Is time parallel and can Neverland move through time?

[Myril]

@RumplesGirl wrote:

@AngieBelle wrote:

I think Adam and Eddy confirmed that time works differently in Neverland. It’s like in Narnia- remember years went by with the children as the princes and princesses of Narnia, but when they returned, almost no time had passed in our world. Then when they went back to Narnia a year later, it was like 1,000 years later in Narnia.

I guess I have to question what “time” means when A and E say that. Because like Phee pointed out “time being different” has not affected the rotation of the sun, so far as we can tell. Bae found out about Milah in the daytime and seemingly that night he was taken by the Lost Ones. So far as we could tell time wasn’t moving faster in between those two scenes nor was it moving more slowly. So when they say time moves differently, I wonder if it’s on a personal level: your own personal biological time works differently.

A good question: What is time? Time in physics, time in biology and medicine (chrono-biology), time in society (sociology of time), time experienced individual (psychological time perception) … Plenty of answers depending on who you asks.

The camera, or viewer, in that moment were inside the time frame of Neverland, so we couldn’t notice any difference. 😉 No one would notice the difference unless comparing it with how much time went by in a place outside Neverland. You have to be an outside observer to notice. Maybe you’ve heard of gravitational time dilation effect. Clocks on different altitudes already tick slightly different, like on the ISS compared to Houston. Anyone who spends a bit of time on the ISS ages slightly less than those remained on earth do, but if you ask them, their days are not longer, still 24 hours if measured with clocks. At the same time they experience on the ISS a different cycle of night and dark, being not in stationary orbit, what might influence their sense of time (psychology).

Biological time, biological clocks, circadian rhythms are another thing. Our bodies are full of those, more or less in sync with each other, more or less finding common ground. Guess everybody know of larks and night owls, which are chronotypes: some people just don’t function early in the morning, while other are already of no good use right after prime time TV. Recent research suggests, that our internal clocks on average have a 24 hours and 11 minutes day cycle, independent of chronotype or something like age (older research said it was closer to 25-hour day, but that couldn’t be confirmed)

And then there is the psychology of time, how we percieve time individually – and that varys with what we experience. We all know that, when we’re excicted and looking forward to something or if we are utterly bored it sometimes seems like time slows down, turning into snail time, while when something is exciting and fun time flies.

We’re not going to find answers in science here, and doubt science fiction will be of much help either.

What Wendy described, makes it sound like she has experienced there at least part of a day day and a night, maybe more (when night fell the children missed their parents and cried through the night). In my opinion it’s not about how someone there perceives time, it’s as real as Neverland is real. Time there moves faster. It’s at last one day (including a night) in Neverland while in our world and FTL just a couple of hours passed. Neverland is, to use science fiction terms, in another dimension, alternative universe, alternative reality, if their “earth” rotates faster has no effects on other worlds like ours.(it’s the earth’s rotation causing night and day, saying the sun rotates is mistakable ;))

Daniel suggested a ratio of 7:1 or even more, but I think actually less. We could otherwise get in trouble with main cast now spending a bit of time in Neverland while others still are in SB and FTL – we don’t want the main character meet the grown up daughters and sons of those left behind when they return, do we. 😉 Not to mention Jared is visibly growing up, can’t stay too long in a land where no one grows up, ages, or we need another actor for Henry. Unless things have changed in Neverland when the Dark Curse was enacted. We still don’t know how much it effected other realms. Bit contrived but possible that by now time in the different worlds is in sync.

Not aging in Neverland has nothing to do with the pace of time there. Time passed, but people don’t age (convenient particular when time moves at a different pace than other worlds and people travel between these worlds)

Like the idea of shadows taken being somehow connected with not aging, but if you only age when you don’t have a shadow anymore, at least Smee and Hook have to lose their shadows too or they would be older by now.

