In First Strike, the Forerunner crystal was able to send Master Chief and the other members of Ascendant Justice were sent back 3 weeks. How was this even possible, as far as we know, time travel isn’t possible in Halo aside from speeding up or slowing down time artificially. However, was what the Forerunner crystal did time travel, and if so, how. Or was it some super fast slip space travel?
What the crystal did was more of a relativity-related quirk than genuine time travel. The space-time continuum is a complicated thing and the only reason normal FTL travel doesn’t cause similar incidents all the time is because space-time heals itself in the Haloverse. This is called reconciliation and comes up a lot in the Forerunner books. If that didn’t happen, ships traveling faster than light would break causality as we know it. Paradoxes would crop up all over the place. Ships arriving before they left, ships being in two star systems at once, etc. While we don’t know what the crystal’s purpose was, it seems to have manipulated this effect in some way (which we know the Forerunners were capable of doing), causing the timeline discrepancy in First Strike.
The Crystal did both… As well fast slip-space, Dr. Halsey discovered that the crystal had bent both space and time, causing a three-week average time difference. John and the other survivors from Installation 04 had effectively had been transported backward in time during their journey to Reach because their relative space-time event path intersected the crystal at an earlier point in time as measured by the UNSC’s Military Calendar.
I wouldn’t mind Grim explaining that in a Canon Fodder.
I would also love this explained by grim
Me thrice I totally forgot this happened.
Space magic.
In halo I believe they create worm holes with their slip space engines to travel point to point in the galaxy. This shouldn’t effect space time at all because there is no faster than light, FTL, travel taking place. There is only 2 things in the real world that can effect space time, speed and gravity. It only works in one direction too, forward. Not backwards.
In First Strike it is/was backwards on how space time should be effected if the crystal did use or create some sorta FTL, or even approaching the speed of light, travel. The way it should work is the faster something or someone goes, space time is warped for that object or person relative to everyone else that isn’t going that speed. So, when the object or person slows back down to the speed everything else is at, they are essentially in the future. Simple put, for the rest of the universe that isn’t going FTL, or approaching it, time stays normal. The person or object traveling at or approaching FTL time is sped up.
This is all due to the fact of nothing and no one being able to go faster than the speed of light. Basically as speed increases for an object or person space time is warped to make sure the object or person can not go faster than the speed of light relative to itself.
For instance say you are traveling at the speed of light in a car at night, (Light travels at 186,000 miles a second), then you turn on the headlights. The lights will still shine out in front of your car at the same 186,000 miles a second, it will NOT double its speed. This happens because space time is warped for you and that car, relative to everything else in the universe at that time, to insure the light will travel its constant 186,000 miles a second. This also insures you and that car will never travel faster than the speed of light.
Gravity also can effect space time. That is why at the event horizon of a black hole you will never see an object disappear into the black hole. If you were to witness an object fall in it would reach a point of falling but never go any farther for you to see. It would look like it is stopped. The object would be gone, fallen and consumed, but you can’t witness it. This is because space time would be warped so much by the immense gravity, that for you watching the object being pulled into the black hole, time would be slowed to the point of stopping relative to what has actually taking place.
Cortana makes a reference to this effect in TFoR when she is talking to Halsey about data collected from the rock Blue team recovered on the planet, during battle for, Sigma Octanus Four. Here’s the quote
“I have also, um … coordinated with UNSC’s astrophysics department and discovered some interesting bits archived in their long-range observational databases. There is a black hole located approximately forty thousand light-years from the Sigma Octanus System. An extremely powerful pulse-laser transmission back-scattered the matter in the accretion disk—essentially trapped this signal as this matter accelerated toward the speed of light. From our perspective, according to special relativity, this essentially froze the residue of this information on the event horizon.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Dr. Halsey said.
“This ‘frozen signal’ contains information that matches the sample from Sigma Octanus Four.”
Well, as Forest Gump would say, “And that’s all I got to say about that”.
Do you guys like the idea of time travel?
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> Do you guys like the idea of time travel?
It don’t bother me at all. Everything don’t have to make sense or have a perfect explanation for it to be a good story to me. (I might add that First Strike is my second favorite Halo novel.) I chalk that up to why it’s science fiction. The only reason I went on that whole time travel relativity rant was just to point out that 343 probably can’t come up with a truly scientific reason on how Chief and his buds went 3 weeks back in time to meet Halsey and the rest of the SII’s on Reach. Well, a reason other than space magic. 
which I’m fine with.