What is with the obsession of Paradox in Time Travel?

reply to post by Gazrok


There is no doubt in my mind that Paradoxes hold the key to many mysteries. Whilst my knowledge of Quantum Mechanics is only based on a couple of documentaries, I did not have a problem is accepting some of its premises. For example, in QM , you find that paradoxes exist and can be proven - something can be here and not here at the same time.

I am not getting over-excited about QM. I see it as the scientific explanation of things that were always known in the occult. In a way, Quantum mechanics is where science meets the occult and this is where science is finally catching up with real knowledge.

I love paradoxes as they hide so many truths.


[edit on 29-4-2010 by crowdedskies]

With all the potential parallel universes and alternate timelines, I suppose you could make a case for not having to worry about time-travel paradoxes, because anything you do to the past would only have it split off into different alternate futures.

That being said, reality seems pretty stable, and I really only seem to experience the one and only reality. If it's possible for me to split off into different universes or timelines, why don't I experience them? I only seem to have one point of view, and I don't jump around in various universes. I only have the one.

And if I really only have the one universe or timeline to experience at a time, then maybe all the theories about alternate universes or timelines are just wrong, and if I mess with this one, I mess with the possibility of seriously altering or negating my own existence. It's worth considering.

However, if I can travel to another time or universe where I don't exist or haven't existed, then I have a lot less to worry about. But it also makes it less interesting. I could travel back and see what happened to JFK at Dealy Plaza. But if it isn't my universe, who cares? I can imagine different scenarios, but if an alternate universe is little more than a playing out of something I can imagine, then what's the point?

So there's a bit of a devaluation in timelines/universes if there are so many of them and you can travel to them easily. I prefer to keep the one and only universe I perceive fairly stable and comprehensible. If it starts branching off into a billion alternatives, I don't see how I would be able to keep my sanity.

Kurt Godel said the grandfather paradox does not happen because if a person time travels they do not DESIRE to change their past.

Why is that? Because it's not the "person" who travels -- it's "consciousness" itself that travels. In order to time travel you have to exorcise yourself of any personal DESIRES -- this is how the yogis do it. Time travel works through electromagnetic holographic energy.

www.transcendentdreaming.com...

This doctor describes her own time travel.

Besides the paradox issue, which I feel is valid, Hawking stressed just as much the feedback loop of radiation that would destroy any wormhole to the past. It would disappear before it could even be used.

True, but again, it's just theory...Until one actually makes and stretches such a wormhole, how will we KNOW that feedback would cause that? We don't... And, going further, perhaps the smartie who came up with this wormhole generator also builds in something to prevent the problem of feedback?

We simply don't know. My main point for the discussion was really, do you believe that the Universe is somehow "sentient" in that it tries to "correct" against paradox? This appears to be what Hawking is suggesting, and it kind of seems like a cop-out to me....to just say, nope, we can't go back in time....move along...

Heres my 2 cents worth. First to assume that there is a paradox is to assume that reality is what we think it is.
By that I mean what if we all woke up tomorrow and had no memory of today. the paradox argument assumes that the reality that we are used to experiencing is all there is. However even some highly regarded scientists now think its a likley possibility that we are not even real...and that everything including our bodies and minds are just a computer simulation. Now thats kinda a depressing thought but if that turns out to be what our reality is then paradoxis in time travel hardly count for anything.

I may be off base, but isn't time just something we use to express our lives in a way that makes sense to us. I mean, our past time does not exist in a way that you could go back to it. It is over, there really is no tangible past that you could "visit". Because that past is this present. Just like I cannot take back sleeping in this morning instead of waking up early and doing homework. Because that is what happened and I cannot change it. Time travel for me suggest that our past "time" is "somewhere" for us to travel to. Which to me just doesn't pan out. My past self is my present self is my future self. We are one and the same. I cannot leave my present self and go back to my past self because we are one and the same and one cannot exist without the other. There is no "past" to go back to.

Going further, I could not travel back to a "time" where I did not already exist because I did not exist in that time. For me time travel is man's way of hoping to fix the past we screwed up, which is our present..... instead of changing our present which is our future..... I mean technically if I went with that thought, then we do have time travel already, and it is called changing our present. Which if you ask me is a hell of a lot easier than spending time on trying to travel to the past to change the events that we could be changing now. In the present (past and future).

edit: for messing up future and past

[edit on 2-5-2010 by worlds_away]

[edit on 2-5-2010 by worlds_away]

[edit on 2-5-2010 by worlds_away]

I try to think,

if you could take a 3-dimensional snap shot, of each second.

For 3 consecutive seconds. Is there a reality where you could "see" each snap shot?

--------------

Does a Dimension exist,

that records these snap shots?


Will we ever discover this dimension?

I like Douglas Adam's take on it:

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem about changing the course of history - the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s “Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations”. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intension of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstration, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.


-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

[edit on 5/3/10 by silent thunder]

reply to post by silent thunder


You can not become your own mother or father. Your mother is Irish, your dad is German. You are 1/2 Irish 1/2 German. You go back in time and have a child with your mother. The child would be 3/4 Irish and 1/4 German, and it wouldn't be you, it would be an inbred child. Not sure what your post means how simple grammar debunks time travel.

