Why Timelines Don't Solve The Grandfather Paradox
- Thread starter Twighlight
- Start date
Re: Why Timelines Don\'t Solve The Grandfather Paradox
I think the only realistic way today to travel back in time is to travel in space and end up in a parallel universe that is younger than our own.
The replier to my previous post had some good points, in order to travel backwards in time you need to physically rewind time, which is impossible because you need to break all the physical laws that created the universe in the first place.
I think the only realistic way today to travel back in time is to travel in space and end up in a parallel universe that is younger than our own.
The replier to my previous post had some good points, in order to travel backwards in time you need to physically rewind time, which is impossible because you need to break all the physical laws that created the universe in the first place.
Darby
Epochal Historian
Re: Why Timelines Don\'t Solve The Grandfather Paradox
Which isn't really travelling backwards in time. What happens in one universe has no cause-effect relationship with the other universe. What time it is in one or the other is irrelevent and arbitrary. Even within our own universe we can't unambigously state what time it is if the distance beetween two objects is more than a few tens of thousands of kilometers. Look at the moon and "now" here is one second ago on the moon. Look at the sun and it is 8 minutes ago there. Look at yourself in a mirror .5 meters away and you see yourself 3 billionths of a second in the past. And that's very local time within our own tiny solar system.
We have to define what we actually mean by time travel "backwards in time". It implies that we view an event that is the effect of some other space-time event that we call the cause. We then move ourselves to another place in space-time so that we can view the cause. We believe for good reason that cause always precedes the effect. Eggs fall, hit the floor and break. We do not expect to ever see a broken egg "fall" up and reassemble itself into the otherwise original configuration of a complete intact egg. That's both the thermodynamic and enthropic arrows of time. They always points forward ---->, never backwards <-----.
To be technically correct we should say that there is a vanishingly small probability, but a real probability nonetheless, that a broken egg will fall up and reassemble itself. In the entire universe, over the entire theoretical life of the universe the chance of that happenining is virtually zero. But it is still in theory possible.
Anyway, traveling back in time is the ability to see the cause after first seeing the effect and having the opportunity to alter the cause and avoiding the effect that you've already witnessed. Now try rewiring your Newtonian brain to accept that one.
Which isn't really travelling backwards in time. What happens in one universe has no cause-effect relationship with the other universe. What time it is in one or the other is irrelevent and arbitrary. Even within our own universe we can't unambigously state what time it is if the distance beetween two objects is more than a few tens of thousands of kilometers. Look at the moon and "now" here is one second ago on the moon. Look at the sun and it is 8 minutes ago there. Look at yourself in a mirror .5 meters away and you see yourself 3 billionths of a second in the past. And that's very local time within our own tiny solar system.
We have to define what we actually mean by time travel "backwards in time". It implies that we view an event that is the effect of some other space-time event that we call the cause. We then move ourselves to another place in space-time so that we can view the cause. We believe for good reason that cause always precedes the effect. Eggs fall, hit the floor and break. We do not expect to ever see a broken egg "fall" up and reassemble itself into the otherwise original configuration of a complete intact egg. That's both the thermodynamic and enthropic arrows of time. They always points forward ---->, never backwards <-----.
To be technically correct we should say that there is a vanishingly small probability, but a real probability nonetheless, that a broken egg will fall up and reassemble itself. In the entire universe, over the entire theoretical life of the universe the chance of that happenining is virtually zero. But it is still in theory possible.
Anyway, traveling back in time is the ability to see the cause after first seeing the effect and having the opportunity to alter the cause and avoiding the effect that you've already witnessed. Now try rewiring your Newtonian brain to accept that one.
Re: Why Timelines Don\'t Solve The Grandfather Paradox
Well the idea of time travel creating new timelines is that as soon as you try to travel back and enter the past a new timeline is created. This would hapen as soon as you apear in the past as the course of events that lead to you killing your grandfather etc has already ben set in motion. And even if you tried not to create a paradox through the butterfly effect your very presence would lead to slight and growing changes in the timeline. If time travel like this was posible crosstime travel to your own timeline could be imposibel becaus it has been overwritten or the act of doing so imediatly creates yet another paralel universe diverging at the instant you enter that time.
Well the idea of time travel creating new timelines is that as soon as you try to travel back and enter the past a new timeline is created. This would hapen as soon as you apear in the past as the course of events that lead to you killing your grandfather etc has already ben set in motion. And even if you tried not to create a paradox through the butterfly effect your very presence would lead to slight and growing changes in the timeline. If time travel like this was posible crosstime travel to your own timeline could be imposibel becaus it has been overwritten or the act of doing so imediatly creates yet another paralel universe diverging at the instant you enter that time.
thantifaxathbeta
Temporal Novice
Re: Why Timelines Don\'t Solve The Grandfather Paradox
If you think of yourself as a point, and you have n distinct choices, each choice would seemingly produce a distinct timeline, a separate 'branch'. The 'grandfather paradox' is a 'feedback loop' in time, so for me the question is always 'how are the various possible paths connected.' For anyone knowledgeable in basic topology, you know that connectivity is a topological issue. What, then, is the topology of time? I would say that spacetime is multiply-connected....
