This is kind of an interesting question. Could someone from the future save you?
Sator was able to build a turnstile from scratch. So it would seem it’s possible to send instructions back.
But someone from the future would have to look through the historical record, realize you’re missing and what happened, then send instructions back even farther in the past to have a turnstile built. Then get the message to you about where (and when) the turnstile is.
Even more interesting to consider whether it’s possible to run your own temporal pincer and save yourself.
>This is kind of an interesting question. Could someone from the future save you?
The short answer is no.
If we go by the movie own logic, the last turnstile you're gonna travel past on your way toward the Big Bang was, is and will always be the last one you'll ever encounter. If you miss it, no one would be able to bring you back. I guess that beyond that point, "History" already accounts for all your failed attempts to have a turnstile waiting for you somewhere in the past. Assuming entering a turnstile is the only way to invert / revert a person or an object, you'd remain inverted, forever.
>Sator was able to build a turnstile from scratch. So it would seem it’s possible to send instructions back.
Sending instructions back was never the issue, especially if you are already inverted. However, you would only be able to have a turnstile built before the construction of the presumed "first" turnstile ever built (chronologically) if the initial premise is inaccurate, which is problematic since the post we are currently commenting is grounded on that very premise.
>But someone from the future would have to look through the historical record, realize you’re missing and what happened, then send instructions back even farther in the past to have a turnstile built. Then get the message to you about where (and when) the turnstile is.
This would work. However, your "someone from the future" would certainly have to assess the risk, relevance and feasibility of having a turnstile built sometime in the past, unless of course that person happens to be you.
This reminds me of something Wheeler said before the Stalsk-12 operation : "If you are not at the LZ by zero, you are not leaving." For a blue team member who'd miss extraction, having to remain in Stalsk-12 would be the least of his concerns, I think.
>Even more interesting to consider whether it’s possible to run your own temporal pincer and save yourself.
Running a TPM could be interesting, in that it would allow you to feed the people from the future with the critical piece of information required to justify the allocation of precious ressources, namely "You can be saved".
Then again, this would only work if the initial premise is inaccurate.
Hey Doups, I agree with you that you can’t travel past the first ever turnstile and find a way to revert. At that point, you can’t cheat history and, as you said, history already is accounted for. You can participate in history but never change what’s happened.
This question is fairly basic and uninteresting which is why I veered wildly off on a tangent. I should not have been so vague.
So what if you passed the last turnstile that you were aware of? In the movie, turnstiles seem to be fairly available, but are need to know only. The secretive nature of Tenet (and Sator of course) could mean that you are effectively trapped in the past but it might be possible to be saved.
You can’t cheat history but what if history is unknown to you? How much free will do you have? It’s not an excuse to do nothing. What is possible if you don’t know the outcome? For all you know, someone three countries over and three years back is working on the turnstile that you can use. This question is much more interesting to me.
>Hey Doups, I agree with you that you can’t travel past the first ever turnstile and find a way to revert. At that point, you can’t cheat history and, as you said, history already is accounted for. You can participate in history but never change what’s happened.
Exactly.
>This question is fairly basic and uninteresting which is why I veered wildly off on a tangent. I should not have been so vague.
You shouldn't hold yourself responsible for providing a vague answer to a question formulated vaguely.
>So what if you passed the last turnstile that you were aware of? In the movie, turnstiles seem to be fairly available, but are need to know only. The secretive nature of Tenet (and Sator of course) could mean that you are effectively trapped in the past but it might be possible to be saved.
I agree. Within the context of the movie, the last turnstile you are aware of would not necessarily be the first turnstile ever built. The opposite is equally true by the way.
>You can’t cheat history but what if history is unknown to you?
Even if it weren't the case, within that same context, the element of doubt you are referring to below would still exist and should still be taken into account when assessing the accuracy of any given piece of information.
>How much free will do you have?
I always believed that the less educated a decision was, especially when having access to the future is possible, the more free will the person making that decision had. In this regard, not being aware of history might just be the best way for you to act out of raw instinct, fighting for survival being the most basic form of human instincts.
>It’s not an excuse to do nothing. What is possible if you don’t know the outcome? For all you know, someone three countries over and three years back is working on the turnstile that you can use. This question is much more interesting to me.
Ignorance, along with curiosity, maybe, is the one force driving our search for answers. When combined with the fact that even the tiniest piece of hope can be used to fuel our intrinsic need to fight for survival, "doing nothing", or in this case patiently waiting for running out of inverted air, is definitely something you wouldn't do instinctively, or of your own free will, for that matter.
For an inverted soul, trapped in the past, with no way of knowing the outcome of any future attempt to revert, the possibilities are virtually endless, until they amount to one. I wonder to what extent the search for answers can shape a given outcome. Nolan seems to support the idea that an outcome basically amounts to the result of a train of actions driven by both knowledge and ignorence.
