what prevents a traveller from successfully
changing her own personal past. Say you've been shot. Since it's an unpleasant
and painful experience, you understandably wish it hadn't happened. So
you travel back and warn yourself. Your past self takes your advice and
avoids the bullet. But when you return home, you find there are now two
of you; one who got shot and one who didn't. The self who travelled retains
the memories (and scars) of the bullet wound. Fortunately - or perhaps
not - time has an answer to this problem, which we'll address later (see
The
Singularity Principle, below).
In the event of the creation of a temporal disruption, the destiny effect determines the degree to which the original causal flow of the timestream can be restored.
The destiny effect is a function of temporal inertia and the element
of uncertainty both already present and brought about by the disruption,
and is contingent upon the results of the disruption and its adjustment.
In effect, destiny limits the duration of a temporal disruption, eventually
returning the pattern of the causal flow to as close to the original history
as possible. As a rule, the greater the magnitude of the disruption, the
longer it takes for the causal flow to recover. When it does, the effects
of the disruption are absorbed into the background of history.
The degree of temporal inertia associated with a specific event location increases geometrically every time it is disrupted.
Simply stated, the more times an event location is altered, the harder it is to alter it again. However, the total number of disruptions an event location may undergo is directly related to its original degree of temporal inertia, which cannot be measured due to the effects of the law of temporal uncertainty.
The limitation effect manifests itself in a number of ways, from simple 'coincidences' that prevent a disruption from occurring (or at least make it more difficult), to total failure to reach the correct chronospatial co-ordinates. These manifestations are known as Timelock. There are three degrees of timelock, each corresponding to the increased progression of the limitation effect, though in the field these distinctions are rarely used.
Timelock is scary. Personal anecdote time. My squad and I had been up against a psycho with a chronopac and an isolator, who had decided to ice a particular little Austrian headcase before he was old enough to develop a taste for jackboots. We'd bounced around the same events for a while, and things were getting harder by the minute. First he'd shoot the kid, then we'd go back and fix it, then he'd go back and shoot him from a different angle, or at a different time. Finally, we got into a stunner battle on the roof of the kid's schoolhouse. He got the drop on us somehow, stunned us all, and was about to smoke the brat when there was an abrupt hissing noise and he fell over. When we checked him out, he was dead, with a weird pink mist around his head. Turns out he'd suffered a catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage, and the pink stuff was blood.
Don't screw with timelock, because it doesn’t pay to mess with a
universe that'll squirt your brains out of your ears if you annoy it.
This is a variant of the limitation effect, and works to reduce temporal stress by using increasing degrees of timelock to prevent excessive time travel within a chronospatial radius of a given event location, in a direct ratio to it's current temporal inertia.
Effectively, this is nature's way of stopping everyone at the Crucifixion - except the main attraction - from being a time traveller. Trying to crash the most famous parties in history can be pretty frustrating if it's already packed with tourists from 'out of town'. You can end up in the wrong country, the wrong time period, the wrong parallel, or even dead. If you think you're timelocked, don't push it.
A Tech Agent Speaks:
Back when they were still trying to figure out the mechanics of time,
the scientists of the day used to use what we now call the halo effect
to "prove" that temporal travel was impossible. They used to proclaim that
if we could travel in time, all the famous events in history would be knee
deep in "time tourists" taking snapshots of the locals and laughing at
the fashions of the day. At the same time they were smugly stating that
the past was inviolate and that the universe simply wouldn't allow travel
from the future. Meanwhile their theoretical physicists were beginning
to realise that reality wasn't as static as they would like to believe.
Not one of them stopped to think that the reason time travellers weren't
landing outside the UN was that history could be changed, and that since
the traveller's history books said such a thing hadn't happened, they were
being damned careful to stay out of the public eye.
No event entity may exist more than once in the same event location.
This principle is enforced by the fact that each and every event entity has a unique Quantum Signature, defining its existence and location in space-time. No two objects with the same quantum signature may exist within a spatial radius of 5-10 miles (8-16km) of the same event location. Since this may only occur through the use of time travel, this principle effectively prevents time travellers from physically interacting with their past or future selves. In cases where this situation might arise, the 'later' version of the traveller (in terms of his own subjective timeline) simply ceases to exist, effectively self-annihilating on a sub-quantum level. Curiously, though the traveller's body vanishes, his memories and experiences may be accessed by the younger self through the mental ability known as Paramemory, leading many Corps scientists to theorise that the traveller actually merges with his younger self, rather than vanishing. Others take this phenomenon as proof of the continuity and immortality of the soul.
This effect is known as the Loop of Infinity or "looping", because once it has occurred, the traveller is doomed to forever repeat the sequence of events that led to him being looped, unless broken from the loop by external influences or by foreknowledge gained through paramemory.
The quantum signature of an event entity may be altered by extreme changes in its physical nature, such as molecular manipulation, smelting, or in the case of living beings, ageing. For example, the quantum signature of a human being gradually changes with time, as the atoms in his or her body are slowly replaced. This changes the quantum signature enough to avoid looping in approximately seven to ten years.