If you think of yourself as a point, and you have n distinct choices, each choice would seemingly produce a distinct timeline, a separate 'branch'. The 'grandfather paradox' is a 'feedback loop' in time, so for me the question is always 'how are the various possible paths connected.' For anyone knowledgeable in basic topology, you know that connectivity is a topological issue. What, then, is the topology of time? I would say that spacetime is multiply-connected....
Risatalisa
Temporal Novice
Re: Why Timelines Don\'t Solve The Grandfather Paradox
I have had too many beers to fully grasp the paradoxs mentioned here.
Why is it not feasible to think that perhaps a time traveler DID go into the past, kill his grandfather, ceased to exist, and therefore,we are none the wiser? Who's to say that didn't happen, because if it did, then someone merely wasn't born, and so anyone could say that this paradox is true. So perhaps a warning to time travelers is, if you don't want to vanish into thin air, don't kill any of your ancestors?
Now, about traveling back into time. If time is circular, as has been suggested by some folks, isn't it reasonable to assume that if you were to warp speed yourself enough into the future, you would end up at the beginning of time? Assuming of course that there is an end time to our universe, and a beginning.
If it has always just been-the non-creationist theory-then time is totally irrelvant anyone and simply a man-man constitute, which then it can be assumed that you CAN travel back and forth, because it always just IS. Time itself wouldn't move "forward".
Imagine a world with no TIME. We don't count years, age, or even the hours. We kept NO history. If time ceased to exsist as we have defined it-our bodies would still age-and die-but what then would the argument be?
Maybe "time" simply exsist because we have MEMORY of the past. With no MEMORY, then there would be nothing to go back to, because we wouldn't realize anything other than TODAY.
SLURP....ah, this beer sure hits the spot! LOL
I have had too many beers to fully grasp the paradoxs mentioned here.
Why is it not feasible to think that perhaps a time traveler DID go into the past, kill his grandfather, ceased to exist, and therefore,we are none the wiser? Who's to say that didn't happen, because if it did, then someone merely wasn't born, and so anyone could say that this paradox is true. So perhaps a warning to time travelers is, if you don't want to vanish into thin air, don't kill any of your ancestors?
Now, about traveling back into time. If time is circular, as has been suggested by some folks, isn't it reasonable to assume that if you were to warp speed yourself enough into the future, you would end up at the beginning of time? Assuming of course that there is an end time to our universe, and a beginning.
If it has always just been-the non-creationist theory-then time is totally irrelvant anyone and simply a man-man constitute, which then it can be assumed that you CAN travel back and forth, because it always just IS. Time itself wouldn't move "forward".
Imagine a world with no TIME. We don't count years, age, or even the hours. We kept NO history. If time ceased to exsist as we have defined it-our bodies would still age-and die-but what then would the argument be?
Maybe "time" simply exsist because we have MEMORY of the past. With no MEMORY, then there would be nothing to go back to, because we wouldn't realize anything other than TODAY.
SLURP....ah, this beer sure hits the spot! LOL
Darby
Epochal Historian
Re: Why Timelines Don\'t Solve The Grandfather Paradox
True, events can occur that we are not aware of and therefore also unaware of any effect that the incident(s) had on us. That’s not the same thing, though, as an incident where effect precedes cause or worse, incidents where the effect obliterates the cause out of existence. If there is no cause there is no effect.
Sure, we could imagine a timeless world where memory didn’t exist. But such a world would have no intelligent life to ponder the question of why having no memory is good, bad or indifferent. Life in such a world wouldn’t even have a vocabulary.
True, events can occur that we are not aware of and therefore also unaware of any effect that the incident(s) had on us. That’s not the same thing, though, as an incident where effect precedes cause or worse, incidents where the effect obliterates the cause out of existence. If there is no cause there is no effect.
It starts off with a false premise…time is circular. After that everything else is irrelevant. All evidence indicates that time is linear and moves in one direction only.
Dr. Julian Barbour has theorized a world where there is no time. Position/change of position relative to other objects in configuration space is all there is. In this view time is a convenient psychological illusion: useful but not physically real.
Sure, we could imagine a timeless world where memory didn’t exist. But such a world would have no intelligent life to ponder the question of why having no memory is good, bad or indifferent. Life in such a world wouldn’t even have a vocabulary.