MR F

Robert DeNiro Mafia is in sign-ups at HV - we would love to have you!

Happy Bday Mr. F!

Also I am sad that you didn't invite me into the unbelievablysuperawesomepeopleclub but I will forgive you because it's your birthday.

Sweet! I'm in! Wait... are there fees? Cause you know, I'm broke.

You're awesome, just for the record!

Haha. I'm gonna send him a request right now.

http://forum.lostpedia.com/showthrea...62#post2876462

If you were the actual time traveler, then you would be able to percieve (it would be in your memory) the loop of the string, ie the previous reality that caused you to time travel to the past and thereby change it, but to everyone else it would be invisible. They'd think the string from where it crosses itself in the loop is the only part of the string that has ever been beyond that crossing...

The result of the change could even be that you kill your own grandfather and you never get born along the the new line of string, but still no paradox, you were born within the now hidden loop part of the string that no-one else can see.

A parallel universe would be that the original string keeps going along it's merry way, even though theres time travel, but a new piece of string would be tied to the original one from where the time traveler travels back to.Edit: with the extra dimension of time theory, there is only ever one piece of string. It's just that time travel causes that piece of string to loop back on itself to create a two-dimensional string-mat.

Exactly.

No, you don't need alternative universes. You just need an extra dimension of time. If you imagine the timeline as a piece of string, with time travel, that peice of string loops back on itself and and continues on again from where it crosses itself, right alongside where it's previous bit did before. The timeline is no longer a 'line' of string: it's now a time mat, made of string, but where to everyone in the string it seems that there is still just a line, represented by the outer surface of that mat.... It's like everyone thinking the earth is flat (two dimensional) when really, as we now know, it's a sphere (three dimensional). But try telling a caveman that! In theory you'd still be able to follow the line of string backwards through it's loops along the mat and show what caused the outer surface of the mat that seems like, ie there is in actuallity no causal paradox; it just seems like it.