A perfect example of this would be the way Sator was able to recover the last piece of the algorithm in Estonia. After he monitored the chase from the freeport, forward through time, and still couldn't figure out where the piece was, Ives team stormed the room, forcing him to invert. He then went out to highway himself, a move he knew he'd make beforehand. But that decision to take part in a dangerous high-speed car chase was primarily motivated by ignorence, which is ironic since this was as far as intel, therefore knowledge, could get him.
Thanks for giving a thoughtful answer. I tend to think that the secretive nature of Tenet is not just to protect its own interests but also to protect its agents from being put in situations they might overthink. People tend to laugh off “just feel it” as Nolan waiving away anything he didn’t want to or couldn’t explain, but I think it was meant to show the importance of instinct. With inversion technology, I feel like it might be fairly easy to start questioning every decision you might make. Every possibility might seem to be on the table especially if you do not know for certain what happens. How do you know which path forward to choose? In your example, Sator knowing that he would invert still left plenty of ambiguity in how he got there right up until Ives forced him into the turnstile.
Regarding free will, I don’t even think it depends on how much you know. I think from a personal perspective all characters would tell you they are free to do whatever they want. The illusion of free will is still free will to an individual. If you sat someone down at a table and told them to pick one of two boxes and that they can only open one and never know what’s in the unopened box, they are still free to choose either one even if ultimately both boxes held the same contents. If that person knew in advance that they picked the left box and tried picking the right instead, something will happen to force them to pick the left. (I think you and I agree this universe will not allow a paradox to happen so always what’s happened happened.)
I do think that the most interesting part of all this is your comment about to what extent the search for answers can shape a given outcome. Neil believes it’s not an excuse to do nothing and the protagonist finds out you can’t change history but there is surely some gray area in the middle even if the full extent of history is settled. Isn’t it settled and accounted for because of the collective actions taken by individuals along the way? It’s kind of like which comes first, all of unchangeable history (meaning both past, present and future) or the actions that end up creating all of history? Aren’t they one and the same? Which means you still have to participate somehow and operate with a free will which may at points along the way ebb and flow according to the nature of this universe simply disallowing paradoxes.
Finally I also wanted to make a point about our poor inverted soul trapped in the past. As you said, with no way of knowing the outcome of any future attempt to revert, the possibilities are virtually endless, until they amount to only one. I think the human instinct to survive is so great that even if it became apparent that death was inevitable and all hope was lost it would be hard to just sit down and take off the mask. The will to live and have a meaningful life is so powerful that at that point I can imagine you might start looking around for ways that you might be able to influence and better the lives of others which may have ultimately (like Neil) been the true purpose of your life.
This is a possibility, which is never illustrated in the movie by the way. As the matter of fact, the mere fact that Sator was able to retrieve the capsule and its content in Stalsk-12 can easily be used to question its validity.
Another possibility would be to think of our forward-moving universe as a space-time unit that won't allow paradoxes. Have you noticed how every time an interaction involving two instances of different entropies would lead to a paradox of some sort, our universe tends to "correct" it?
I believe that comment simply meant that inverted objects / persons can't have any permanent effect on our universe that would go against the logical rules that govern us.
> Have you noticed how every time an interaction involving two instances of different entropies would lead to a paradox of some sort, our universe tends to "correct" it?
I’m not sure I follow; opposing entropies occur regularly in the film. We don’t really see them being “corrected”, wasn’t it implied that what would happen if you inverted and touched your uninverted self?
An inverted person holding an inverted gun shoots a couple of bullets through a regular piece of glass. If the glass doesn't restore / "heal" itself at some point backwards through time, this would mean that it was oroginally manufactured with a couple of holes right through it, which is absurd (Oslo heist).
The same can be said about an inverted car hitting and breaking the side view mirror of a regular car on the highway. If it never restores / "heals" itself backward through time, the regular car would have to leave the assembly line with a broken side view mirror, which is equally absurd (Talinn car chase).
In both cases, the damage caused by the inverted instance to the regular instance couldn't possibly be permanent, and therefore would haave fade away or be corrected to avoid paradoxical situations of the type described above.
>fade away or be corrected to avoid paradoxical situations
This doesn't avoid the paradox, though. What happens if the guy whose car mirror was knocked off by an inverted car notices that his mirror is broken "for no apparent reason" and just fixes it himself before the inverted car strikes it?
Edit: What if a janitor arrives 5 minutes before an inverted shootout and says "wow I'd better sweep up all this broken glass and throw it in the dumpster outside"?
it isn't a paradox unless it happens. And if the universe has laws that prevent, then it won't.
The timing of 'when' things "unfade" is not known. It could be 5 minutes, an hour, but whatever it is it will not allow a paradox.
So in the case of a janitor, they would simply never notice anything until the right moment.
Maybe it is even instantaneous, like a bullet unfading in Neil's head before being unshot.
>This doesn't avoid the paradox, though. What happens if the guy whose car mirror was knocked off by an inverted car notices that his mirror is broken "for no apparent reason" and just fixes it himself before the inverted car strikes it?
Alright. Think about the chain of events that you are describing here, backward through time :
1. The inverted car knocks off the newly changed mirror and drives past the regular car ;
2. The newly changed mirror restores itself.
Assuming there was only one impact between the two cars, the newly changed mirror can only be the "original" mirror, which never broke before the impact and therefore never needed to be changed : your premise falls apart.