[timespacer]

[attachment=0:2eckzfy0]timelines.pdf[/attachment:2eckzfy0]I’ve been thinking that it’s possible to account for everything we’ve
seen so far without invoking any time travel at all. We just have to
assume that there is no absolute time connecting the different
worlds. Even though we have seen that time does appear to be
synchronized between our world and the Enchanted Forest, that could be a special case; it doesn’t imply that time is the same for all
worlds. In fact, we know from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that
there is no such thing as absolute time; time is a local phenomenon
and different observers, moving relative to one another or experiencing different gravitational fields as myril pointed out, may measure
very different time intervals. Even if they once shared the same time and
place, two moving observers may later measure different time intervals and not even agree on whether a particular event lies in the past or in the future. Most of us tend to ignore this property of time because the effect is very small unless the relative velocities are very large, but it can be significant in many cases, such as calculating one’s location from GPS signals (If you have a GPS in your car or your cell phone, you are doing General Relativity calculations – impress your friends with that!)

Anyway, my point is not to give a physics lesson but just to point out
that we don’t have to assume there is a universal time connecting all
the worlds just because we have seen a connection between
time in our world and in the Enchanted Forest. We’ve already been told that “time is different” in Neverland, so we can avoid time travel as long as characters only move forward in time within a given world. Moving between worlds means you join the time of the world to which you have travelled; it makes no sense to say whether that time is “before” or “after” the time in the world you left because the two worlds do not share a common definition for “before” and “after”. We can only apply “before” and “after” to events within a given world and to the
history of a person who has travelled between worlds.

We can obey this rule if we simply assume that Bae arrived in Neverland after Henry’s picture arrived there. Since Henry appears to be about his current age in the picture, that picture was sent from our world (or will be sent!) sometime within a year or two of the present. For simplicity, let’s just guess an arbitrary date and assume for this example that the picture was sent from our world exactly one year ago. Since Neverland and our world do not share a common time, that doesn’t mean the picture arrived in Neverland one year ago – “one year ago” here doesn’t say anything about the time in Neverland. We don’t know how long that picture had been in Neverland before Bae arrived but we definitely know it was there before he was and before Hook arrived since Peter Pan had been searching for Henry for some time. It’s true young Bae had not yet fathered Henry when he arrived in Neverland but one can’t say the picture arrived in Neverland “before” Henry was born because Henry was not born in Neverland – his birth is an event that took place in our world so it has no direct link to time in Neverland. Henry’s birth lies in Bae’s future but it lies in Neverland’s past. What makes this confusing is Bae’s ability to move from one world’s time (the
Enchanted Forest) to another world’s time (Neverland) but we know from
Rumples statement in “The Return” that travelling between worlds means crossing “the barriers of time and space.”

To help illustrate all this, I’ve drawn some partial timelines in the accompanying PDF. To save space, I only drew our world, the Enchanted Forest, and Neverland but one could construct similar timelines for all the lands we’ve seen. Forward movement in time corresponds to movement upward along a particular timeline in the diagram, so events near the bottom of a timeline occur earlier than events above them on that particular timeline . Notice that there is in general no significance to the vertical position on the page of events on different timelines. I’ve color-coded some of the events to make it easier to spot events which involve more than one timeline, such as Bae travelling from Neverland (NL) to our world (US) which is labeled as “Bae: NL to US” in the diagram.

So long as Bae only moves forward in time in one world (upward along one line in the diagram) there is no time travel in the usual sense of the word. If he moves between worlds, say NL and US, it’s irrelevant that the event “Bae: NL to US” happens to be shown higher on the page along the Neverland timeline than it is along our timeline – since they are in different timelines, the “Bae:NL to US” event in Neverland can not be said to occur before or after the “Bae:NL to US” event in our world. Indeed, both labels refer to the same event which represents a single moment in Bae’s personal history. Of course, if he returns to a world he visited previously, he can’t arrive at a time that would be earlier in his personal history without invoking time travel, i.e. if adult Bae goes to Neverland in Season 3 and arrives there during the same time young Bae was there, then we clearly have time travel.

Finally, I drew some horizontal lines on the figure linking events in our world and the Enchanted Forest to remind us that we have seen that time does appear to be synchronized between those two worlds so some events (like the curse breaking) can be said to occur at the “same time” in both worlds.

