A question on time-turners, and a crack theory

[sunnyskywalker]

We've only seen or heard of witches and wizards using time-turners to go into the past, haven't we? Hermione skipped back an hour or two at a time to take extra classes, and Harry and Hermione went back three hours to save Buckbeak and Sirius. Not being seen is essential, to keep one's past self from doing something rash and/or to keep from introducing a time paradox. (Not that Harry playing James helped that issue much.)

Can time-turners also send people into the future? I ask this not just because it's a gaping hole in our understanding of time-turners, or because I can imagine a Back to the Future version of HBP where Snape says, "Nobody calls me chicken," but because it would provide one more way to keep the pattern of Dumbledore Explains It All intact. Can you imagine a Harry Potter book without a rundown from Dumbledore at the end? We could always get it from his portrait, or from someone else standing in for Dumbledore, but it's just not the same.

Just imagine: it's time for the wrap-up, and right on cue, Dumbledore appears. But that's impossible! Harry protests. "Professor, you're dead!" "Ah," says Dumbledore, "I rather thought I would be. At the moment, however, I have sent you to fetch your Invisibility Cloak - which of course you already have with you - before we embark on our journey to Lord Voldemort's sea cave."

There are all sorts of problems with this scenario, of course. For starters, maybe time-turners simply can't send you into the future. And how would Dumbledore know when to show up? Unless he has been using his time-turner a lot. (Which opens up all sorts of possibilities for chronological confusion throughout the series, and gives a reason for why his hair turned white between 1945 and 1957 other than stress or genetics...)

As I said, it's a crack theory. (I've got another, even crazier one, but I'm still piecing it together.) It is a good amusement for a rainy day.

ETA: Checked, and Hermione does say that wizards have killed their past or future selves by mistake. Does she mean that the time-traveling wizard goes into the future and kills himself, or that the time-traveling wizard is the future self who is killed?

Comments

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

The way they seem to work is by going back to an earlier point in your own known life in order to have the same period of time again. There doesn't seem to be any mechanism for going into the future. The "future selves" bit is odd but I always understood it to mean that doing something stupid in the recent past could kill you in the future as well as kill you before you got back to the present.