Proof that Time Travel Harry did not fix Little Chicago?? (CD Spoilers)

[Cenphx]

         We learned from Odin that there are laws that govern the progression of time in relation to space. Altering the future is easier than changing one’s past, which is more than mildly difficult. Overcoming the inertia of an event to remain as it originally occurred requires tremendous energy, will and a measure of simple luck.

         The larger, more significant or more energy in the event, the more inertia it has to stay the same and the echoes caused by a temporal event are proportionately greater than the span of time that was bridged. If centuries are bridged, echoes begin far, far in advance. We see that the energy echoes happening in the day before the events at Demonreach allowed Harry to determine that the spell was being cast that same day or hours around that time.

         Now consider Little Chicago. If it had not been fixed, it would have exploded with tremendous energy. It would have killed Harry, so it was a significant event in his timeline. Therefore, it is a large, significant, energetic event with an equal amount of inertia working to keep it happening the same way. Therefore, if a time-traveling Harry went back into his own past to fix Little Chicago, which occurred 6 years ago in the Dresden Files timeline, at the very least we should have been seeing echoes 6 years before Proven Guilty, right? And the further in time we get from the fixing of LC to when we see TT Harry make the trip, the early the echoes should have started.

        In Cold Days, the echoes we saw from the events at Demonreach included an energy building up, like a steam boiler, that was going to explode and take out the midwest. I'm not sure what kind of echoes to look for from TT Harry stopping the explosion of LC and his own death, but I can't think of anything that would fit the bill.

       Does this sound a death knell for the idea that Time Travel Harry fixed Little Chicago? Can anyone think of potential echoes which prove that Harry did travel back in time and avert his own death??

[Elegast]

       Does this sound a death knell for the idea that Time Travel Harry fixed Little Chicago?

No. TTH would not change the past as LC has already been fixed.

[wyltok]

You're making the assumption that Future Dresden traveled to the past to change it, rather than Future Dresden traveled to the past to ensure everything happened the way it was meant to. Think Harry Potter and the Prisioner of Azkaban, where Potter makes the Stag Patronus that saves himself and Sirius from the Dementors.

If the situation here is like the one in Harry Potter, then the time travel is aligned with the temporal inertia, rather than against it, so there would be no temporal echoes in the past. Instead, the temporal echoes would occur near the time in the future where Dresden travels to the past, with the echoes being a result of the timeline changing if Dresden fails to do what he already did.

[raidem]

Actually, I think you are correct Cenphx.  Time Traveling Harry could still be present but he wasn't the one that originally fixed Little Chicago.  Someone else did that.  It could be possible that he takes the place of the one who did fix it, which would require less effort.  Though that still begs the question as to who fixed it in the first place.
Odin, Mab, Mac, Rashid, Ebenezer, Langtry.  I'm sure one of those are our culprit.

[Ms Duck]

Ill consider it proof. 

for one thing, the amount of energy it takes to change anything in the past, from odins explanation, increases exponentially the farther into the future you are from.

its been over 7 years...

all the arguments for time traveling harry require he will some day agin godlike power, and I don't see that happening.

[Cenphx]

You're making the assumption that Future Dresden traveled to the past to change it, rather than Future Dresden traveled to the past to ensure everything happened the way it was meant to. Think Harry Potter and the Prisioner of Azkaban, where Potter makes the Stag Patronus that saves himself and Sirius from the Dementors.

If the situation here is like the one in Harry Potter, then the time travel is aligned with the temporal inertia, rather than against it, so there would be no temporal echoes in the past. Instead, the temporal echoes would occur near the time in the future where Dresden travels to the past, with the echoes being a result of the timeline changing if Dresden fails to do what he already did.

Ugh, this is why I LOATHE time travel. I am admittedly horrible at reasoning this out. But let me try...

Ok, only one of two people could have changed LC in our example. Now Harry or Future Harry. We know Now Harry did not do it because Now Harry has no memory of doing so and we don’t watch him do so (though I guess he has “forgotten” things like ordering his own death and his blasting rod, so this may not be a safe assumption, but let’s table that for now).  Therefore, it is Future Harry which takes the actions changing LC (like in the example you used, it is Future Potter). If Future Harry does not act, then LC blows up.

If you say, well, Future Harry always was going to fix LC, so he is not changing the past, he is making it happen the way it was always supposed to, then there would be no such thing as changing the past because every action Future Person takes is always the action they would have taken and the past is never altered [/u]. Yet we know from Odin’s speech that such a thing is possible, though difficult.

[ReturnToOne]

I thought the echo thing was unique to demon reach?

[Cenphx]

I thought the echo thing was unique to demon reach?

Well, that description I put in the OP is pretty much word for word what Odin said to Harry at Mac's bar in Cold Days. It was definitely in the context of figuring out when the attack was going to happen at Demonreach, but I thought it was defining time travel generally, not a situation special or specific to the time travel sheninigans happening at DR. That was just my take on it though...

