Travelling in time, even multiple times in a loop, is still time travelling no?

Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow: time loops rather than travel because they reset the subject to the same state when they restart loop, even if they’ve died.

But they can also break out of them.

I think if one were to go back to the past and just do “one loop” that would count.

Of course we are all travelling through time right now.

b0r1s wrote:

But it’s not is it. As the subject of the loop remembers all loops. Hence time travel in a fixed loop by the subject.

But only the memory is retained, everything else is reset, which means that there is some force acting upon the subject which isn’t present in your standard time travel scenario.

Yeah, I'm going with they're all time travel.

My initial reaction was that loops are different because you're not physically changing - Bill Murray's stuck in there for literally hundreds of years in Groundhog Day - and I'd argue for it to be Time Travel you have to still be moving forward in time in the usual way, but have translocated to a different place in time.  (So a Time Traveller who travels to one day ago shouldn't get younger, and a traveler moving to a hundred years in the future shouldn't get older.)  So time loops can't be time travel because the "traveller" doesn't age within the loop.

Except, they do.  In Groundhog Day, Murray's character retains memories, he changes as a person, and indeed develops muscle memory and skills that he didn't have before. Same in Edge of Tomorrow. So whilst his body somehow escapes ageing, he definitely becomes older and wiser, and develops physical skills he didn't have before too.  So time does have an effect on him.  Protagonists in a time loop are just repeatedly travelling back to the same point in time and somehow not physically ageing. (Except in subtle beneficial ways.)

They are at the very least cognitive time travellers if not physical ones. Or something.

All of which makes me realise two things:

1)  It's probably best not to think abut these things too hard and...

2)  If any of you fancy making a movie I'd love to write one about a guy in a time loop where they do get physically older.

There are several ongoing arguments over how many dimensions there might be in multidimensional spacetime, but I think they all agree on these dimensions defining the state of everything, including gravity and whatnot. Gravitational lensing's an interesting thing to read about.* But of course our perception of time's linear, so Murray wormholing does raise the question of whether he's a day older on each run, because it's easier to imagine if he is.

Everything else gets into philosophy; i.e. if he's receiving an instalment of futuresight every day, it means he has no free will. Or if only his consciousness loops with his body never ageing, that's also a separation of matter that I don't have the science brains for. Or maybe that's it — that his brain particles are wormholing as firmware updates? If only Dr Kawashima had been stuck with him.

*Webb's about 5 years overdue but should be fascinating — https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/about/index.html

I saw this hypothesis of Back to the Future which was something like for the film to work there needs to be a parallel Marty McFly and what happens is the shit life Marty mcfly goes into the good life Marty McFlys life. Essentially we miss the film where successful dad Marty mcfly ends up in shit life Marty mcfly.

tin_robot wrote:

Bill Murray's stuck in there for literally hundreds of years in Groundhog Day

Citation needed.

So...

“ The time loop experienced by Bill Murray’s character in the classic film Groundhog Day lasted for 10 years, its filmmakers claimed.

While Danny Rubin’s original script for the film indicated that Murray’s character was forced to live the same day for 10,000 years, the film’s director Harold Ramis reportedly said otherwise.”

He sure wouldn't be going to work any more.

My birthday is the day before Groundhog Day. I dodged a bullet.

I mean, if it was 10,000 years, he would have gone insane LONG before what eventually happens

Questor wrote:

I mean, if it was 10,000 years, he would have gone insane LONG before what eventually happens

He does rob banks... If I remember rightly didn't the director or someone say he definitely would've gone on a murder spree?

Bill Murray is the only one travelling in time. Even if it's just his consciousness that's doing it.

Time loop is just a style of time travel so long as there is some element of progression. That might be a character, a physical object... whatever. Something is retaining after the loop which tells us it - or an element of it - is travelling back through time.