Cause and Effect

Events can be sequenced as a series of Causes and Effects.

For this article, causes will be represented by blue rectangles and effects will be represented by yellow rectangles.



You are holding an egg, and you let go of it. This is neither a cause or an effect. It is merely an event.



Since the egg is no longer supported by your hand, the egg falls. The action of the egg falling happens because you let go of the egg. The release of the egg is the cause of the falling of the egg.



Since the egg fell, it hit the ground and splats. The egg falling caused the egg to splat. The only reason the egg splats is because it falls. The only reason the egg falls is because it was released. If the egg had not been released, it would not have fallen, nor would it have subsequently splatted.



Causes can trigger more than one effect, and certain effects only occur under multiple causes.



Generally, events will not occur without a cause, neglecting quantum scales and whatever happened at the origin of the universe.

Let's say you didn't want the egg to splat. Naturally, you time travel back to the past and catch the egg before it hits the ground. The number on the left is the iteration number.



But now we run into a bit of a problem. In order for a future self to catch the egg, the egg needs to fall and you need to time travel. But Iteration 0 doesn't exist in the context of Iteration 1, leaving the egg-catching unsupported since no time travelling occurred.

So what happens when there's an effect with no cause? Well, it depends on what system of time travel you are going by. Any of these are possible:
 * Nothing. Unsupported effects are okay.
 * Nothing. The effect actually still has a cause: the time traveling within Iteration 0.


 * A new iteration is made to unlink from the nonexistent cause. No future self catches the egg here. CauseAndEffect6.png Although, this would right back where we started, which would make an infinite number of iterations get generated. That's an example of a negative paradox. And then what? Does the universe get destroyed, since it can't make up its mind?
 * Time dies and the universe becomes just a massive 3D sculpture