[Griffyn612]

Cold Days Incident
I'm one of the biggest TTH theory supporters around.  At least, I talk about it the most.  So understand that as I analyze your observation, I do so in a slightly biased fashion. 

First, my interpretation of what caused the build-up is different from what yours is.  You seem to think that the energy build-up felt on the island was due to someone messing with time.  My interpretation was that it was a build-up of energy by the attack that had already commenced.

See, Maeve and Lily both hit DR with a lot of power within a time-dilation field.  Harry and the Hunt were caught in the time-dilation field, and Odin Claus had to break them through it to get them there on time.  Once there, they battled the Outsiders first, and then went after the Ladies.

The Ladies had a good amount of time to attack DR.  Their attack was designed to hit DR not only in one place at one time, but at one place from multiple times.  That's the other purpose of the time-dilation they cast; it allowed their attack to happen simultaneously with other times.  That energy attack is what set off the build-up of energy felt by DR.  The build-up wasn't from the explosion of the island, or the time-stream trying to be changed; it was from the attack.  Bob himself showed a movie about it, where the attack was represented as a dissonance against the protection spells on the island.  It was that dissonance build-up that caused the flares which were felt on the island.

Since there's no time-dilating attack in PG, there wouldn't have to be a build-up like the one we saw on DR. 

Proven Guilty Incident
I understand your dilemma with the time-travel theory.  That if Harry travels back and fixes LC, but didn't fix it the first time, then we end up with a paradox/splinter universe, like Odin describes.

But the ANSWER has been provided in Cold Days!  (Ta-Da!)

Ready for it? 

Merlin didn't build the prison five times; he built it once at five times.

Harry doesn't travel back in time to fix LC; he creates a temporal joining between the two times, so that they occur together, just like Merlin did to create DR.

There was no first time when Harry didn't fix LC, or someone else did, because the first time the events of PG occur, Harry creates a temporal bridge with a future time, thus allowing it all to occur at the same time!

BOOM!!!!  Mind blown.

[Ms Duck]

Problem

Merlin's power and skill >>>>>> Harry's

to the point im convinced Merlin was working for a cosmic level power when he did that; no mortal is capable of building a prison that can hold a titan.

your theory demands Harry gains godlike power. It always had. Im not ready to buy that yet.

[wyltok]

I thought the echo thing was unique to demon reach?

Hm, I just re-read that section, and it seems I remembered how this works incorrectly. We are actually discussing two separate things.

- There is a law of conservation of history, what Odin calls temporal inertia. This makes changing the past considerably harder than changing the future.

- There is a secondary effect which is the temporal echoes. This effect always manifests for a longer time than the actual time gap that's bridged. Think of ripples in a pond, expanding from the point of impact.

The first element is fairly straightforward, as Elegast pointed out: If Future Harry always traveled to the past to fix LC, then there would be no going against temporary inertia. In which case, Cenphx later post would be correct: Future Dresden did not actually change the past. He merely travelled in time. In time travel, this is known as a time loop. This is considered a paradox, because it means that the knowledge about the flaw in Little Chicago literally appeared out of nowhere (onthological paradox).

Paradoxes aside, it's worth keeping in mind that just because one can travel to the past and not change it does not mean that one cannot travel to the past and change; one thing does not exclude the other (just because some balloons are blue does not mean all balloons are blue).

Now, the temporal echoes or ripples are definitely a bigger problem than I originally thought. From how Odin describes them, they always happen, whether you're traveling forwards or backwards in time. This would imply that the ripples travel in both directions along the timeline, I think? Though there's no mention of echoes after the dawn of November 1st...

The other point regarding the echoes is the magnitude of them, as Cenphx originally pointed out. For a multi-state explosion, the echoes were appropriately massive. I have to agree with the OP: I have no idea what the echoes of a time-travelling Harry would be.

... time travel is confusing.

[Griffyn612]

Problem

Merlin's power and skill >>>>>> Harry's

to the point im convinced Merlin was working for a cosmic level power when he did that; no mortal is capable of building a prison that can hold a titan.

your theory demands Harry gains godlike power. It always had. Im not ready to buy that yet.

Ah, but Odin himself in CD says that "bridging a temporal gap of any length is something utterly beyond the reach of any mortal practitioner acting alone."

Merlin is/was mortal.  So he couldn't have done it alone.  And Odin proves both knowledge of temporal bridges and practical use of temporal bridges in CD.

My bet is Odin helped Merlin, since Odin taught him to begin with, and Odin knows so much about DR.  Team effort?  I'd say so.

So who's to say at some future point, there isn't a situation that arises where Odin agrees that Harry needs to go back and 'bridge' the two separate times for something to happen?

Or Mab, for that matter.  If Maeve and Lily can work together to create a temporal-distortion around DR, then Mab could probably arrange it. 

