Time slips

Perhaps count the number of unwarranted multiplication of entities?
Anachronism: 0 additional entities
Time slip : a bunch of additional entities
Alternate universe: a larger bunch of additional entities

 

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How do you know? Do you have some objective way of deciding what is more mundane and less mundane? A time slip is not any more mundane than zapping into an alternate universe. Mundane is defined as being common or ordinary. I don't see it as anything more than that. It is a useless criteria for deciding whether something has happened or not. You may assume that it is more mundane that someone is lying than that they actually won the lottery. But you could be totally wrong too. There is no justification for ruling out the extraordinary based on it simply not being ordinary. Given the huge number of events that occur in the world everyday, it seems to me very likely that the extraordinary would occur every day somewhere.

 

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Because the fifties really did happen. That is mundane. Your suggestion of time slip merely posits that one has moved to a different (yet undeniably real) - time in a universe we know exists. An entirely alternate universe requires positing ... well ... an entirely alternate universe.

But since you make no distinction between mundane and exotic (in terms of plausibility), why would you make a distinction between exotic and very exotic?

 

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The exoticness is the same in both cases--slipping into another time, or slipping into another space. There is no one being more mundane than the other. They are both extraordinary events.

 

Ok, so if you have to go for a non-mundane explanation, why do you conclude that this event, or any of them, are time-slips rather than this other possibility, which you admit would also be an equally exotic event?

 

What other mundane explanation? That people sometimes play dress up in period styles, whole stores are changed instantaneously, and modern cars are replaced with old ones just because? That in itself would require a multiplication of explanatory entities beyond that of one simple time slip.

 

Except the "other time" is known to exist already; the "other space" is not.

Which is more plausible, stepping out into the middle of a busy city road and getting trampled by a horse, or stepping out into the middle of a busy city and getting trampled by a unicorn? This is pretty straightforward logic. Surely you acknowledge that there are degrees of plausibility.

So if you don't account for plausibility in an explanation, why limit youself to this universe?

 

It would reuqire fewer multiplications that doing so with an entire universe, would it not?

 

I'm referring to this one case - the latest one you put forward (Moberly-Jourdain). Do you think it more reasonable to conclude that it was a time-slip or that they inadvertently wandered into a neighbour's themed party that he was reportedly holding at that time?

 

I think it more likely it was a time slip. People don't put on costume parties in the middle of the day. They passed an old farmhouse on the way and it looked old fashioned, with an old style plough in the field. And there was a peasant girl handing a jug to a child. Also, what of the bridge which could not be found later when they returned? Such details suggest a time slip, not a party. Also, there were no parties reported being held at that time.

 

"A white Ford pickup pulled up to cattle pasture near Ponca City, Oklahoma, in early Fall 1971, and stopped at a gate. Karl, Mark, and Gordon worked for cattle feed distributor and were sent to this remote area to pick up a feeder. What they found there has kept them silent for 41 years.

“We opened the gate, which was barbed wire with no lock, and entered,” Karl said. “We went on the property, which was covered with grass up to and over the hood of the truck.”

They drove through the tall grass to the tank that sat close to a red barn and got out of the truck.

“We realized the tank was almost half full and too heavy to load,” Karl said. “We decided to leave and drove around the red barn and we saw a large, two story white house, with no lights in front of us.”

The trio drove back to the cattle feed company and the boss said he’d drain the tank and they could pick it up tomorrow.

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“We went to the location to retrieve the tank the next night,” Karl said. “This time we decided to go through the old white big house on the hill and brought our shotguns.”

They drove onto the property over the path they’d made through the grass the day before and loaded the tank. Then they pulled around the barn toward the house. What they saw burned into their memories.

“It was no longer there,” Karl said. “We walked up the hill where it stood and there were no signs of demolition, no foundation, nothing at all. What we all seemed to witness the night before was no longer there. We have talked to each other over the years but none of us can begin to explain this vision.”====http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2012/11/cases-of-time-slips/

 

What entire universe? According the physics notion of block time, the past exists just as much as the present. It's PART of our universe, not a whole different universe.

 

LOL! Very few people know that the past can suddenly re-exist in the same location it used to. It's an idea as fantastic and otherworldly as that of another universe. There's nothing more mundane about it at all.

 

The mundane is only what is more likely to occur in each individual case. But when we're talking what can occur over millions of cases over long periods of time to anybody, then the extraordinary becomes very likely, if not inevitable. Winning the lottery is unlikely for any given person, but is certain to occur for SOMEone. That's the nature of the extraordinary. It is a matter of happening anywhere and at any time to someone among billions of people. Hence it is bound to occur eventually. The odds dictate it. So who knows? Maybe people who timeslip are like that one in millions of people who wins the lotto because it was bound to happen to someone. Hearing their accounts would be like hearing accounts of people winning the lotto, which by your own weird logic should always be assumed to be lies because that is more likely than them actually winning the lotto.

 

So you find that to be highly implausible.

 

Right..although there IS this note that was dug up later on this story:

"In addition to the explanation by the women that they had been caught up in what is now called a time slip and had observed ghosts from the past, a non-supernatural explanation of the events was proposed by Philippe Jullian in his 1965 biography of the aristocratic decadent French poet Robert de Montesquiou.[28]At the time of Moberly and Jourdain's excursion to Versailles, Montesquiou lived nearby and reportedly gave parties in the grounds where his friends dressed in period costume and performed tableaux vivants as part of the party entertainments. Moberly and Jourdain may have inadvertently gatecrashed a gay fancy dress party. The Marie-Antoinette figure could have been a society lady or a cross-dresser, the pockmarked man Montesquiou himself. It was suggested that a gathering of the French decadent avant-garde of the time could have made a sinister impression on the two middle-class Edwardian spinsters who would have been little used to such company."===https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly–Jourdain_incident

 

It does not follow that any given event is bound to occur eventually.

By that logic, if we wait long enough, a bowl of petunias and a whale should spontaneously appear ten miles above the ground. Why not?
Or all the molecules of air in a room spontaneously hug the North wall, leaving the rest of the room in hard vacuum.

There are some things that just do not happen.

 

Less pausible than spontaneous time travel.

 

In a near infinite universe of near infinite duration, anything can happen at least once, if not nearly an infinite number of times. Such is the nature of quantum vacuum fluctuations.

 

But not people putting on costume parties in the middle of the day. That's implausible. Even in a near infinite universe of near infinite duration.