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I'll hope that other brighter members of our community correct me if I'm wrong, but here's a stab at it.

We all learn about causality. Things don't just happen without being there being some kind of reversible action. If an ice cube melts, that's a time reversible aspect of physics. Basically if you could run time backwards like a video in reverse, you would see the ice unmelt.

In another instance, imagine a block of ice in the middle of a star. There's no way that a chunk of ice can just appear in a star. Now, that's not to say its impossible for such a chunk to be there. But you can trace back a line of actions that led to it being there, ranging from the debris of the spacecraft that contained it to the launch pad on a planet orbiting nearby, to all of the patterns of matter and information encompassing the civilization that built and launched it in the first place.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, the temporal cloak effectively allows stuff to happen inside it that isn't detectable from the outside. To stretch my last analogy a bit, imagine you put such a temporal cloak around the entire civilization leading up to where the ice ends up in the star. To an outside observer, say some aliens doing a research study on our star, all of a sudden they would detect the block of ice in the star but not have any idea where it came from.




Nice Anathem reference :)

The problem with your analogy is that the debris from the spaceship, etc. would still be visible to an observer after the fact. A better analogy would be this:

The aliens point a camera at our entire civilization. Ignoring the fact that this cloak works on the order of monumentally smaller scales than civilizations and the time it takes to put an ice chunk in a star, we use the cloak while we put an ice chunk in a star. The aliens would see our civilization jump from a state with no ice chunk in a star to one with an ice chunk in a star. Assuming that their measuring devices are up to the task, they would still be able to find all the spaceship debris, etc.


So basically, time cloaking enables the possibility of Cuil[0] realities over 2.

[0] http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory




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