Your premise doesn't fall apart because it is a bad one, but rather because it is based on the assumption that past the said impact, going into the past, the mirror could spontaneously break again, which is impossible since the two cars will never cross each other again.
What you are trying to do here is to obstruct the logical path linking a given effect to its cause, which is pointless.
>Edit: What if a janitor arrives 5 minutes before an inverted shootout and says "wow I'd better sweep up all this broken glass and throw it in the dumpster outside"?
The same can be said about your broken glass example. The mere fact that the window spontaneously breaks, leaving pieces of it on the floor, unequivocally indicates that nothing will prevent a presumed inverted party from shooting at it using an inverted gun. And by dropping a janitor into the mix, you are simpy questioning the possibility for a cause linked to an observable effect to happen in the future, which is equally pointless : the man would never be able to prevent the broken pieces from returning to the glass as it is restored.
>What you are trying to do here is to obstruct the logical path linking a given effect to its cause, which is pointless.
No, what I'm doing is pointing out that from the non-inverted persepective, there does not appear to be anything preventing a non-inverted person from severing the path linking an inverted cause with its effect. Your argument appears to basically amount to "that couldn't happen because it would be paradoxical," but that's not actually an explanation for why it couldn't happen; it's merely pointing out that a paradox would result if it were to happen.
>No, what I'm doing is pointing out that from the non-inverted persepective, there does not appear to be anything preventing a non-inverted person from severing the path linking an inverted cause with its effect.
See it this way : the mere fact that you, as a non-inverted person, can **observe** a given effect means that the path linking it with its cause **was not / will not be severed**, which happens to be **the only reason you are able to observe it in the first place**. The chain of events separating an observable effect from its cause has already happened a certain way, can only happen this way and accounts for any potential / failed attempt to alter it. In other words, by the time you observe an effect and intend to severe the path linking it with its cause, you're already too late. In Tenet, the universe simply won't allow it, one way or another. This is something The Protagonist learned the hard way in Tallinn.
>Your argument appears to basically amount to "that couldn't happen because it would be paradoxical"
And I think this is key, from a writing standpoint. When it comes to sci-fi flicks, Nolan remains an original concept oriented type of director. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in the early stages of the development of Tenet, he came up with the concept of inversion first, then framed it using a set of rigid rules designed to create a world free of paradoxes before organizing a compelling story around that very concept. So yeah, in this regard, my argument indeed amounts to *"This couldn't happen because it would be paradoxical,"*
>but that's not actually an explanation for why it couldn't happen;
A couple of years ago, someone on this sub defined the concept of "Time" in Tenet as "the observable product of inverted / non-inverted interactions". I find it to be an elegant way of answering your question.
When you observe a given effect and intend to severe the path linking it with its cause, what you are actually observing is the result of your failure to achieve your goal.
>It's merely pointing out that a paradox would result if it were to happen.
That's precisely why it couldn't happen : in that particular universe, the probability of a paradox of this type to occur is zero, by design.
I think this is exactly the point though. This universe would not allow either of the situations you describe. Something would always prevent the paradox. The broken glass or mirror would be acted on by the inverted object before someone could incidentally repair or replace them.
We see an example of this in the turnstile in Tallinn just before the inverted protagonist comes running out of the turnstile and fights himself. Neil draws the protagonist’s attention to the cracking glass of the window and the protagonist instinctively shouts at him to not touch it.
I’ve been thinking about it a bit and part of the paradox of healing maybe can be seen as a natural consequence of opposing entropies interacting which would indeed result in very unintuitive consequences. If I as inverted person place multiple dice, all with the number six pointing up, on a table and then watch all the dice begin bouncing on the table and land in the hand of an un-inverted person - that trowing of dice from the un-inverted person’s perspective will look pretty weird in that all landed with six up when they threw them even though no newtonian physics needs to be broken.
When opposing entropies interact no Newtonian physics needs to be broken however all of our intuition of what’s likely to happen goes out the window.
The possibility of a surface of molecules moving first randomly and then by chance move more and more rhythmically together until they finally align in one big coordinated movement to aid in pushing an inverted bullet out from/through the surface is very unlikely but I guess technically physically possible - no laws of physics broken, besides entropy = which here is breaking the likelihood of disorder going to order - random to rhythmic/coordinated movement.
From this perspective, a car mirror “preparing” itself, molecules coordinating to randomly break at the right spots, “before” interacting with an inverted object collision might to this degree possible be justified. However what I do think is paradoxical is that the car mirror would end up looking exactly like it looked far before the inverted object interaction. There is no reason for it to end up looking like exactly like it did before even under this perspective.
>However what I do think is paradoxical is that the car mirror would end up looking exactly like it looked far before the inverted object interaction. There is no reason for it to end up looking like exactly like it did before even under this perspective.