By introducing a random oscillation into a subject’s quantum signature, it is possible to temporarily bypass this law. However the technology required, known as a Temporal Isolator, is currently only 50% effective. If a subject is in close proximity (four to five meters) with an earlier self when the isolator fails, the result can be the catastrophic event referred to as Chronal Annihilation. Instead of looping, the displaced energy of temporal inertia crushes the two versions of the subject together, causing an extremely localised fusion reaction. This occurrence so disrupts the causal flow that it becomes a meta-event, a permanent disturbance that remains even if history is altered to prevent it.
A Tech Agent Speaks:
The loop is one of the few effects of time travel that is a blessing, as well as a curse. It's the one thing that stops you from altering your own immediate past, and it's also what stops you tripping over multiple versions of yourself every time you successfully complete a mission.
It's like this; say you clock back to 1795, to stop a time wave rolling on uptime. You manage to stop the wave from ever starting, and clock home. But, since the wave was never started, you were never sent on the mission. The preservation effect has stopped you from being affected by the change, so that when you get back - presto! - now there are two of you; one who didn't go on the mission and one who did. But as soon as you get within range of your other self, you (Mr Hero, the mission master) vanish. If it wasn't for paramemory, we'd never have realised that this isn't death.
An Ops Agent speaks:
There isn't one of us who hasn't thought about going back and changing our past, erasing some pain or hurt, taking the road not travelled. Hell, we wouldn't be human if the temptation wasn't there (of course, some of us aren't human, but that's neither here nor there). It's not like it can't be done either. The technology's there. You can hop back along your personal past with no problems at all. Just stay away from yourself. As long as you keep a good distance between you (and I mean a good distance), you'll be fine, but get to close and -poof! - you're history.
I spoke to a guy who tried it once. Of course he claims he misjumped, but we knew the truth. He tried to warn himself about the death of his wife, but it didn't work. He got within 15 klicks of his old home and just…faded away. We broke him out of the loop at the same point we originally recruited him, and he was never the same again. He told me later that it was like a bad dream, that he suddenly found himself reliving his past, unsure if the memories he had of future events were truth or fantasy. In the grip of history, he found it impossible to break the cycle of events and watched his wife die all over again.
It broke him.
The Theory of Temporal Expansion
Time expands to accommodate events.
This controversial theory was first posited in the early 21st Century by Professor Louise Gray in her book Mystic Physics: Why the truth doesn’t want to be found. It states that the timeline of each parallel is expanding to accommodate the history within it. This means in effect that history, and indeed time itself, has a leading edge beyond which nothing exists, and that this leading edge is moving, creating the future at a rate observable in Absolute Time (see below). The leading edge is defined as a sort of ‘true present’, independent of the infinite present experienced by sapients living throughout history. This leading edge moves forwards, creating history by collapsing probability structures into events. However, without observation in absolute time, this theory is unprovable, since any traveller within the timeline attempting to move forward beyond the leading edge would simply be collapsing further probabilities, creating events and moving the leading edge onwards.
This theory may go some way to explaining the phenomenon of extra-temporal meta-events. These are events that apparently defy the law of temporal preservation, having an effect that moves both pastward and futureward. The best known example of this is the so-called Paradigm Shift, and is derived from the idea that reality is created by the observer. The paradigm shift, an event so far unobserved in absolute time, theoretically occurs when a new belief system gains dominance among a given sentient population. When this occurs, the combined will of the population can reshape the parallel around them. This effect moves backwards in time, remaking history to match the current reality. However, it must be noted that this is purely a theory, and one which finds little favour among Corps temporal physicists.
A Tech Op Speaks:
I just can’t get my head around this theory, though I can’t say that it’s not true. My tutor in Advanced Temporal Physics explained it like this: Every sentient at any point in time experiences that point in time as the present. It’s the ‘present’ for you now, and for some guy in Imperial Rome it’s the ‘present’ too. But if there is a sort of "True Present", then there is a point, observable in Absolute Time, where an event has occurred for the very first time. If that is true, then it is possible to have an event that could rewrite it’s own history.
I didn’t get it either.
The example my tutor used was the paradigm shift, as mentioned above. The idea goes that a given population believes that the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the snot god Zog. A traveller going back far enough would even get to see the event as the population believes it happened. Then a rival religion starts up, and this one believes the universe fell out of the ear of the goddess Hogrit. Once the rival’s ideas gain dominance, any traveller going back to the beginning will see creation falling out of the divine ear, as it always has done. The change in reality is the paradigm shift.
I never did very well at Advanced Temporal Physics.
Also known as ‘Imaginary Time’, this is the ‘time’ experienced in phase space, in which the rate of historical change and temporal flow can be measured.
Absolute time exists only for an observer in phase space, but it can be expressed in terms of normal time (often referred to as real time, though this is a misnomer). The Kleindast Absolute Time equations enable the Corps to measure the speed of temporal disturbances such as the time wave or timequake, and estimate the subjective time available before impact on a specified time zone.
An Ops Agent Speaks:
Absolute Time is one of the most difficult concepts in temporal physics, so if you don’t get it, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Just remember that when your commanding officer tells you you’ve got three hours to prepare for a mission before the approaching time wave hits your point of origin and possibly wipes you all out, three hours is all you get. Period.
