Re: Lottery drawings and sensitivity to initial conditions

Michael Ash <mike@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>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.

Yes.

Unless the time traveler inserted himself into an earlier time of the
same universe that he left.  That is, the future that he knew contained
all the consequences of his visit to the past already.  This assumes that
past details that are not in the historical record are in some sense
undefined.

I recall a news item in the New Scientist which reported that a scientist
had suggested that the act of sending somebody back to the past would
select the appropriate pattern of quantum-level events that would ensure
that the known future happened.  Thus the time traveler would have to
carefully act in a way that would not clash with his known future, not
because he could change anything, but because random events would seem to
conspire against him, possibly involving nasty accidents.

-- 
Dave Farrance