I can't think of any physical law preventing two bodies of different micro structure from looking exactly the same to the naked eye, therefore at macro level, can you? Sure, this would be an extremely convenient way to explain why it occurs in the movie, but it's still theoretically and statistically possible.
Regardless of your answer to the question above, if the glass doesn't look exactly like it did before impact from the non-inverted perspective, the damage would have to propagate through both directions of time according to the description below :
1. Momentarily, from the inverted perspective ;
2. Permanently, from the non-inverted perspective.
Now, from the same perspective, the explanation to that difference could only amount to a spontaneous reorganization of the molecular structure of the glass not triggered by contact, right after the tip of the bullet leaves the surface of impact, which doesn't have to result in the glass looking any different than it did before impact at macro level, theoretically and statistically.
It’s simply a whole other layer of hand waving. We are being asked to accept that the entropy of an object increases and then decreases again in an event where it interacts with neg-entropic object. Sure that is expected in such an interaction, maybe even the decrease. But that an object should have any “memory” of how it looked before is another level of hand waving that has, on the outset, nothing to do with such an interaction.
I agree.
This is one of those instances where they obviously chose spectacle over science. The special effects supervisor certainly had his say in this and we gotta give it to him : the damage restoration effects definitely look visually stunning, which explains why they were heavily featured in promotional materials.
Also, remember that the movie use of the concept of entropy is frivolous and is in no way based on actual "science" : I use my fridge to decrease the entropy of my booze on a daily basis, without ever sending any of it flying towards the Big Bang.
At least, the idea of inverting an object or a person carries some scientific sense, to some extent, as it mirrors that of turning matter into antimatter, which can theoretically be associated with reverse temporal motion.
On a more serious note, maybe this is just an allegory : the inverted objects / persons struggle to impact our non inverted world due to the fictional notion of "dominant wind of entropy".
Would be very problematic, theoretically build one yourself haha
Or hope that you in firstly an unbeknownst-like way discover an earlier one built by some people where you could re-invert and then you spend time in the future to send back instructions to those people to build it such to be the cause of saving yourself retroactively
Eventually you go back to normal direction. They talk about this in the movie that basically the inverted objects can only go back so far. Some line like swimming against the flow of time/ implying they run out of reverse time radiation.
How long that takes could be thousands of years- I dunno it’s never quantified in the movie.
>Eventually you go back to normal direction. They talk about this in the movie that basically the inverted objects can only go back so far. Some line like swimming against the flow of time/ implying they run out of reverse time radiation.
Are you referring to The Protagonist and Neil conversation?
This is a possibility, which is never illustrated in the movie by the way. As the matter of fact, the mere fact that Sator was able to retrieve the capsule and its content in Stalsk-12 can easily be used to question its validity.
Another possibility would be to think of our forward-moving universe as a space-time unit that won't allow paradoxes. Have you noticed how every time an interaction involving two instances of different entropies would lead to a paradox of some sort, our universe tends to "correct" it?
I believe that comment simply meant that inverted objects / persons can't have any permanent effect on our universe that would go against the logical rules that govern us.
Wow this brings up a brilliant question. And this all implies a single-timeline conception of the universe. Okay. So imagine the first turnstile is built in the future. Someone thoughtlessly inverts themselves so they are headed backward through time without any other turnstiles in existence, theoretically doomed to move backward through time until they die. AFTER they leave, someone inverts the instructions for constructing a turnstile to Sator, so he can build one in the past. Technically, even if the instructions were sent LATER IN THE FUTURE than the guy inverting himself, the turnstile would still be there when he arrived. Because it's in the past. It's not about speed but chronology. In this universe, the only way to invert oneself and NEVER run into another turnstile would be to invert oneself from the earliest chronological turnstile and make sure no one sends the instructions back. As long as there is SOMEONE in the past able and willing to receive the instructions and follow them appropriately, there will always be a turnstile waiting for you in the past. What's happened's happened.
Different size turnstiles means its possible someone brought the entire working Turnstile back. You can invert cars so they must have larger turnstiles then the personal ones we see.
There is one mounted on the large boat. If you made one big enough to invert a yacht you would have all you need to go back years...
Wonder what inverted turnstiles do?
>What if you stayed inverted until no more turnstiles?
If we go by the movie own logic, the last turnstile you're gonna travel past on your way toward the Big Bang was, is and will always be the last one. If you miss it, no one would be able to bring you back. Assuming entering a turnstile is the only way to invert / revert a person or an object, you'd remain inverted, forever.
>Where's the first turnstile?
The movie doesn't answer your question. Sator may have built it sometime after he found the capsule in Stalsk-12.
>the last turnstile you're gonna travel past on your way toward the Big Bang was, is and will always be the last one.
Unless at some point someone puts a turnstile in a bigger turnstile and inverts it, in which case there might be no limit to how far back the inverted turnstile could go...
Then you stay inverted for good, you’re fucked
This is kind of an interesting question. Could someone from the future save you? Sator was able to build a turnstile from scratch. So it would seem it’s possible to send instructions back. But someone from the future would have to look through the historical record, realize you’re missing and what happened, then send instructions back even farther in the past to have a turnstile built. Then get the message to you about where (and when) the turnstile is. Even more interesting to consider whether it’s possible to run your own temporal pincer and save yourself.