[RumplesGirl]

Ok TimeSpacer: I’m going to sit and read your post and make comments as I go. If it’s jumbled it’s because I’m just letting my thoughts flow. Here we go:

In fact, we know from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that
there is no such thing as absolute time; time is a local phenomenon
and different observers, moving relative to one another or experiencing different gravitational fields as myril pointed out, may measure
very different time intervals. Even if they once shared the same time and
place, two moving observers may later measure different time intervals and not even agree on whether a particular event lies in the past or in the future. Most of us tend to ignore this property of time because the effect is very small unless the relative velocities are very large, but it can be significant in many cases, such as calculating one’s location from GPS signals (If you have a GPS in your car or your cell phone, you are doing General Relativity calculations – impress your friends with that!)

True. But I believe it was Myril who pointed out (I can’t remember which thread. Myril if you read this, chime in and let me know what you were saying) that our answer to the time question isn’t going to be solved via science. Science and magic are tricky. People generally assume they are opposites but the are not. Truth be told I tend to follow Arthur C. Clarke’s law that

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

and that science and magic are actually very similar. People may believe that science evolved from magic, following Frazer (see: The Golden Bough) but the two are not mutually exclusive. With that said there is the question of genre. While I think drawing a hard line between sci fi and fantasy is a futile exercise (especially in today’s TV/literature examples) I think it may apply here. Thus far everything about NL (that we’ve seen) has been magical, such as the Shadow and ripping shadows from boys. I think magic will explain any time issues, not science. I think that outside of NL, THO is well funded and uses science because in our world it’s the only thing they can use.

Since Neverland and our world do not share a common time, that doesn’t mean the picture arrived in Neverland one year ago – “one year ago” here doesn’t say anything about the time in Neverland. We don’t know how long that picture had been in Neverland before Bae arrived but we definitely know it was there before he was and before Hook arrived since Peter Pan had been searching for Henry for some time. It’s true young Bae had not yet fathered Henry when he arrived in Neverland but one can’t say the picture arrived in Neverland “before” Henry was born because Henry was not born in Neverland – his birth is an event that took place in our world so it has no direct link to time in Neverland. Henry’s birth lies in Bae’s future but it lies in Neverland’s past. What makes this confusing is Bae’s ability to move from one world’s time (the
Enchanted Forest) to another world’s time (Neverland) but we know from
Rumples statement in “The Return” that travelling between worlds means crossing “the barriers of time and space.”

I see what you’re saying (I think 😆 ) but I also think that this needs to be brought up: it’s a TV show and the explanation for Henry’s pic needs to be simple enough for the causal Sunday viewer (in other words: NOT US) to understand. I think it’s far more likely given the importance of prophecy already that Peter has the gift of sight. The casual member of the audience can understand that–in so much as they understand prophecy to be seeing into the future (never mind what it really means). Think LOST. The second they started time traveling and being in the past but not remembering being in the past because whatever happened happened and was happening to them currently, the viewing went down because it was unfamiliar territory for some and it got really confusing. I think H and K learned from that. Even though you’re not suggesting time travel, I think we might want to employ Occam’s Razor here: among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Also there are some preconceived notions going into NL: that time doesn’t move. At least..biological time. It might be safer to stick with something familiar given that they are about to turn the story of PP on its head.

EDIT (a word about audience smartness)

I’m not trying to say that the casual viewer isn’t smart or can’t hold really complicated myths in their head along with equally complicated constructs, but then I look at season 2. H and K have always acknowledged that they have a really smart audience but then came the taser and they caught so much crap for it. They said once they assumed that because their audience was so smart they would know it wasn’t a normal taser. And the audience didn’t. And it was, for H and K, their biggest regret of S2.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[timespacer]

@RumplesGirl wrote:

But I believe it was Myril who pointed out (I can’t remember which thread. Myril if you read this, chime in and let me know what you were saying) that our answer to the time question isn’t going to be solved via science. Science and magic are tricky. People generally assume they are opposites but the are not. Truth be told I tend to follow Arthur C. Clarke’s law that

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Excellent point, RG. I agree that they don’t need to actually address any of this in the show; it’s a fantasy after all and they can just say “It’s prophecy” and still be consistent with everything already established in the show. I just find it fun to consider all the various interpretations, given all the questions about the appearance of Henry’s picture at the end of the episode and the debates about “No time travel.”

