: If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it split
: the timeline?
Technically speaking, nothing ever actually *splits* the timeline as an action, as action implies change which implies time, and we are considering things from an "outside of time" perspective. Since time travel involves a sort of hyper-time, that can in some sense actively split a timeline. But from a completely outside-the-universe perspective, no actions occur. There just exist splits in timelines.
That said, there is a split in every timeline for every possible variance that could occur in it. If in one timeline some variance leads to the falling of a lonely tree in the woods, and another variance doesn't, then yes, there is a split in the timeline there.
Though consider also that a tree falling would require the piling up of many particular variances, that don't all have to happen in perfect sequence (just enough damage to it's trunk and/or enough force applied to it, in aggregate), so really there are many timelines where any given tree falls at roughly some given time in roughly some given way, and many timelines where it falls at grossly different times in grossly different ways, and maybe some vanishingly small proportion of timelines where the tree just doesn't fall, ever, if such a thing is possible but extremely improbable. In fact there's infinitely many timelines where a given tree falls at *precisely* a certain time in *precisely* a certain way, because there are infinitely many other factors that could vary between one such timeline and another.
