I’m trying to be canon-compliant in terms of worldbuilding and all characters except Bella. So, yeah, Alice’s power works pretty much the same way in the originals, although I’ve found excuses to bring it up more frequently.
My (largely surface level, not physics-inspired) explanation for her limitations is that people’s decisions are the only things liable to be affected by her advance knowledge. The weather doesn’t change based on what she or anyone else does, and so she is a perfectly reliable meteorologist except at time scales so far in advance that butterfly effect type stuff starts adding up. However, when she sees things, even if she tells no one, her own decisions change, and so does what Edward can see in her head, etc.
Alice’s visions are: a) purely visual, b) do not tend to have vantage points from inside of objects, c) are only mostly under her control, and d) can be changed even after she’s become very confident in them. She cannot see inside people’s future minds. She can’t perfectly decide what to see. The sorts of things that upset her visions after she’s had them are reactions to that vision itself in her or others (like when she sees Bella telling her something that there is subsequently no reason for Bella to share), decisions that haven’t been made yet being prompted by other factors (like when James’s coven heard the baseball game), and people deliberately exploiting the nature of her visions (the way James did).
In canon, it turns out that she can’t see Quileute wolves or half-vampires, nor things they affect, at all—the initial supposition is that Quileutes are just too unpredictable because of how their shapeshifting is unexpected, but that’s patently ridiculous. They often do predictable things and many have good control over their “phasing”. In the last book she blames the gap on “half breeds” in general and says she can see humans because she was one and vampires because she is one. In neither case does canon indicate that she actually knows what’s going on instead of just guessing, so I’m going to freely invent here.
As a character, Bella cares somewhat more about what it is that various powers can accomplish than the mechanism that makes them work. It is obvious to her from the moment she learns about Alice’s abilities that Alice has the ability to save her from various miserable fates like getting hit by a car. (In canon, Edward had to risk exposure to knock her out of the way, because he’d kept telling Alice to stay out of the situation and she was getting only involuntary Bella-visions, not paying attention to her deliberately for informational purposes.) Bella is unlikely to devote considerable time to devising Alicey experiments until the very serious gaps in precog as used with wolves and half-vamps come up. At that time, learning how the power works can confer a significant practical improvement if there’s a way to work around it. Before, Alice is unlikely to become significantly more valuable via information about the nuts and bolts of her visions.
Well, obviously her visions only show her the future as it would have been, had she not received that vision, or something like that. But since she can see counter-factual futures the fact that her reaction would undo a particular future can’t explain why she doesn’t see that future in the first place.
You could further stipulate that she can only see futures that are indiscriminate to the way her visions counter-factually ended up not to containing them , i. e. that turn out the same whether she counter-factually changed her mind on trying to see that future or counter-factually tried but failed, or something similar (e. g. that she counter-factually received some other vision, counter-factually based on yet another, but only when the visions cycle between a limited number of possibilities, which leads to similar results with somewhat different details).
This would not explain why her visions fail even if the undecided subject is sufficiently far away not to be influenced by nuances of her counter-factual reactions, i. e. when trying to see what someone is doing between now and time X when X is the earliest possible point when she could affect anything. Maybe she can’t see anything she couldn’t possibly see with her own eyes no matter what she does, so she can’t receive those sorts of visions in the first place. But finding out would still be useful (e. g. so she could arrange for really fast transportation on hand to increase her vision range). And if what’s blocking her visions vs. “undecided” things is of the sort speculated about above she could circumvent it with suitable precommitments and staying outside the subjects actual sensory range (while the subject is still within her potential sensory range).
As for your explanations why your Bella does not care to find out, it’s your character, but it does seem somewhat at odds with the stated irresistibility of mysteries for her, or the way she insists on testing the various vampire abilities. Also finding out might have allowed for a more convenient way to block her from reading her notebook entries, and possibly allowed her to find James.
I’m trying to be canon-compliant in terms of worldbuilding and all characters except Bella. So, yeah, Alice’s power works pretty much the same way in the originals, although I’ve found excuses to bring it up more frequently.
My (largely surface level, not physics-inspired) explanation for her limitations is that people’s decisions are the only things liable to be affected by her advance knowledge. The weather doesn’t change based on what she or anyone else does, and so she is a perfectly reliable meteorologist except at time scales so far in advance that butterfly effect type stuff starts adding up. However, when she sees things, even if she tells no one, her own decisions change, and so does what Edward can see in her head, etc.
Alice’s visions are: a) purely visual, b) do not tend to have vantage points from inside of objects, c) are only mostly under her control, and d) can be changed even after she’s become very confident in them. She cannot see inside people’s future minds. She can’t perfectly decide what to see. The sorts of things that upset her visions after she’s had them are reactions to that vision itself in her or others (like when she sees Bella telling her something that there is subsequently no reason for Bella to share), decisions that haven’t been made yet being prompted by other factors (like when James’s coven heard the baseball game), and people deliberately exploiting the nature of her visions (the way James did).
In canon, it turns out that she can’t see Quileute wolves or half-vampires, nor things they affect, at all—the initial supposition is that Quileutes are just too unpredictable because of how their shapeshifting is unexpected, but that’s patently ridiculous. They often do predictable things and many have good control over their “phasing”. In the last book she blames the gap on “half breeds” in general and says she can see humans because she was one and vampires because she is one. In neither case does canon indicate that she actually knows what’s going on instead of just guessing, so I’m going to freely invent here.
As a character, Bella cares somewhat more about what it is that various powers can accomplish than the mechanism that makes them work. It is obvious to her from the moment she learns about Alice’s abilities that Alice has the ability to save her from various miserable fates like getting hit by a car. (In canon, Edward had to risk exposure to knock her out of the way, because he’d kept telling Alice to stay out of the situation and she was getting only involuntary Bella-visions, not paying attention to her deliberately for informational purposes.) Bella is unlikely to devote considerable time to devising Alicey experiments until the very serious gaps in precog as used with wolves and half-vamps come up. At that time, learning how the power works can confer a significant practical improvement if there’s a way to work around it. Before, Alice is unlikely to become significantly more valuable via information about the nuts and bolts of her visions.
Well, obviously her visions only show her the future as it would have been, had she not received that vision, or something like that. But since she can see counter-factual futures the fact that her reaction would undo a particular future can’t explain why she doesn’t see that future in the first place.
You could further stipulate that she can only see futures that are indiscriminate to the way her visions counter-factually ended up not to containing them , i. e. that turn out the same whether she counter-factually changed her mind on trying to see that future or counter-factually tried but failed, or something similar (e. g. that she counter-factually received some other vision, counter-factually based on yet another, but only when the visions cycle between a limited number of possibilities, which leads to similar results with somewhat different details).
This would not explain why her visions fail even if the undecided subject is sufficiently far away not to be influenced by nuances of her counter-factual reactions, i. e. when trying to see what someone is doing between now and time X when X is the earliest possible point when she could affect anything. Maybe she can’t see anything she couldn’t possibly see with her own eyes no matter what she does, so she can’t receive those sorts of visions in the first place. But finding out would still be useful (e. g. so she could arrange for really fast transportation on hand to increase her vision range). And if what’s blocking her visions vs. “undecided” things is of the sort speculated about above she could circumvent it with suitable precommitments and staying outside the subjects actual sensory range (while the subject is still within her potential sensory range).
As for your explanations why your Bella does not care to find out, it’s your character, but it does seem somewhat at odds with the stated irresistibility of mysteries for her, or the way she insists on testing the various vampire abilities. Also finding out might have allowed for a more convenient way to block her from reading her notebook entries, and possibly allowed her to find James.