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Temporal mechanics give me a headache

11 replies · 2,451 views · Started 27 May 2003

"If you hadn't screwed up my past, your future wouldn't be like this."

Who says cartoonists can't be philosophers?

That particular strip makes perfect sense to me. *shrug* It is funny, though.

If I do understand correctly, he went forward in time because he wanted to pick up his homework and it would be done in the future, except that he didn't do it in the first place and wasn't going to so in the future it wasn't done anyway. In the future it would've been done if he'd written it in the first place. Of course, if he wrote it he'd have no reason to go forward in time to pick it up, as his intent was to totally skip writing it. If he wrote it at the time he left, it would've been written in the future; he didn't write it, and wasn't going to between then and the point in the future he went to, so it wasn't.

A simpler explanation. Calvin tried to get the finished homework without doing it, and thus it wasn't done.

Aaah, the wonders of temporal physics! (If I recall right, Future Hobbes and Past Hobbes ended up writing the paper, although Calvin didn't particular like the result when he got to read it in class.)

Aaah. But you see, as demonstrated by Bill & Ted, Esquires, if you plan to later use your time machine to bring something *back* from the future and place it where you need it in the past, everything works out just fine.

Dude, that was a movie with Keanu Reeves in it. You can't take those seriously.. *goes out to see the Matrix again*

You can always find someone to take the blame...

Aint that the truth? It's also the new American way, if I understand my lawyer correctly.