21–30 of 215 posts
In Isaac Asimov's "End of Eternity" he posed a similar concept where contrary to the butterfly effect where minor changes ripple through time, time has a mechanism of self-preservation which is resistant to change. Asimov never ceases to amaze me with how prescient he was for his time.
When you take this theory to it's logical conclusion, you end up with some strange outcomes. The strangest is the idea of going back and killing baby Hitler. When you attempt to do that, the universe, in it's self righting ways makes the assassination attempt not work. Since Hitler is a pretty big enemy for a lot of people, many people over time try to go back and kill Hitler. Hitler, on the other hand is just living…
Why bother going back so far? Let's think of what would happen if you went back 30 seconds. As soon as you arrive in the past, take a baseball bat to the time machine. What then?
And then let's take the article's scenario at face value. If you went back 5 minutes and somehow events always led back to you successfully using the time machine, your consciousness would be stuck in a permanent 5-minute loop. Maybe you could spice up those 5 minutes but you'd be right back where you started soon enough. Wouldn't the same be true if you went back 5 seconds? That would be hell.
But that's not the end of it. If you went back in time, why would we assume you'd displace to a new location? One of two things would need to happen: A) you'd need to teleport AND erase a blank area of space perfectly sized for your arrival, or B) you'd rewind like a tape playing backwards.
I like to think of the B scenario. If it were true we would never know it. The effects of the time machine would never be observable. We could have working time machines all around us right now for all we know. As I sit in this chair I could be at the destination of a trip through a time machine which I will one day invent. And when I finally enter the machine and flip the button, nothing will seem to happen. A pointless device.
It’s impossible to create a paradox, because the events that led to you being able to go back in time were created by whatever you did in the past in an attempt to change the future. If you did successfully change the past so that you never ended up going back, you would not live the life where you go back in time to make that change. But if you did find yourself even going back in time it means your efforts already…
(I don't think arbitrary travel backwards in time is possible in our universe; there could be very rare circumstances where it ends up occurring, but not where you can build a device that takes you anywhen)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-fulfilling prophecy, yes. But the article reads like some sci-fi bs tbh. What's considered the 'same outcome'. If I kill baby Hitler, would the universe create another just like him? Or someone else will do same things? If someone else does them, surely it won't (for example) kill as much people. So someone dead would now be alive in the future (or vice versa). And now the outcome isn't the same yeah? Sorry but…
I find the concept absurd as well. If you do something like go back in time and murder Hitler, you're going to be impacting the actions of every single human being alive. Within a few generations there's going to be an entirely different set of people alive than the set of people alive in the universe in which Hitler was not murdered. This idea that you would still have to go back in time because the universe correct…
It’s impossible to create a paradox, because the events that led to you being able to go back in time were created by whatever you did in the past in an attempt to change the future. If you did successfully change the past so that you never ended up going back, you would not live the life where you go back in time to make that change. But if you did find yourself even going back in time it means your efforts already…
> Researchers ran the numbers and determined that even if you made a change in the past, the timeline would essentially self-correct, ensuring that whatever happened to send you back in time would still happen. I'm sure these researchers are pretty smart, but nothing in this article goes beyond the level of a grade-school debate. Maybe there's something enlightening in the paper. But if there was, you'd think it woul…
Exactly. The article mentions the grandfather paradox, but doesn't really address it at all. Can't "self correct" shooting your past self in the head.
Time travel violates the law of conservation of energy. By travelling back in time, you yourself are injecting more mass/energy into a system. So it's great as a science fiction trope, but if you're going to talk physics, that needs to be addressed.
Time travel violates the law of conservation of energy. By travelling back in time, you yourself are injecting more mass/energy into a system. So it's great as a science fiction trope, but if you're going to talk physics, that needs to be addressed.
Time travel violates the law of conservation of energy. By travelling back in time, you yourself are injecting more mass/energy into a system. So it's great as a science fiction trope, but if you're going to talk physics, that needs to be addressed.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm vastly underqualified to even form an opinion on this subject.