Timeline question

 Posted on 4/11/1997 by J. Michael Straczynski <71016.1644@compuserve.com> to CIS


Will Gearhart <102147.2670@compuserve.com> asks:
> To that I would add, if the Minbari couldn't scan Sinclair, would
> they have just finished earth off and made the whole question of
> the battle scene, Babylon 5, 4 (all of them) moot? And what kind
> of race would the Minbari be without Valen? And doesn't believing
> in Mobius-like temporal paradoxes take a bit more faith than
> believing in God?

Sinclair went back because he would always go back and always
went back; the "alternate" timeline phrase isn't quite correct...it's
more like the moment when the two possible wave forms of
*possibilities* must collapse into one probability or certainty, both
tugging at the same time. For instance, you've got Shroedinger's cat,
put into a box, with a 50/50 chance of a poison gas capsule opening and
killing the cat. At the instant before you open the box, Shroedinger
said, the cat is neither dead nor alive, but *both*, until you open the
box and the two possibilities collapse into one. It isn't that the cat
had two alternate timelines, only that there were two possibilities
fighting it out to become the real one.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

jms