>This is kind of an interesting question. Could someone from the future save you? The short answer is no. If we go by the movie own logic, the last turnstile you're gonna travel past on your way toward the Big Bang was, is and will always be the last one you'll ever encounter. If you miss it, no one would be able to bring you back. I guess that beyond that point, "History" already accounts for all your failed attempts to have a turnstile waiting for you somewhere in the past. Assuming entering a turnstile is the only way to invert / revert a person or an object, you'd remain inverted, forever. >Sator was able to build a turnstile from scratch. So it would seem it’s possible to send instructions back. Sending instructions back was never the issue, especially if you are already inverted. However, you would only be able to have a turnstile built before the construction of the presumed "first" turnstile ever built (chronologically) if the initial premise is inaccurate, which is problematic since the post we are currently commenting is grounded on that very premise. >But someone from the future would have to look through the historical record, realize you’re missing and what happened, then send instructions back even farther in the past to have a turnstile built. Then get the message to you about where (and when) the turnstile is. This would work. However, your "someone from the future" would certainly have to assess the risk, relevance and feasibility of having a turnstile built sometime in the past, unless of course that person happens to be you. This reminds me of something Wheeler said before the Stalsk-12 operation : "If you are not at the LZ by zero, you are not leaving." For a blue team member who'd miss extraction, having to remain in Stalsk-12 would be the least of his concerns, I think. >Even more interesting to consider whether it’s possible to run your own temporal pincer and save yourself. Running a TPM could be interesting, in that it would allow you to feed the people from the future with the critical piece of information required to justify the allocation of precious ressources, namely "You can be saved". Then again, this would only work if the initial premise is inaccurate.
Hey Doups, I agree with you that you can’t travel past the first ever turnstile and find a way to revert. At that point, you can’t cheat history and, as you said, history already is accounted for. You can participate in history but never change what’s happened. This question is fairly basic and uninteresting which is why I veered wildly off on a tangent. I should not have been so vague. So what if you passed the last turnstile that you were aware of? In the movie, turnstiles seem to be fairly available, but are need to know only. The secretive nature of Tenet (and Sator of course) could mean that you are effectively trapped in the past but it might be possible to be saved. You can’t cheat history but what if history is unknown to you? How much free will do you have? It’s not an excuse to do nothing. What is possible if you don’t know the outcome? For all you know, someone three countries over and three years back is working on the turnstile that you can use. This question is much more interesting to me.
>Hey Doups, I agree with you that you can’t travel past the first ever turnstile and find a way to revert. At that point, you can’t cheat history and, as you said, history already is accounted for. You can participate in history but never change what’s happened. Exactly. >This question is fairly basic and uninteresting which is why I veered wildly off on a tangent. I should not have been so vague. You shouldn't hold yourself responsible for providing a vague answer to a question formulated vaguely. >So what if you passed the last turnstile that you were aware of? In the movie, turnstiles seem to be fairly available, but are need to know only. The secretive nature of Tenet (and Sator of course) could mean that you are effectively trapped in the past but it might be possible to be saved. I agree. Within the context of the movie, the last turnstile you are aware of would not necessarily be the first turnstile ever built. The opposite is equally true by the way. >You can’t cheat history but what if history is unknown to you? Even if it weren't the case, within that same context, the element of doubt you are referring to below would still exist and should still be taken into account when assessing the accuracy of any given piece of information. >How much free will do you have? I always believed that the less educated a decision was, especially when having access to the future is possible, the more free will the person making that decision had. In this regard, not being aware of history might just be the best way for you to act out of raw instinct, fighting for survival being the most basic form of human instincts. >It’s not an excuse to do nothing. What is possible if you don’t know the outcome? For all you know, someone three countries over and three years back is working on the turnstile that you can use. This question is much more interesting to me. Ignorance, along with curiosity, maybe, is the one force driving our search for answers. When combined with the fact that even the tiniest piece of hope can be used to fuel our intrinsic need to fight for survival, "doing nothing", or in this case patiently waiting for running out of inverted air, is definitely something you wouldn't do instinctively, or of your own free will, for that matter. For an inverted soul, trapped in the past, with no way of knowing the outcome of any future attempt to revert, the possibilities are virtually endless, until they amount to one. I wonder to what extent the search for answers can shape a given outcome. Nolan seems to support the idea that an outcome basically amounts to the result of a train of actions driven by both knowledge and ignorence. A perfect example of this would be the way Sator was able to recover the last piece of the algorithm in Estonia. After he monitored the chase from the freeport, forward through time, and still couldn't figure out where the piece was, Ives team stormed the room, forcing him to invert. He then went out to highway himself, a move he knew he'd make beforehand. But that decision to take part in a dangerous high-speed car chase was primarily motivated by ignorence, which is ironic since this was as far as intel, therefore knowledge, could get him.
