How Time Travel ACTUALLY Works in Harry Potter

Today J dives into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter to explain how Time Travel and Time Turners work. We always say “Whatever happened always happens,” but what does that really mean? Do time turners violate the bootstrap paradox? Does it control your actions? Does it remove free will?

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[jeremiahdew]

Does anyone look at J and get the sudden urge to play Monopoly and eat some Pringles? Just me?

[hollynpeterson]

This is why I don’t get why Hermione doesn’t understand Harry when he explains that he knew he could cast the stag when he “already did it”

[DrTimes]

I think an interesting way to explain the situation doesn't use "time travel" at all.
Imagine the timeline as a constant unchanging sequence of events. (I don't know the exact times so I'll just be using numbers). At 3:00 Harry, Ron, and Hermione head to Hagrid's. At 3:05 a second Harry and Hermione are seemingly spontaneously generated with knowledge of the future. The following three hours play out the evening's events between the two groups. At 6:05 Harry and Hermione use the Time Turner, essentially ceasing to exist and allowing the pair that appeared three hours prior to take their place. There is no "first time around." Everything happened once but Harry and Hermione get to experience it twice.

[longc]

I am so glad that you got this right. Ever since Prisoner came out I’ve been hearing people ask “Why don’t they use time turners more? They can fix every problem.” and it is so infuriating because as you explained time turners are incapable of fixing any problems because any problems that exist are problems that you didn’t fix when you used the time turner otherwise they wouldn’t have been problems in the first place.

[JEdits]

Time Turners are based upon the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle which states that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes. This means that when traveling back in time to change an event, that event must have always happened that way and cannot be altered.

[mellow]

Harry Potter's Time Travel is like my favourite version of it but only if you ignore the fever dream of bad writing of the Cursed Child, which you should always be doing anyway let's be honest

[FoxbrushDraws]

The Ravenclaws put it very well already: A circle has no beginning. I think of this a lot when I watch the show Dark as well.

[SkyPerson]

J: **mentions Bootstrap Paradox**

Me (instinctively): Who really wrote Beethovens fifth?

[MoxxoM]

5:03: When he says that with luck two inocent lives can be saved he didn't talk about Buckbeak. He knows that he survived already, since he was there when the Griff disappeared and the executioner hacked a pumpkin into pieces instead. So it's just about Sirius being a potential second survivor.

[eomguel]

Prisoner of Azkaban is imo one of the neatest examples of time travel done right, with a simple, yet logical set of rules. I've always found that frustrating about stories that overuse time travel without consistency because it then becomes a whole mess of alternative time lines that rend every action by the characters irrelevant. How much is actually at stake when fighting the villain if they can always rewind the story until the desired outcome is achieved? But this does not make sense because if you travel back in time to change something that you don't like in your present, then the motivation to travel back in time in the first place disappears, meaning you would not travel back to fix it. Now, with this logical set of rules in place, then time travel is a lot more limited as a plot device, but it can still make for a good story.

[Hi_Im_Akward]

I'll admit that HP time travel is one of the more elegant ways to eliminate paradoxes. Not counting the cursed child because that sh*t ain't cannon.

[luketruscott]

The time travel paradox you mentioned about Beethoven was mentioned in doctor who when Capaldi was the doctor

[FrequencyNegative]

Not a theory with any basis, but as Hermoine states that many wizards who meddle with time often manage to hurt the alternate versions of themselves but that would violate the loop that we see with the Time-Turner. Do you think its possible that there is other time magic we don't see and that the Time-Turner is honed in to create loops, so such scenarios can't happen? Not that we need to make space for the Cursed Child, but this would also allow the special Time-Turner to allow dramatic edits to the timeline, and also allows for wizards who meddle with time (without a time-turner) to succumb to all the terrible stories Hermoine has heard about. Also, it would allow the expanded Pottermore lore that traveling back and forth ages the wizard by however much time they skip to apply to unprotected time travel.

TLDR - The Time-Turners are a government sanctioned "safe" form of time travel, which is why they'd let a underage wizards use it for class, as the loop it creates doesn't allow for edits.

[finndevries]

Okay, but here is an interesting thing Imagine how weird it is that Dumbledore knows that two "innocent" lifes have to be saved, because to him Buckbeak never died so het doesn't need to save him. That's some big brain moves right there

[cl]

I think the point with the bootstrap paradox is that the moment you interfere and create a paradox, you in a way kill “future you”, because you prevent “past you” to live up the point where you use the time turner to go back. That’s why for successful time travel you must not be seen and “everything that happens always happens”.

The question is if minor details couldn’t yet be changed. BTTF works on a similar premise: Marty inadvertently interrupts how his parents meet and therefore he has to fix this, without exposing himself. He only trusts in Doc. Minor changes occur, but the main events play out like they used to. I know it is not the same concept, and I like the HP version more, but they only started to get lost in paradox and alternate timelines in the second part. The first one is almost straight forward.

[zackatk]

Or my favourite time travel explanation: "It's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... timey wimey... stuff."

[prastarkeepers]

Three methods of time travel:

Harry Potter/Predestination theory: everything that happens always happened.

MCU/Dragon Ball/Branching theory: your actions cause a different timeline, but yours remains the same.

Back to the Future/Butterfly theory: everything you do actively alters your present.

[jameshinds]

11:13 A certain amount of predestination? Oh, no. The HP universe is *entirely* predestined, but the only time you can peak under time's skirt and see that is when you use a time turner.

Also, the best way to describe HP time travel is that it is a variation of Naruto Shadow Clones. You can't change events, but you do experience the same time twice.

[tymecamp]

QUESTION/THEORY TIME! Dumbledore is seemingly either always at the right place at the right time, or seems to know everything that is happening at pretty much any given moment. Is it possible that he has a time turner/made one himself that he has potentially kept secret from the ministry? Seems to fit pretty nicely into the “DUMBLEDORE’S BIG PLAN” theory as well.