And I LOVE the fact that you quoted Clarke’s Law! Any reference to Arthur C. Clarke makes my day! 😀

[RumplesGirl]

Excellent point, RG. I agree that they don’t need to actually address any of this in the show; it’s a fantasy after all and they can just say “It’s prophecy” and still be consistent with everything already established in the show. I just find it fun to consider all the various interpretations, given all the questions about the appearance of Henry’s picture at the end of the episode and the debates about “No time travel.”

And I LOVE the fact that you quoted Clarke’s Law! Any reference to Arthur C. Clarke makes my day! 😀

I agree. It’s really fun to try and explain all the various way it could happen and I really liked everything you had to say (took me four times to read through it all…but I liked it :))

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[timespacer]

I think the PDF sums it up better than all the text in my post – a picture really is worth a thousand words. I started to post it as an image instead of a link, but I fear it would be too troublesome for people to scroll past it if they aren’t interested – it’s a full page.

[Myril]

@RumplesGirl wrote:

True. But I believe it was Myril who pointed out (I can’t remember which thread. Myril if you read this, chime in and let me know what you were saying) that our answer to the time question isn’t going to be solved via science. Science and magic are tricky. People generally assume they are opposites but the are not. Truth be told I tend to follow Arthur C. Clarke’s law that

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

and that science and magic are actually very similar. People may believe that science evolved from magic, following Frazer (see: The Golden Bough) but the two are not mutually exclusive. With that said there is the question of genre. While I think drawing a hard line between sci fi and fantasy is a futile exercise (especially in today’s TV/literature examples) I think it may apply here. Thus far everything about NL (that we’ve seen) has been magical, such as the Shadow and ripping shadows from boys. I think magic will explain any time issues, not science. I think that outside of NL, THO is well funded and uses science because in our world it’s the only thing they can use.

It was in this thread, my previous post 😉 It’s of course nevertheless fun to see, how much science as we know it can be applied to the logic of the universe of OUaT.

The question of genre. Agree, drawing a hard line between science fiction and fantasy is futile, in the sense that stories told can have elements of both. But there is a difference between science fiction and fantasy. In fantasy for example a witch has magic, that is part of what makes her a witch, part of the archetype witch (more so witches have evil magic or use it for evil) and nothing that has to be explained. In science fiction a witch has at best powers which look like magic, but if you digg deeper one likely will find some machine or biological-chemical substance at work, a more or less scientific explanation (if that explanation is all true to or science is another thing, but it has to have a scientifical tone). Great example for the latter is an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, where an imposter pretends to be the devil playing on a myth believed in on some planet – of course the crew of the Enterprise finds the gadgets and exposes her as fraud. But I still have a big laugh every time I hear the midichloria explanation on Star Wars, because it forced a science fiction tone on a story that did very fine as a fantasy universe and so didn’t need that kind of explanation. Space opera doesn’t equal science fiction. Franchises like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica are fantasy universes, with more of a fantasy logic than science ficion logic. Just because of space and the extensive use of technology we tend to perceive them as something more like science fiction than fairy tale – but they are way closer to fairy tales than to science fiction.

And then there is supernatural fiction. While fairy tale story logic and plots not at all care if what they describe could be found like that in nature, supernatural stories imply more that something is part of nature although something that our science is not able to explain, it’s a bit between fairy tale fantasy and science fiction and horror. Supernatural is something that plays most of the time in our world (or world resembling our world), there is (weird) science and technology, it is eventually embeded in real historical events and involves more or less mystical creatures like vampires, werewolves, ghosts. Grimm is a recent example for a show with supernatural tone, even though playing with figures and archetypes drawn from fairy tales, and the notion that the Grimms where more than fairy tale story tellers (they were indeed linguists and cultural researchers, but that is not the point).

Now what is OUaT? it’s fantasy with supernatural and maybe a few science fiction elements, but the basic logic of the OUaT universe is a fantasy one, a fairy tale logic. A witch is a witch because she can do magic, a fairy is a fairy and does magic, a curse works because there is magic. That was all still quite clear in first season, despite discussing how can a town created by magic exist in a world without magic. But in second season this element of magic vs. science has been brought in, first through Dr. Whale and then Greg and Tamara, and I think since we are somewhat struggling to find and follow the logic working inside of the OUaT universe. Had to remind myself that this show is still basically fantasy not science fiction.

