Obtaining multiple electrons by forcing a single one to bounce back and forth all the way across the time line a zillion times seems like a major design smell. That would be the worst hack ever, or at least the worst one before Facebook devs hacked Dalvik just to get their app to run on Android: http://jaxenter.com/facebooks-completely-insane-dalvik-hack-... ;)
Perhaps our universe is one created by a junior, or an intern, and this "creative" workaround got mocked on TheDailyWTF somewhere.
Well, it's immutable. So why would it be a problem with bouncing it around?
It's like a symbol in Ruby -- all instances of, say, :electron point to the same point in memory, they're just used all over the place. The sharing isn't problematic because you can't change :electron.
Why would you want to use 'electron' instead where every time you use it, you put another instance of it into memory?
It's only a "major design smell" to "bounce back and forth" if it's computationally expensive. This theory makes it sound like electrons aren't firmly rooted in space and time to begin with.
Maybe it's computationally cheaper to define something as existing in all places and all times.
Well I imagine it isn't optimized for readability :)
If the point is to have a jillion of electrons, each at the right time and place (for the observer), I assume a rather complicated mechanism must have been put in place to "tie the knot" just right - I mean to "navigate" the time-travelling electron just so it never fails to appear wherever, whenever it's expected.
It would be terrible to design it that way, but I think it's fine as a compiler optimization. Most of that datastructure is constant anyway, think of the memory savings!
Perhaps our universe is one created by a junior, or an intern, and this "creative" workaround got mocked on TheDailyWTF somewhere.