Top Gun Posted April 26 Posted April 26 Yeah, Steins;Gate does some fantastic stuff with the concept of multiple timelines that I hadn't seen any other time-travel story tackle before, specifically with the idea of how much change would be required to jump from one timeline to another and truly change the future. To say much more would spoil it, but as naraku said, the series does a great job of providing a rational framework for its mechanics. The only reason I brought it up is because the end of this episode reminded me of it, with the sense that Takemichi seems trapped by these same negative outcomes even after making what seemed like substantial changes in the past. At this point it feels like we have a mix of different time-travel stories in play: the initial premise of going back in time to stop a murder is a dead ringer for Erased, Takemichi (and Naoto apparently?) not having memories of his own changed past smacks of Marty's situation at the end of the original Back to the Future, and then there's the S;G stuff. I won't claim that it handles things nearly as expertly as any of those examples, but I'm willing to forgive some hand-waving if I'm enjoying the series, which I definitely am. Speaking of, the ANN review for this episode brought up a good point that I didn't think about: the fact that Hinata was deliberately targeted here implies that her initial death in the initial unchanged timeline was no accident either. Coupled with Akkun being the one who originally pushed Takemichi onto the subway tracks, that's two (attempted) murders that happened before the timeline was ever changed. So why does someone want the two of them dead so badly in the first place? 3
OwlChemist81 Posted April 26 Posted April 26 Dammit, I just can't seem to stay up for Toonami anymore and my cell phone dies easily. 1
saito34 Posted April 26 Posted April 26 (edited) 14 hours ago, ben0119 said: Yep, that video from that Anton Petrov scientist Youtuber guy I posted last week discussed how more and more experiments are showing time to be an illusion or mental construct. Yep, clocks used to be set by the sun, and any town that wasn't directly due north or south had a different time. This had to be changed when trains were invented as it wreaked havoc with schedules, giving us time zones. Before clocks, people woke up at sunrise and went to sleep at sunset, sometimes sleeping in two blocks of four hours, waking up in the middle of night for fresh air, tea, etc. But as you said, we measure time based on the rotation of the Earth, the moon's orbit around the Earth, and the Earth's orbit around the sun. Those are just objects moving in space. If time doesn't exist, it would explain why time seems to "slow down" during tense situations or "speed up" during fun (though I have had fun days seem to take a long time in a good way as well.) Yup...100%. The distinction between the observable physical behavior of heavenly objects and our division of that behavior into hours, minutes, and days is key. Einstein's special relativity and his thought experiments are were time really starts to breakdown conceptually. Edited April 26 by saito34
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