In another thread which shall remain nameless, it a scenario was posited
in which a time traveller arrives and hands over the winning lottery
numbers to a stranger, said numbers having been dug up from historical
archives in the far future. A great deal of discussion on the other
particulars of the scenario took place and I hope we can avoid repeating
that, but interestingly this aspect was never questioned.
So I shall do that here. Is it actually reasonable to expect the presence
of a time traveler not to alter the outcome of a lottery drawing? Lottery
drawings are, or at leash should be, highly chaotic systems, in the sense
of being highly sensitive to initial conditions. The balls bounce all over
the place, and even the tiniest alteration to a single ball's trajectory
will quickly balloon into a totally different result in the drawing.
But just how tiny is the tiniest alteration? A time traveller arriving
hundreds of miles away has few ways to disturb the drawing directly. His
presence will create sound and electromagnetic waves which wouldn't
otherwise have been there. These get quickly lost in the noise, but that
phrase merely means that it becomes impossible to distinguish them from
the noise, or that they become part of it. The noise itself will be
changed by them, however slightly. Will this result in a different
outcome? Do we even know?
Perhaps worse, the presence of the time traveler alters the way people
behave. This is going to create small ripples throughout society, and
these ripples will travel as fast as people communicate with each other.
This is much more likely to change the environment of the drawing in a way
which, while still extremely subtle, would be a lot stronger than the
direct changes discussed above. Will this one change the outcome?
Any thoughts on the above?
It seems to me that a time traveler is going to have a better time in
sports betting or the stock market. Both of these are chaotic to some
extent but at least in the short term are based on more macroscopic
effects. Small changes in the players' brains won't change the fact that
team A's defense is helpless against team B's offense, or that company X
is going to announce earnings 50% higher than predicted the next day.
--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software
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