Glad you liked this! I needed the timeline so as not to break my wee brain, but even so, I got a few headaches.
I wish I'd saved the email to platypus that outlined all the rules so that I didn't have to re-type it, but here they are:
1) Every 20 minutes, people (not rooms) are jumped to a point along their pre-existing timeline running from 9pm - 11:50pm. (It would have been until 1am, had the machine continued to run.)
2) Yes, this means that the machine, in a way, has to have prior knowledge of everyone's timelines, because it can't jump you to a time period before it's enabled or after it's disabled. If quantum mechanics can support the concepts of particle entanglement and spooky action at a distance -- because it always comes back to quantum mechanics, doesn't it? -- then I think it's okay to make the logical leap, no pun intended, that once the machine gets going, everyone's timelines are fixed. For the same reason, you'll note that the Doctor, Donna, and the Phengarian are never jumped to time periods before they arrived in the house.
3) You can't overlap with yourself because you are moving along a linear timeline. If you start at point A and jump to point C, you may come back to point B later, but only at the moment in time in which you would have arrived at point B in a linear fashion.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2008-03-10 07:46 pm (UTC)I wish I'd saved the email to
1) Every 20 minutes, people (not rooms) are jumped to a point along their pre-existing timeline running from 9pm - 11:50pm. (It would have been until 1am, had the machine continued to run.)
2) Yes, this means that the machine, in a way, has to have prior knowledge of everyone's timelines, because it can't jump you to a time period before it's enabled or after it's disabled. If quantum mechanics can support the concepts of particle entanglement and spooky action at a distance -- because it always comes back to quantum mechanics, doesn't it? -- then I think it's okay to make the logical leap, no pun intended, that once the machine gets going, everyone's timelines are fixed. For the same reason, you'll note that the Doctor, Donna, and the Phengarian are never jumped to time periods before they arrived in the house.
3) You can't overlap with yourself because you are moving along a linear timeline. If you start at point A and jump to point C, you may come back to point B later, but only at the moment in time in which you would have arrived at point B in a linear fashion.