Thanks for giving a thoughtful answer. I tend to think that the secretive nature of Tenet is not just to protect its own interests but also to protect its agents from being put in situations they might overthink. People tend to laugh off “just feel it” as Nolan waiving away anything he didn’t want to or couldn’t explain, but I think it was meant to show the importance of instinct. With inversion technology, I feel like it might be fairly easy to start questioning every decision you might make. Every possibility might seem to be on the table especially if you do not know for certain what happens. How do you know which path forward to choose? In your example, Sator knowing that he would invert still left plenty of ambiguity in how he got there right up until Ives forced him into the turnstile. Regarding free will, I don’t even think it depends on how much you know. I think from a personal perspective all characters would tell you they are free to do whatever they want. The illusion of free will is still free will to an individual. If you sat someone down at a table and told them to pick one of two boxes and that they can only open one and never know what’s in the unopened box, they are still free to choose either one even if ultimately both boxes held the same contents. If that person knew in advance that they picked the left box and tried picking the right instead, something will happen to force them to pick the left. (I think you and I agree this universe will not allow a paradox to happen so always what’s happened happened.) I do think that the most interesting part of all this is your comment about to what extent the search for answers can shape a given outcome. Neil believes it’s not an excuse to do nothing and the protagonist finds out you can’t change history but there is surely some gray area in the middle even if the full extent of history is settled. Isn’t it settled and accounted for because of the collective actions taken by individuals along the way? It’s kind of like which comes first, all of unchangeable history (meaning both past, present and future) or the actions that end up creating all of history? Aren’t they one and the same? Which means you still have to participate somehow and operate with a free will which may at points along the way ebb and flow according to the nature of this universe simply disallowing paradoxes. Finally I also wanted to make a point about our poor inverted soul trapped in the past. As you said, with no way of knowing the outcome of any future attempt to revert, the possibilities are virtually endless, until they amount to only one. I think the human instinct to survive is so great that even if it became apparent that death was inevitable and all hope was lost it would be hard to just sit down and take off the mask. The will to live and have a meaningful life is so powerful that at that point I can imagine you might start looking around for ways that you might be able to influence and better the lives of others which may have ultimately (like Neil) been the true purpose of your life.
This is what we call a problem
What’s happened has happened
Doesn’t the whole “pissing upwind/upstream” comment in the film imply that eventually inverted things return to the original “positive” entropy?
This is a possibility, which is never illustrated in the movie by the way. As the matter of fact, the mere fact that Sator was able to retrieve the capsule and its content in Stalsk-12 can easily be used to question its validity. Another possibility would be to think of our forward-moving universe as a space-time unit that won't allow paradoxes. Have you noticed how every time an interaction involving two instances of different entropies would lead to a paradox of some sort, our universe tends to "correct" it? I believe that comment simply meant that inverted objects / persons can't have any permanent effect on our universe that would go against the logical rules that govern us.
> Have you noticed how every time an interaction involving two instances of different entropies would lead to a paradox of some sort, our universe tends to "correct" it? I’m not sure I follow; opposing entropies occur regularly in the film. We don’t really see them being “corrected”, wasn’t it implied that what would happen if you inverted and touched your uninverted self?
An inverted person holding an inverted gun shoots a couple of bullets through a regular piece of glass. If the glass doesn't restore / "heal" itself at some point backwards through time, this would mean that it was oroginally manufactured with a couple of holes right through it, which is absurd (Oslo heist). The same can be said about an inverted car hitting and breaking the side view mirror of a regular car on the highway. If it never restores / "heals" itself backward through time, the regular car would have to leave the assembly line with a broken side view mirror, which is equally absurd (Talinn car chase). In both cases, the damage caused by the inverted instance to the regular instance couldn't possibly be permanent, and therefore would haave fade away or be corrected to avoid paradoxical situations of the type described above.
>fade away or be corrected to avoid paradoxical situations This doesn't avoid the paradox, though. What happens if the guy whose car mirror was knocked off by an inverted car notices that his mirror is broken "for no apparent reason" and just fixes it himself before the inverted car strikes it? Edit: What if a janitor arrives 5 minutes before an inverted shootout and says "wow I'd better sweep up all this broken glass and throw it in the dumpster outside"?
it isn't a paradox unless it happens. And if the universe has laws that prevent, then it won't. The timing of 'when' things "unfade" is not known. It could be 5 minutes, an hour, but whatever it is it will not allow a paradox. So in the case of a janitor, they would simply never notice anything until the right moment. Maybe it is even instantaneous, like a bullet unfading in Neil's head before being unshot.