[Cenphx]

Cold Days Incident
I'm one of the biggest TTH theory supporters around.  At least, I talk about it the most.  So understand that as I analyze your observation, I do so in a slightly biased fashion. 

First, my interpretation of what caused the build-up is different from what yours is.  You seem to think that the energy build-up felt on the island was due to someone messing with time.  My interpretation was that it was a build-up of energy by the attack that had already commenced.

See, Maeve and Lily both hit DR with a lot of power within a time-dilation field.  Harry and the Hunt were caught in the time-dilation field, and Odin Claus had to break them through it to get them there on time.  Once there, they battled the Outsiders first, and then went after the Ladies.

The Ladies had a good amount of time to attack DR.  Their attack was designed to hit DR not only in one place at one time, but at one place from multiple times.  That's the other purpose of the time-dilation they cast; it allowed their attack to happen simultaneously with other times.  That energy attack is what set off the build-up of energy felt by DR.  The build-up wasn't from the explosion of the island, or the time-stream trying to be changed; it was from the attack.  Bob himself showed a movie about it, where the attack was represented as a dissonance against the protection spells on the island.  It was that dissonance build-up that caused the flares which were felt on the island.

Since there's no time-dilating attack in PG, there wouldn't have to be a build-up like the one we saw on DR. 

Well, to be honest, as I was writing the OP, I realized that I didn’t really understand/recall enough about what the heck all was going on with time and energy at Demonreach.  But I kinda figured that for purposes of this post, I didn’t need to have the intricacies of what was happening there down pat, because I was relying on what Odin explained about how time travel wherein you change the past means that you cause temporal echoes. For the Little Chicago example, we are talking about changing the past (aside from the arguments against whether this is really changing the past or merely assuring it, as Elegast and wyltok were noting) and THAT would cause the temporal echoes Odin described, regardless of whether time travel was involved with DR.  So I guess I was hoping to skirt my non-understanding of the precise nature of what was happening at Demonreach.

But let’s talk about it for a second. You are saying the energy buildup which was going to cause the explosion Molly was talking to Harry when he first gets to Chicago is NOT due to someone futzing with time but is a result of the spell Maeve and Lily were performing, if I understand you correctly. But how is it that the energy buildup had already started before Harry even met with Molly? Remember Molly had already been talking to Lea about it, so not necessarily days or anything, but people were noticing the energy backlash definitely some time before that night at Demonreach. I noticed that you said their (Maeve/Lily’s) attack was happening simultaneously with other times. I could see that. But it couldn’t have been happening as early as when Molly noticed the energy building up, because didn’t Harry met with both Maeve and Lilly at the Botanical Gardens after that?   

[Cenphx]

Cold Days Incident
Proven Guilty Incident
I understand your dilemma with the time-travel theory.  That if Harry travels back and fixes LC, but didn't fix it the first time, then we end up with a paradox/splinter universe, like Odin describes.

But the ANSWER has been provided in Cold Days!  (Ta-Da!)

Ready for it? 

Merlin didn't build the prison five times; he built it once at five times.

Harry doesn't travel back in time to fix LC; he creates a temporal joining between the two times, so that they occur together, just like Merlin did to create DR.

There was no first time when Harry didn't fix LC, or someone else did, because the first time the events of PG occur, Harry creates a temporal bridge with a future time, thus allowing it all to occur at the same time!

BOOM!!!!  Mind blown.

Hmm...I guess when I was imagining Merlin creating DR, I picture it as there was one Merlin existing in one place which happened to be a joining of 5 different times, like he had folded time like a ribbon and the spot where the folds were held together was were he was standing when he worked the magic to create Demonreach. So it was one Merlin at five different points in time, but at the same time.

But that doesn't work for the Little Chicago example, because even if you folded time to make the future and the time of Proven Guilty touch, there would be 2 Harrys in existence at the time LC was fixed,  the one who knows it was being fixed and our Harry who had no idea.

[Ms Duck]

Ah, but Odin himself in CD says that "bridging a temporal gap of any length is something utterly beyond the reach of any mortal practitioner acting alone."

Merlin is/was mortal.  So he couldn't have done it alone.  And Odin proves both knowledge of temporal bridges and practical use of temporal bridges in CD.

My bet is Odin helped Merlin, since Odin taught him to begin with, and Odin knows so much about DR.  Team effort?  I'd say so.

So who's to say at some future point, there isn't a situation that arises where Odin agrees that Harry needs to go back and 'bridge' the two separate times for something to happen?

Or Mab, for that matter.  If Maeve and Lily can work together to create a temporal-distortion around DR, then Mab could probably arrange it.

sorry griff, I doubt Odin's that strong. we are talking white god level, there.

a Titan could take out Odin or Mab by sneezing hard. Odin is in the category of 'can walk around fine on earth without causing so much as a temperature change' -- he nowhere near that level.