Story telling 101: keep things simple. That some have the ability to see into the future, no matter how blurry and misleading these views are, has been established, in fantasy logic no problem, there is magic, so people can see the future. It is the simple solution to explain, why the Lost Boys in past Neverland have a picture of present Henry. I agree with RumplesGirl here. TimeSpacer your idea can work but it is hard to grasp and thus more confusing than explaining. Fun to ponder though.

While time was an important story element on Lost, and because K&H worked on the show we like to look at Lost for references, I don’t see time ever be an important plot on OUaT. It is already too much of an issue in my opinion. And when fans are discussing more technical details of a story like this t-thing instead of character development, and the writers claim it’s a character driven show, then something is going wrong.

¯\_(?????? ?)_/¯

[RumplesGirl]

While time was an important story element on Lost, and because K&H worked on the show we like to look at Lost for references, I don’t see time ever be an important plot on OUaT. It is already too much of an issue in my opinion. And when fans are discussing more technical details of a story like this t-thing instead of character development, and the writers claim it’s a character driven show, then something is going wrong.

I agree. I think in the end the questions of “why does Peter have a picture of Henry” or “how does time not move in NL (or move slowly or fast…whatever)?” will be answered: because magic. Which is perfectly acceptable in a show like OUaT because they set us up from the first moment of the series with Charming waking up Snow with TLK that magic exists.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[kfchimera]

I know I referenced Clarke’s quote somewhere, as well as that we would not have a technical science solution somewhere. I feel like Cora/Regina about tracking hearts–there’s too many threads and it is impossible to keep track who said what & where.

My thought is when the writers say no time travel, what they mean is they don’t want to have loops in the timeline so there are not multiple versions of the same character existing /crossing paths. They also want to more or less keep time moving parallel between worlds, as that simplifies things for them to avoid an unintended loop being implied by various storylines they have done or intend to do. The apple was an exception I suppose, as it was an object at a specific point in time, where no contradiction was implied as no one knew where it had gone after Snow chucked it.

There’s a thing with time travel, the “own grandpa” paradox (different than Henry’s family tree issues), and I think they want to avoid that kind of loop as well. Good thing because if it gets any more complicated for that family tree….. 😮

So the picture has to be a prophecy type thing, yet the fact that people can catch glimpses of the future, or live somewhere that they don’t age, and of course, where we have anachronistic clothing/cultural concepts/things available undercuts the idea of no time travel–but that’s where “magic” comes in. So no time travel really means–they don’t intend to have something in the future cause something in the past, even if there are these occasional oddities. (Like how the “real story” of these characters take place in a world influenced by the stories long before). There will always be some other explanation than someone traveling from a point in the future to the point in the past. That explanation of course is magical in nature, like prophecy or people not aging or in some cases time standing still completely. They implied Cora’s bubble made time actually stand still I think, rather than time passing like in SB but no one aging.

Hook: Twenty-eight years?

Cora: You won’t even notice. You’ll be frozen, like all those in this corner of the land. But, when the curse ends, our quest will resume. And, when it does, Regina will truly have lost everything, and then she’ll need me. That’s when we’ll go to this new land. You’ll get your revenge. And me, I’ll… Help her pick up the pieces.

Sooner or later, the writers might just goof on something too, and there’ll be no logical explanation other than “um, it’s magic.”

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

[kfchimera]

That Jefferson hat example came up and it was an exception, to reach and grab an object. In terms of the writers’ thinking, that was still not characters going into a past time and changing history, as in their minds the apple winked out of relevance when it rolled away. Maybe they should have thought of the butterfly effect or something, but they are writing magic not science. So we will just have to suspend disbelief.
If you need a semi-logical sci-fi-magic explanation, Jefferson and Regina’s magic is only strong enough to avoid paradoxes and isolate any and timeline ripple effects for a very small object like an apple.

The writers in general don’t want to (right now) tangle the timelines in general

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

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