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Scientific Paper Claims Time Travel Is Not Just Theoretically Possible But It Would Self Correct For Any Changes Made In The Past.
- Thread starter HStallion
- Start date
Back to the Future 2 had it right, I think – except you probably would never be able to go back to your timeline the second you arrived in the past
Many worlds means they exist in parallel, this would be them existing in sequence with each one discarded and replaced with the next until one is stable.
The Terminator (by the end of the film) demonstrates time travel in which you cannot actually make any changes when you go back in time. Terminator 2 just barely contradicts this, maybe.
Further sequels just do whatever the fuck they want.
How does the energy that makes up your body (energy that presumably also exists in the past) travel back in time? How does the same energy exist in multiple spaces inside one inertial frame of reference? Is the causality of special relativity enough to account for this?
My favorite handwaving of time travel paradox was in Michael Chricton's Timeline where a character just insists that it's not possible to change anything in any meaningful capacity anyway because you're just one person who can't have that much of an impact and they just charge forward from there.
Seemed super weird in context of the book where technically they weren't time traveling at all and didn't have any such paradoxes to concern themselves with in the first place.
Seemed super weird in context of the book where technically they weren't time traveling at all and didn't have any such paradoxes to concern themselves with in the first place.
Man how do I become a Researcher?
"Not only is faster than light travel theoretically possible, but-" SNOOOOOOORT "-it would be really fucking fast, maaaaaan."
collects paycheck
"Not only is faster than light travel theoretically possible, but-" SNOOOOOOORT "-it would be really fucking fast, maaaaaan."
collects paycheck
Why did he have to correct something in the future, though?
Surprise, it's determinism!
Technically we are all time travelers because the future happens at fractions of fractions of milliseconds faster than we can perceive.
Technically we are all time travelers because the future happens at fractions of fractions of milliseconds faster than we can perceive.
It doesn't state there's anything preventing you from committing changes. Only that in response to any changes you made things would change to create something very similar to the original outcome.
Therefore time travel does exist. Just never negative. Usually at t=1, but sometimes different because of speed.
Here's my Paradox-free time travel theory:
Time travel (in the sense of a person or anything beyond some weird quantum particle or wave) isn't possible, so you can't change a person from getting sick or kill your grandfather because it isn't a real concept or a useful analogy for anything larger than an atom.
Maybe in the sense of some subatomic particle or wave or field fluctuation could go back in time, and maybe in the sense that there are so many OTHER particles or waves or fields wobbling around at any given time, that this weird particle or whatever does somewhat get "course corrected" back into the "flow" of how time went before it went back in time (like a ball getting swept along with a wave, or one soundwave merging and disappearing into a whole symphony of waves).
Or if that's even real it probably happens all the time on the quantum level and we just can't detect or notice it because it's just a fundamental aspect of reality that allows for particles/waves/energy to interact in just the right way to make matter and eventually us.
Time travel (in the sense of a person or anything beyond some weird quantum particle or wave) isn't possible, so you can't change a person from getting sick or kill your grandfather because it isn't a real concept or a useful analogy for anything larger than an atom.
Maybe in the sense of some subatomic particle or wave or field fluctuation could go back in time, and maybe in the sense that there are so many OTHER particles or waves or fields wobbling around at any given time, that this weird particle or whatever does somewhat get "course corrected" back into the "flow" of how time went before it went back in time (like a ball getting swept along with a wave, or one soundwave merging and disappearing into a whole symphony of waves).
Or if that's even real it probably happens all the time on the quantum level and we just can't detect or notice it because it's just a fundamental aspect of reality that allows for particles/waves/energy to interact in just the right way to make matter and eventually us.
So if future humans have the power to create a weapon that can instantly blow up the earth and a future dude takes it back in time and destroys the planet with it, the earth would find a way to reform and things would be hunky dory?
Killing Adolph Hitler means Randolph Hipster would take power in Germany and still cause WWII and the Holocaust??
Killing Adolph Hitler means Randolph Hipster would take power in Germany and still cause WWII and the Holocaust??
Isn't this where the whole parallel universes idea comes from? The paradox doesn't exist but your basically sliding into an alternative universe where you did kill your grandfather. You're still you but you don't exist at the same time.
There isn't a paradox if there no problem to begin with.
