Theoretic Lottery Puzzle

Schroedinger's cat died?

You forgot to account for the butterfly.

I think this explains it all....

You are assuming there is a definite future, determined by the complete state of the present. Because of quantum uncertainty, this probably isn't true, the future isn't determined.

So the tomorrow you visited with your time machine may not be the same tomorrow you reach by sleeping through the night.

OK, how's this?

You actually had a heart attack, died and went to Hell. Nobody wins the lottery in Hell.

There's actually been a scientific study on whether time machines (currently) exist that avoided the anecdotal evidence that turns up from coincidences.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173813-back-to-the-future-scientists-search-the-internet-for-evidence-of-time-travelers

You got entangled and played quantum power ball again and ended up in the wrong corner of the multiverse.

It's just "A big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff".

You need to refer to the manual that came with your time machine, obviously your dimensional universe alignment calibrator is incorrectly adjusted....You're lucky to have made it back at all...

http://www.bmc-switzerland.com/fileadmin/files/documents/04_Support/Manuals/TM01/TM01_OwnersManual2012_EN.pdf

That's the thing. He didn't make it back. He just thinks he made it back, but he hasn't - not yet.

Meanwhile, Power Ball is at 1.3 billion dollars. That seems like an alternate universe to me.

This manual is better for the nuts and volts.

"...I didn't win. The winning numbers had changed.."

Haven't you seen "Back to the Future" and "Back to the Future II"? Biff comes back to the '50s and gives his younger self a book with results of sports events. The younger Biff used it to bet on games and amass a fortune.

So your hypothetical scenario just isn't possible.

Whoever plays with the trixter is surely deceived.

Probably what happened is that you DID win the lottery with those numbers.

But all that money you won from the lottery led you to a life of misery. One life disaster happened after another. You abandoned the ones who loved you, and you eventually wound up rich, but miserable.

Finally, desparate to find happiness, you got back in your time machine and re-appeared just at the moment you were about to play the lottery. You appeared for a fraction of second, just long enough to steal the ticket from the machine and substitute a previously prepared, slightly altered ticket. You also wrote a note to yourself on the back of the ticket directing yourself to a file on your computer where you stored a video explaining all of this to your younger self.

Well that's almost a bit too well thought out.

Interesting theory though.

Well, that was my experience...

The answer depends on what current theory of time you subscribe to and if you believe in the concept of free will or not.

So I just have to believe...like Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time? Neato!

Some theories indicate free will doesn't exist because our actions are purely dictated by our experiences and hence you cannot change time because what happens was always going to happen.

The theory (one at least) involving free will being an illusion just relates to the supposed fact that if free will doesn't in fact exist then all actions by everyone are determined by experiences and hence if you did build a time machine and go back in time you were always destined to build that time machine and the actions that follow.

This (I guess) also heavily assumes that all physical actions and interactions can be accurately modelled and hence predicted hence removing random 'chance' events that could otherwise influence reality.

I personally don't believe (or understand in depth except for a passing understanding) in the theories involving free will being an illusion, I merely added them to the discussion as they were a relevant perspective.

Some people say free will does exist because they have experienced the influence of spiritual forces that transcend the mechanistic forces of the universe, such as dreams that come true and out-of-body experiences. Free will here, in this universe, would come from that realm, but whether there is actually free will in the larger spiritual universe is a different question. It could have its own rules of physics and causation, and it might be mechanistic in more dimensions and in spiritual ways, but it can't be answered until we get to that bigger universe. One thing that appears to be true is that there has to be at least one more dimension of time there.

In short: I don't know.

How about this. A loser of that lottery went further back into the past and altered to circumstances that generated the numbers in question? No. Wait a minute. That would require two DeLoreans that actually start. Oh well. Never mind.

Is it?.. How do I put this delicately?.. Is it because you're in a mental hospital?

Oh if I only had a dollar for every time I questioned whether or not my life as I see it is just the imaginings of a crazy person who's locked away somewhere.

tcm, tcm, TCM, TCM WAKE UP!!!

My theory.

The Lottery Temporal Support Team is always monitoring the time stream to see whether someone went to the future to get the numbers, and if they detect one they change the algorithm for generating the numbers. For example, if a machine that bounces balls around inside is being used, they wait an extra second before pulling them out so there is an extra bounce or two for each ball. If there is more than one person from the future, they wait an additional second for each one. That prevents you from going back to the future again and again to get the new numbers and playing again.

As a basic premise I would say you would need to take the place of the person who bought the ticket and if the ticket was randomly generated you would have to place the request at exactly the right moment. So you would need to duplicate the time and place of the winning purchase.

By now we have heard that the winners were in California, Tennessee, and Florida; but not North Dakota.

So you mean Tcmtech actually did come back from an alternate future! WOW!

Is it true that a DeLorean only looks fast?