Two brief (2min) vids about time travel paradoxes

Hi Paul, I have only watched the first video as yet...a question presents itself. We postulate that you have travelled back in R1 and accidentally wiped your self out and so triggered R2... so what happens to you as a time traveller? I don't dispute you still exist (and don't wink out of existence). Is it your opinion that you can still return forward (I never use the term "back" ) to your own R1 or is that now closed to you? Interested what you think.
 
Aha the second video concerns the classic bootstrap paradox. I see you also circumvent this with the Many Worlds Interpretation.
 
Paul, I have been thinking about the second video and what you say about giving the ring to your grandmother before your grandfather did, and that this invokes a bootstrap paradox (ie where did the physical ring come from?) but this is not neccessarily so. The ring could still have been made (Would HAVE to be made in fact to avoid a paradox) but the process of it actually passing down to you in the future R1 becomes very much more convoluted . But the Novikov Self-Consistency theory says that is exactly what will happen. Actual events will become increasingly more improbable , but true in order to for time to "protect itself" as it were. Many Worlds allows you to get away with anything....Self Consistency makes you jump through hoops.
 
vodkafan said:
Hi Paul, I have only watched the first video as yet...a question presents itself. We postulate that you have travelled back in R1 and accidentally wiped your self out and so triggered R2... so what happens to you as a time traveller? I don't dispute you still exist (and don't wink out of existence). Is it your opinion that you can still return forward (I never use the term "back" ) to your own R1 or is that now closed to you? Interested what you think.
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Thanks for your question - yes, I see no reason why I ((PL-1) cannot move forward in R-2, by either living or via time travel. Why would you think I couldn't return forward?
 
vodkafan said:
Paul, I have been thinking about the second video and what you say about giving the ring to your grandmother before your grandfather did, and that this invokes a bootstrap paradox (ie where did the physical ring come from?) but this is not neccessarily so. The ring could still have been made (Would HAVE to be made in fact to avoid a paradox) but the process of it actually passing down to you in the future R1 becomes very much more convoluted . But the Novikov Self-Consistency theory says that is exactly what will happen. Actual events will become increasingly more improbable , but true in order to for time to "protect itself" as it were. Many Worlds allows you to get away with anything....Self Consistency makes you jump through hoops.
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Yes, and Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture also postulates a universe that strives to protect itself from the unraveling ravages of time travel. See my novelette, "The Chronology Protection Case," for a fiction treatment of this. Free over here The Chronology Protection Case - Wattpad
 
vodkafan said:
The duplication of people and objects is one of the things I like to play with a lot..
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I love playing with duplication, too,

I came up with Levinson's paradox of duplication back in the 1990s: the attempt to perfectly duplicate a unique object is intrinsically self-defeating, because if you duplicate a unique object in all respects, you will undo its uniqueness, rendering it no longer a complete or exact copy of the original. In that case, the original will have been transformed into something no longer unique, and that original will therefore have been not duplicated but destroyed. I discuss this briefly in my 1997 nonfiction book, The Soft Edge Amazon.com: Soft Edge:Nat Hist&Future Info eBook: Paul Levinson: Kindle Store
 
PaulLev said:
Thanks for your question - yes, I see no reason why I ((PL-1) cannot move forward in R-2, by either living or via time travel. Why would you think I couldn't return forward?
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Thanks Paul. Yes, you can move forward naturally in R2. But my question was about R1. Can PL return forward to his original future , the one you came from, or is that now closed to be replaced by R2? If from R2 he jumps back in time again he will trigger R3.
 
PaulLev said:
I love playing with duplication, too,

I came up with Levinson's paradox of duplication back in the 1990s: the attempt to perfectly duplicate a unique object is intrinsically self-defeating, because if you duplicate a unique object in all respects, you will undo its uniqueness, rendering it no longer a complete or exact copy of the original. In that case, the original will have been transformed into something no longer unique, and that original will therefore have been not duplicated but destroyed. I discuss this briefly in my 1997 nonfiction book, The Soft Edge Amazon.com: Soft Edge:Nat Hist&Future Info eBook: Paul Levinson: Kindle Store
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Interesting. I have my own take on duplication I am using in my own novel. I can't talk about it in detail as the novel is only half way written.
 
vodkafan said:
Thanks Paul. Yes, you can move forward naturally in R2. But my question was about R1. Can PL return forward to his original future , the one you came from, or is that now closed to be replaced by R2? If from R2 he jumps back in time again he will trigger R3.
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Ah - That is more complicated (and more fun). I would say no - PL1 will be in R2, in all future times - unless PL1 jumps back in time and stops his earlier self from interfering with his grandparents, in which case R1 would not be changed to R2. And, right, if PL1 jumps back in time and does something else, that would trigger R3. It might be useful to give PL1 an age. So PL1-age30 in R1 goes back in time and prevents his grandparents from meeting, which creates R2. PL1 stays a year in that past. PL1-age31 returns to the future R2. PL1 stays a year in that future. PL1-age32 returns to the past, before PL1-age30 got to the past. PL1-age32 stops PL1-age30 from interfering with his grandparents. At that moment, R2 flips back into R1.
 
PaulLev said:
Ah - That is more complicated (and more fun). I would say no - PL1 will be in R2, in all future times - unless PL1 jumps back in time and stops his earlier self from interfering with his grandparents, in which case R1 would not be changed to R2. And, right, if PL1 jumps back in time and does something else, that would trigger R3. It might be useful to give PL1 an age. So PL1-age30 in R1 goes back in time and prevents his grandparents from meeting, which creates R2. PL1 stays a year in that past. PL1-age31 returns to the future R2. PL1 stays a year in that future. PL1-age32 returns to the past, before PL1-age30 got to the past. PL1-age32 stops PL1-age30 from interfering with his grandparents. At that moment, R2 flips back into R1.
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Great stuff. And then he could of course, make some other inadvertant change instead which would lead to yet another version of the future...
 
vodkafan said:
Thank you. This is my first novel. Sometimes the writing is easy and sometimes it's like trying to squeeze out a mental baby that doesn't want to be born. :)
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When I first started writing books - including my doctoral dissertation - I would make great progress, then get stuck, then think I would never finish, until, one day, I started writing fluently again. I'm now at the point where I just ignore those slowdowns, and keep writing anyway :)
 
Thanks for the encouragement Paul. Yes I think it is an internal discipline thing. It's not going to write itself that's for sure. I tried that and it hasn't worked lol :rolleyes:
 
Exactly. The other piece of advice I can give you is don't let social commitments get in the way of your writing. If you're in the mood to write, cancel whatever appointment if you can. You'll get more accolades anyway in the long run when you're a published author.
 
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