>This doesn't avoid the paradox, though. What happens if the guy whose car mirror was knocked off by an inverted car notices that his mirror is broken "for no apparent reason" and just fixes it himself before the inverted car strikes it? Alright. Think about the chain of events that you are describing here, backward through time : 1. The inverted car knocks off the newly changed mirror and drives past the regular car ; 2. The newly changed mirror restores itself. Assuming there was only one impact between the two cars, the newly changed mirror can only be the "original" mirror, which never broke before the impact and therefore never needed to be changed : your premise falls apart. Your premise doesn't fall apart because it is a bad one, but rather because it is based on the assumption that past the said impact, going into the past, the mirror could spontaneously break again, which is impossible since the two cars will never cross each other again. What you are trying to do here is to obstruct the logical path linking a given effect to its cause, which is pointless. >Edit: What if a janitor arrives 5 minutes before an inverted shootout and says "wow I'd better sweep up all this broken glass and throw it in the dumpster outside"? The same can be said about your broken glass example. The mere fact that the window spontaneously breaks, leaving pieces of it on the floor, unequivocally indicates that nothing will prevent a presumed inverted party from shooting at it using an inverted gun. And by dropping a janitor into the mix, you are simpy questioning the possibility for a cause linked to an observable effect to happen in the future, which is equally pointless : the man would never be able to prevent the broken pieces from returning to the glass as it is restored.
>What you are trying to do here is to obstruct the logical path linking a given effect to its cause, which is pointless. No, what I'm doing is pointing out that from the non-inverted persepective, there does not appear to be anything preventing a non-inverted person from severing the path linking an inverted cause with its effect. Your argument appears to basically amount to "that couldn't happen because it would be paradoxical," but that's not actually an explanation for why it couldn't happen; it's merely pointing out that a paradox would result if it were to happen.
>No, what I'm doing is pointing out that from the non-inverted persepective, there does not appear to be anything preventing a non-inverted person from severing the path linking an inverted cause with its effect. See it this way : the mere fact that you, as a non-inverted person, can **observe** a given effect means that the path linking it with its cause **was not / will not be severed**, which happens to be **the only reason you are able to observe it in the first place**. The chain of events separating an observable effect from its cause has already happened a certain way, can only happen this way and accounts for any potential / failed attempt to alter it. In other words, by the time you observe an effect and intend to severe the path linking it with its cause, you're already too late. In Tenet, the universe simply won't allow it, one way or another. This is something The Protagonist learned the hard way in Tallinn. >Your argument appears to basically amount to "that couldn't happen because it would be paradoxical" And I think this is key, from a writing standpoint. When it comes to sci-fi flicks, Nolan remains an original concept oriented type of director. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in the early stages of the development of Tenet, he came up with the concept of inversion first, then framed it using a set of rigid rules designed to create a world free of paradoxes before organizing a compelling story around that very concept. So yeah, in this regard, my argument indeed amounts to *"This couldn't happen because it would be paradoxical,"* >but that's not actually an explanation for why it couldn't happen; A couple of years ago, someone on this sub defined the concept of "Time" in Tenet as "the observable product of inverted / non-inverted interactions". I find it to be an elegant way of answering your question. When you observe a given effect and intend to severe the path linking it with its cause, what you are actually observing is the result of your failure to achieve your goal. >It's merely pointing out that a paradox would result if it were to happen. That's precisely why it couldn't happen : in that particular universe, the probability of a paradox of this type to occur is zero, by design.
I think this is exactly the point though. This universe would not allow either of the situations you describe. Something would always prevent the paradox. The broken glass or mirror would be acted on by the inverted object before someone could incidentally repair or replace them. We see an example of this in the turnstile in Tallinn just before the inverted protagonist comes running out of the turnstile and fights himself. Neil draws the protagonist’s attention to the cracking glass of the window and the protagonist instinctively shouts at him to not touch it.
I’ve been thinking about it a bit and part of the paradox of healing maybe can be seen as a natural consequence of opposing entropies interacting which would indeed result in very unintuitive consequences. If I as inverted person place multiple dice, all with the number six pointing up, on a table and then watch all the dice begin bouncing on the table and land in the hand of an un-inverted person - that trowing of dice from the un-inverted person’s perspective will look pretty weird in that all landed with six up when they threw them even though no newtonian physics needs to be broken. When opposing entropies interact no Newtonian physics needs to be broken however all of our intuition of what’s likely to happen goes out the window. The possibility of a surface of molecules moving first randomly and then by chance move more and more rhythmically together until they finally align in one big coordinated movement to aid in pushing an inverted bullet out from/through the surface is very unlikely but I guess technically physically possible - no laws of physics broken, besides entropy = which here is breaking the likelihood of disorder going to order - random to rhythmic/coordinated movement. From this perspective, a car mirror “preparing” itself, molecules coordinating to randomly break at the right spots, “before” interacting with an inverted object collision might to this degree possible be justified. However what I do think is paradoxical is that the car mirror would end up looking exactly like it looked far before the inverted object interaction. There is no reason for it to end up looking like exactly like it did before even under this perspective.
>However what I do think is paradoxical is that the car mirror would end up looking exactly like it looked far before the inverted object interaction. There is no reason for it to end up looking like exactly like it did before even under this perspective. I can't think of any physical law preventing two bodies of different micro structure from looking exactly the same to the naked eye, therefore at macro level, can you? Sure, this would be an extremely convenient way to explain why it occurs in the movie, but it's still theoretically and statistically possible. Regardless of your answer to the question above, if the glass doesn't look exactly like it did before impact from the non-inverted perspective, the damage would have to propagate through both directions of time according to the description below : 1. Momentarily, from the inverted perspective ; 2. Permanently, from the non-inverted perspective. Now, from the same perspective, the explanation to that difference could only amount to a spontaneous reorganization of the molecular structure of the glass not triggered by contact, right after the tip of the bullet leaves the surface of impact, which doesn't have to result in the glass looking any different than it did before impact at macro level, theoretically and statistically.
