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question about "synchronic displacement" in TNG 'Times Arrow' (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de to c/daystrominstitute@startrek.website

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So in this episode they go into a cave, and can read some sort of energy field, as well as Troi having a sense that there are lifeforms present. Geordie explains that the people must be displaced in time, but only by a few milliseconds. If that's true, how is there not overlap? Say the people are a few milliseconds ahead of the enterprise when they arrive, shouldn't they appear a few milliseconds later, as they still would have had to be 'present' during that time? I don't understand how they would be consistently invisible if time is a dimension like space that can be traveled through. Some past (or future) version of them would be present regardless of the desynchronization would they not?

Please if anyone could help me understand or shed some light on this I'd appreciate it.

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[–] commander_la_freak@startrek.website 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Huh. It occurs to me that the writers were treating the passage of time as though they were frame rates of film/ video.

I'm not sure there's anything to this but the concept of matter and energy in our observable reality "vibrating" at a certain frequency might have something to do with the episode. Putting this in film terms we would say that the universe runs at 120fps (or more) while the Enterprise, crew, et al, reside/ experience reality at 60fps, and the orifice aliens experience it on the alternating frames also at 60fps. We're seeing two different narratives taking place on alternating frames.

This doesn't explain why the same planet is still there on the alternating frames.

[–] youronlyone@c.im 2 points 8 months ago

@commander_la_freak @emeralddawn45

That's a new way to explain it, “frame rate”.

Most #scifi that touches on #ParallelWorlds and #TimeTravel use some sort of vibration or frequency. Even in the 90s Japanese #anime entitled #SerialExperimentsLain, it used the Schumann resonance to explain its plot. And of course in #Marvel and #DC they do the same.

But, yeah, I'm not sure either about it. Is there a way to find out which author/writer first thought of this idea? Or, was it based on a real-life theory that scifi authors picked-up independently? Or, was it Star Trek that created this approach?

(And again, that frame rate approach is great. ^_^)

[–] Ensign_Seitler@startrek.website 1 points 11 months ago

My understanding of the concept was that it was something like multiple channels of data being sent along the same wire. So long as the frequencies are the right kind of different they’ll essentially exist completely independent of each other.

Maybe this requires a minimum of two time dimensions so that the variance can result in the different beings following time along different “tracks”?

I took Troi’s awareness of the beings to be a result of the intermittent overlapping bits of time where they did overlap. Like, it happened too quickly to perceive visually, but enough for the empath to have something to pick up on.

[–] half_built_pyramids@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Here's a shot at the balloon filling up with water explanation:

It's like two cars driving down a highway at night. You see the headlights from the car ahead of you illuminating the scenery, but you never catch up to them.

[–] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I think OP is implying that time works like a film strip, so that if I’m five minutes behind you, I see where you were five minutes ago.

That’s the way time travel in Trek works. If you travel from Time B in the future to Time A in the past at a given place, you see the place as it was at that time, including the people who were there.

I think that rather being just shifted in time a la time travel, they were actually dealing with a flex in spacetime, like a curve in the road you can’t quite see around, but Diana could see their essence like light from the tail lights, as in your example.

In other words, they were caught in a time warp, again.

[–] rah@feddit.uk 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

You won't be able to make sense of it because the idea is just some nonsense words made up by writers as a means of allowing the story they wanted to tell to be told. It doesn't make sense because it's writing, not science.

Edit: fascinated by the downvotes.

[–] Lumidaub@feddit.de 1 points 11 months ago

The downvotes are because what you wrote is pointless. We all know it's made up and in the end there is no actual, definitive, real answer. That's not what we're here for. We are here for the creative exercise of finding an answer that fits the universe of the show and episode. You just shut down that creative process.