16 replies to this topic

[Piglet]

So, last night I was having this thought about the Grandfather paradox. I ended up concluding that the paradox creates another paradox. Namely the paradox of 'it didn't happen'.

I will explain:

Freddy's grandfather met Freddy's grandmother during World War 2 on an army base, she was a nurse and he caught a bullet. Freddy is a scientist working on time-travel, he goes back in time and he takes out Hitler. Freddy's grandparents never met, and freddy doesn't exist anymore.

But now the other paradox comes into play: If Freddy never existed, he could never take out Hitler. Hitler still lives and starts World War two like it would've happened. Freddy's grandparents meet like they should've, and freddy invents time-travel again and goes back in time to kill hitler.

In other words, the entire universe is caught in a ~70 year loop!

So, what are your takes?

[Valdez]

Freddy doesn't not-exist. He stays in the new timeline which he travelled to, which is a divergent timeline separate from the one he came from.

It's like when you play a game and travel back to a save point from earlier. Once you travel back, the timespace continuum you were previously in no longer matters (we will disregard that it being a game, you could have saved game in order to go back). What happens in the timeline you are currently in is independent of what happened in the 'future' timeline you were from. This is how most Commander Shepards romance more than one person.

The grandfather paradox depends on the assumption that it is impossible for parallel timelines to exist. If that were the case, then according to Stepehen Hawking, we'd already know time travel is impossible since nobody thus far has witnessed any time travellers from the future coming into our present day (or any time in the past). Unless you count stewox, who may be a time traveller from a dark and tumultuous future where everyone's retarded.

Edited by Valdez, 26 August 2010 - 12:48 AM.

[Piglet]

So you go with the assumption that traveling back in time causes another universe to form, in which your actions do have an effect on it's timeline, but not on yourself?

And what if we have not seen time-travelers yet is because there has been only one, that caused a loop, when he tried to kill off hitler, and thusly not time exists after the point he jumped back in time, therefore we can not have new travelers since 'Freddy' caused this universe to loop on itself, which prevents anyone from using the same device as Freddy did.

And now I have to go to work.

Edited by Piglet, 26 August 2010 - 12:54 AM.

[The Archon]

I get enough of this at work

What Valdez said is the generally accepted theory: time travel creates an alternate universe.

How does the Grandfather Paradox fit in with the concept of saving a game, though? Hmm... I guess it doesn't.  Saving/loading a game presupposes that you were there in the first place, so while you may be able to go back to a point in your own life (where you'd become your younger self), you can't load back to an event that happened before you started the game.

Quote

In other words, the entire universe is caught in a ~70 year loop!

Edited by The Archon, 26 August 2010 - 02:41 AM.

[Valdez]

The game saving thing is a loose analogy, its not 100% perfect, I just thought it up in a hurry.

Time travelling backwards is way too confusing anyway. How would the outside world perceive an entity that is moving back in time? Would it be like teleportation where it just vanishes?

Edited by Valdez, 26 August 2010 - 06:51 AM.

[The Archon]

Depends on the rule set you adhere to.  Most franchises (Terminator, Haruhi, Back to the Future, the save-game analogy, Red Alert, Austin Powers, etc.) dictate sudden disappearance from one time and appearance in another.  This generally supports the possibility of there being multiple instances of a time traveler at once.  Incidentally, The Terminator (first movie) offers a nice little counterpoint to the Grandfather Paradox

The Time Machine is different, and suggests continuous (though possibly invisible) presence, but I don't think that makes much sense, and it isn't handled very well in those movies.  I haven't read the novel.  Some time travel book I read a few years ago used x/t graphs, which also suggest continuous movement, but I'm very wary of pseudo-scientific books.

Maybe continuous presence is more likely, but sudden disappearance/appearance is easier to swallow, or just makes for more interesting movies.

[Dei]

Or, perhaps, people have traveled back in time [assuming we're not using the parallel timeline theory] and altered history in a way that we perceive to be -normal- to prevent the creation of the aforementioned time machine.

For an example, all we know is that yesterday a nuke exploded in France(my favourite example evuuur), but due to the time traveler, we don't remember there being any threat at all or explosion because he went back to the early stage of 'whoopsiedaisy' and prevented it on a still harmless level.
Like killing Hitler when he was a baby, we wouldn't be all, 'OMG HITLER GOT KILLED WHILST HE WAS A BABY AND IN THE HOSPITAL THUS PREVENTING A WORLD WAR 2!' but never be aware that there was 'the' Hitler! (except for his parents..unless he went waaaay back)

Edited by Dei, 26 August 2010 - 12:18 PM.

[Valdez]

There's a reason the grandfather paradox is called a paradox you know. Being a paradox implies a violation of truthness, a contradiction in logic, so to speak. It'd be like saying I have a formula to travel back in time, but for the formula to hold, 1+1 must equal to 3. You'd intuitively presume the formula can't be true because of this.

You know this reminds me of all those silly time travel debates on the Red Alert series, which had dozens of blatant silly dumbness in the time travel mechanics...

Spoiler

- Einstein travels back in time. He somehow manages to go back to his original timeline, implying no-parallel-timelines in red alert canon.

- Einstein shakes Hitler's hand and Hitler is erased from history because in red alert canon, future things annihilate past things like antimatter on matter, yet Einstein never suffocated to death from never being able to breathe the oxygen in the past timeline, nor did his footsteps erase the very ground beneath him.

- In RA3, Einstein is eliminated from the timeline, thus erasing nuclear tech. Einstein was never responsible for nuclear tech to begin with. Ironically, despite Einstein being erased nearly 40 years before RA1 (the time when the chronosphere was developed), RA3 still had the chronosphere. And the Mirage tech, which he was supposed to have developed even later.

- Erasing Einstein gave the Japs super tech and made them a regional superpower.

- It is worth noting however, that one thing which did make sense was the Soviets inventing their atomic bomb more quickly, since there was no Germany to distract them.

Edited by Valdez, 26 August 2010 - 12:48 PM.

[Piglet]

soviet bomb research only started after stalin heard about the american research.

[Kakatios]

Time traveling. Wooooohooooo.

If we're making assumptions at that there are time travelers in the future, does that mean we're in the past? And if a time machine was invented, going back and eliminating Hitler before he becomes a threat would seem wise. But what are the consequences of that action? The whole "for every action, there is a equal and opposite reaction" has to happen, right?

Plus the complications and power needed for a time machine would be off the chart I imagine. Bending space and time to get in one place would probably be insane to calculate. The Earth spinning and moving through space at high rate of speed, the chance of actually appearing in another object, altitude, air pressure, gravity, weather, and who knows how many other factors. What about the off chance of the time traveler being pulled over? Or the time travel sneezing on someone and spreading a virus/bacteria for which no cure exists in the past?

So many things, so many possible consequences. Go back to remove Hitler and end up destroying the species with whatever flu will exist in a century.

[Piglet]

which in turn would evoke the grandfather paradox paradox, or nothing would happen because it would start another timeline which does not affect the time-traveler.

[Valdez]

Kakatios, on 26 August 2010 - 06:49 PM, said:

going back and eliminating Hitler before he becomes a threat would seem wise. But what are the consequences of that action?

Attack dogs. Also, dolphins.

[Piglet]

Double barrelled tanks?

Tanks with 4 seperate tracks?

Weather controling devices?

MIND CONTROLLING MADMEN!

[Commander Loony]

*head explodes into bite-sized chunks*

[Noah es Frio]

om nom nom nom

[Piglet]

DEEEEEEEEEEELICIOUS!

[Noah es Frio]

/randomspam