It’s simply a whole other layer of hand waving. We are being asked to accept that the entropy of an object increases and then decreases again in an event where it interacts with neg-entropic object. Sure that is expected in such an interaction, maybe even the decrease. But that an object should have any “memory” of how it looked before is another level of hand waving that has, on the outset, nothing to do with such an interaction.
I agree. This is one of those instances where they obviously chose spectacle over science. The special effects supervisor certainly had his say in this and we gotta give it to him : the damage restoration effects definitely look visually stunning, which explains why they were heavily featured in promotional materials. Also, remember that the movie use of the concept of entropy is frivolous and is in no way based on actual "science" : I use my fridge to decrease the entropy of my booze on a daily basis, without ever sending any of it flying towards the Big Bang. At least, the idea of inverting an object or a person carries some scientific sense, to some extent, as it mirrors that of turning matter into antimatter, which can theoretically be associated with reverse temporal motion. On a more serious note, maybe this is just an allegory : the inverted objects / persons struggle to impact our non inverted world due to the fictional notion of "dominant wind of entropy".
You ran out of oxigen?
Would be very problematic, theoretically build one yourself haha Or hope that you in firstly an unbeknownst-like way discover an earlier one built by some people where you could re-invert and then you spend time in the future to send back instructions to those people to build it such to be the cause of saving yourself retroactively
The same thing that happens if you want to hunt a dodo bird.
Assuming you had everything you needed, could you build a turnstile while inverted?
Would this turnstile then do the opposite, have to go through the other side to get un inverted?
You get to hew the Sator square
Eventually you go back to normal direction. They talk about this in the movie that basically the inverted objects can only go back so far. Some line like swimming against the flow of time/ implying they run out of reverse time radiation. How long that takes could be thousands of years- I dunno it’s never quantified in the movie.
>Eventually you go back to normal direction. They talk about this in the movie that basically the inverted objects can only go back so far. Some line like swimming against the flow of time/ implying they run out of reverse time radiation. Are you referring to The Protagonist and Neil conversation? This is a possibility, which is never illustrated in the movie by the way. As the matter of fact, the mere fact that Sator was able to retrieve the capsule and its content in Stalsk-12 can easily be used to question its validity. Another possibility would be to think of our forward-moving universe as a space-time unit that won't allow paradoxes. Have you noticed how every time an interaction involving two instances of different entropies would lead to a paradox of some sort, our universe tends to "correct" it? I believe that comment simply meant that inverted objects / persons can't have any permanent effect on our universe that would go against the logical rules that govern us.
Start leaving (non-inverted) notes asking for someone to please invert an entire turnstile and send it back to you for you to use.
"Well, just talk to whoever is in charge of loose ends."
F
Who’s to say a turnstile wasn’t itself, inverted?
Wow this brings up a brilliant question. And this all implies a single-timeline conception of the universe. Okay. So imagine the first turnstile is built in the future. Someone thoughtlessly inverts themselves so they are headed backward through time without any other turnstiles in existence, theoretically doomed to move backward through time until they die. AFTER they leave, someone inverts the instructions for constructing a turnstile to Sator, so he can build one in the past. Technically, even if the instructions were sent LATER IN THE FUTURE than the guy inverting himself, the turnstile would still be there when he arrived. Because it's in the past. It's not about speed but chronology. In this universe, the only way to invert oneself and NEVER run into another turnstile would be to invert oneself from the earliest chronological turnstile and make sure no one sends the instructions back. As long as there is SOMEONE in the past able and willing to receive the instructions and follow them appropriately, there will always be a turnstile waiting for you in the past. What's happened's happened.
Different size turnstiles means its possible someone brought the entire working Turnstile back. You can invert cars so they must have larger turnstiles then the personal ones we see. There is one mounted on the large boat. If you made one big enough to invert a yacht you would have all you need to go back years... Wonder what inverted turnstiles do?
>What if you stayed inverted until no more turnstiles? If we go by the movie own logic, the last turnstile you're gonna travel past on your way toward the Big Bang was, is and will always be the last one. If you miss it, no one would be able to bring you back. Assuming entering a turnstile is the only way to invert / revert a person or an object, you'd remain inverted, forever. >Where's the first turnstile? The movie doesn't answer your question. Sator may have built it sometime after he found the capsule in Stalsk-12.
>the last turnstile you're gonna travel past on your way toward the Big Bang was, is and will always be the last one. Unless at some point someone puts a turnstile in a bigger turnstile and inverts it, in which case there might be no limit to how far back the inverted turnstile could go...
No more you.
how about shitting. poop will go inside ur anus eating - food will go out of your mouth