There isn't a paradox if there no problem to begin with.
You couldn't or wouldn't be able to. You might go back in time with the intent to chop your own head off as a kid, but something would prevent you from doing so no matter what. If you think of the past, present and future all occurring at the same time, this theory makes total sense.
"Forces" would somehow stop the former from happening. The intent may be for future dude to do so, but he's already done it, so it didn't work for any number of reasons (he was killed before he could use it, the mechanisms in the weapon failed, the weapon had never been tested at scale and an interaction of it being used had an inverse effect, etc).
"Forces" would do something similar for the latter in their theory, too, if I'm understanding it correctly.
Essentially, if it happened, it happened, and any interference from the future was actually either part of ensuring it happened or failed to prevent it from happening. Which also postulates that the future already exists, I think...
We had better scientific papers on this in the 80s, that are still referenced in modern time travel stories
en.wikipedia.org
Novikov self-consistency principle - Wikipedia
I've seen this story getting picked up by several news outlets. I think a 6th grader or a sci-fi writer wrote this paper?
Not sure how someone could possibly come up with this who thought about this in any logical way.
Take the coronavirus patient zero example. "You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so, you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would," Tobar told the university's news service.
Um, how about, no?
If you tried to stop patient zero (Let's call him Donnie and he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) then that precludes you from going back in time to stop Donnie. If you become patient zero then you went back in time to stop yourself who lives at an entirely different address. This is an entirely knew series of events. Now how do you become patient zero all the sudden? This is all utter nonsense.
The many worlds theory already solves all the issues with causality.
When you travel back in time, you create a new universe because you are creating new events. (this is a simplified description).
If you leave the portal open you can go back to your universe any time you want. You won't see any effects in your universe. Once you close the portal you are stuck in the universe and will see the events play out after you forked that universe. You of course can now travel forwards through time to see the results in your original time date that you left.
So for the example they gave...
You leave universe A by travelling back to 2019. You close the portal. You are now in Universe A-prime. You stop patient zero. You travel forward through time and you will meet yourself in the future and this guy would be doing something totally different, not concerned with travelling back in time at all because patient zero never existed. Or maybe he is concerned about going back in time, but just for something more sensible like collecting all the NWC carts. Your memories of the events of Universe A remain intact.
No paradox.
It's more like, you literally can't do those things because they didn't happen in the first place. If a time traveler went back and destroyed the Earth then the Earth wouldn't be here right now.
To the time traveler who attempts to change the past it will appear that the universe is conspiring against him, but the simple fact of the matter is that he can't achieve his goal because he exists in a universe where he already attempted and failed.
Basically, according to this theory, the universe is 100% deterministic, we're all following a script without realizing it, and the actions of time travelers are and always have been written in the script.
So... determinism?
Ok, this has been an extremely popular take on time travel within pop-culture for like decades?
Ok, this has been an extremely popular take on time travel within pop-culture for like decades?
lmao
Time travel being theoretically impossible due to the grandfather paradox strikes me as a much simpler, more elegant hypothesis.
The article is a poor explanation of the paper.
What the paper describes is possible multiple scenarios in which you can commit a grandfather paradox without actually causing a paradox.
It doesn't say that time will course correct but that there are numerous ways in which it could.
What the paper describes is possible multiple scenarios in which you can commit a grandfather paradox without actually causing a paradox.
It doesn't say that time will course correct but that there are numerous ways in which it could.
It could also be that this research was conducted by some kid that's still pursuing his Bachelor's degree, while also being confined to a super-specific part of theoretical physics that isn't even commonly accepted in the first place, and that the authors themselves acknowledge that there obviously isn't any evidence of their theoretical model manifesting physically.
Don't blame the scientist for an overhyped journalist, and never trust news articles about research articles.
It turns out you didn't actually kill him and hospital workers managed to save him while you were on your way back to the present
If you find the idea of time travel mind-bending, get a load of the 'block universe'
The block universe theory says the past, present and future all exist — and are equally real — in a four-dimensional block where the passing of time is an illusion.
www.google.com
Basically space time looks like it does because this (flow of time, space time) is just an imposition our brains make to perceive whatever this (Space-time) is. Why do we perceive time in such a vividly spatial temporal way? No one knows yet.