Originally posted by game over man
reply to post by silent thunder

 

You can not become your own mother or father. Your mother is Irish, your dad is German. You are 1/2 Irish 1/2 German. You go back in time and have a child with your mother. The child would be 3/4 Irish and 1/4 German, and it wouldn't be you, it would be an inbred child. Not sure what your post means how simple grammar debunks time travel.

It is supposed to be humorous. Millions laughed at Adams' books. I guess you didn't.

But it does contain a deeper truth, below the layer of humor, which has to do with the way changes would automatically fit "like a jigsaw puzzle" to avoid paradox. Ultimately, it supports time travel, rather than debunking it, and it claims (in a humorous way) that there is no paradox at all to time travel, which is what the OP claims as well.

Originally posted by silent thunder

Originally posted by game over man
reply to post by silent thunder

 

You can not become your own mother or father. Your mother is Irish, your dad is German. You are 1/2 Irish 1/2 German. You go back in time and have a child with your mother. The child would be 3/4 Irish and 1/4 German, and it wouldn't be you, it would be an inbred child. Not sure what your post means how simple grammar debunks time travel.

It is supposed to be humorous. Millions laughed at Adams' books. I guess you didn't.

But it does contain a deeper truth, below the layer of humor, which has to do with the way changes would automatically fit "like a jigsaw puzzle" to avoid paradox. Ultimately, it supports time travel, rather than debunking it, and it claims (in a humorous way) that there is no paradox at all to time travel, which is what the OP claims as well.

I thought it was quite ridiculous myself. Didn't catch your sarcasm. Interesting point on the jigsaw puzzle. I mean lets be honest, if anyone had their hands on time travel it would be the military and why would they go back in time to kill their grandfather

You must not be able to kill your grandfather because one of your parents wouldn't have been born, therefore you wouldn't exist to grow up to become a time traveler.

But you do exist and are about to time travel, because time travel technology exists, therefore you must be traveling to parallel dimension.

However people say, the occupants of UFO's could be humans from the future...How does that work?

Time doesn't exist like people think it does.

Time is just an illusion created by memory, and the state of "existing".

The universe is ONE object that is constantly changing. The "past" doesn't really exist anymore because it changed into NOW and is constantly changing into the future. The "past", "now", and the "future" are ALL THE SAME OBJECT but at different times.

Right NOW is the past, only changed. So you can NOT physically travel to the past because you are already there, it just changed into what we call NOW.

The universe is NOT like a movie with multiple frames that you can just jump to certain sections of in order to view. The universe is more like a single photograph that constantly changes. There is no previous frame, and no future frame, only one single frame that changes.

However, memories record the changes of the universe like a movie (multiple frames). This creates the illusion of the "past". Naturally, the concept of a "past" can not exist without the concept of a "future", and those combined created the illusion of time. There is no "time", only a NOW.

Now, now, now, now, now, ...


[edit on 3-5-2010 by ALLis0NE]

I've said it before but I think it's so important that it's worth repeating yet again ...

If we posit that time travel is indeed possible, feasible and permitted, then we have to immediately give up any pretense that the concept of free will exists.
Alternatively, if we wish to retain the concept of free will, we have to give up on any idea whatsoever that the possibility of time travel exists.

It's one or the other ... either free will and NO time travel ... or time travel and NO free will.
Can't have it both ways.

i think destiny or "whatever happened, happened" is absurd in that it's meaningless and only serves to relieve any misguided anxiety we feel that things "wouldn't be right" or "make sense to us" or blow apart our fragile sensibilities of how we think the universe ought to work.

this is where i like the op's inference that the universe doesn't care about this kinda stuff. we go back in time and kill hitler … big deal. okay, it's done. next. our precept that the universe must have had a reason for hitler existing or that the time since hitler was around would be changed if he was killed are abstract humanistic wonderings that are really immaterial to whatever supposed science there could be behind time travel.

however, if you go back in time and kill hitler, then come back to the present and things are as if you hadn't gone back in time and killed him (i.e., history still indicates hitler died the way we know he did versus via an assassin), then you didn't really visit the past, did you? you didn't time travel at all, at least in our understanding.

it would make more sense to me that if you went back in time and killed hitler, then returned to the present, history should change to indicate that hitler was killed by someone (and you wouldn't have to look it up, you'd already know because you have already lived your past and since you went and changed the past, that is the past you learned in school).

but it's all for nothing, because i firmly believe that any sort of time travel like this is inherently impossible. it seems to me that the past is called that because it is past and it is over. there's nothing to "go to." it has ceased to exist. but i, of course, am no hawking. i do believe in the perception of time travel via tricks of relativity based on distance and speed. but to go back fifty years or two thousand? no way.

alright heres what i think,

this is a topic i have talked to people about for a long time, and i have come to the conclusion of the multiuniverse, that each desision made creates a new universe. so if you traveled back in time and killed hitler, the future might be different, but when you went into the future nothing might not be different because you went back to the multiuniverse that you originated in, the one where hitler did not die. but there is another part to the story

say you really wanted the redsocks to win the big game, so you decide to shoot the opposing picher, first would cercomstances warrent you getting close enough to the target for you to actually get a kill shot on him. and lets say you get the kill shot and he dies. they would just send another picher out to replace the original

so if you killed the existing hitler, someone else would take his place, and create the same havic that the original did.

this is the short version of what i think on this topic