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Grandfather paradox
The grandfather Paradox is a proposed paradox of time travel first described (in this exact form) by the science fiction writer Ren Barjavel in his 1943 book Le Voyageur Imprudent (Future Times Three).[1] The paradox is this: suppose a man traveled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveler's grandmother. As a result, one of the traveler's parents (and by extension the traveler himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have traveled back in time after all, which means the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveler would have been conceived allowing him to travel back in time and kill his grandfather. Thus each possibility seems to imply its own negation, a type of logical paradox. Despite the name, the grandfather paradox does not exclusively regard the impossibility of one's own birth. Rather, it regards any action that makes impossible the ability to travel back in time in the first place. The paradox's namesake example is merely the most commonly thought of when one considers the whole range of possible actions. Another example would be using scientific knowledge to invent a time machine, then going back in time and (whether through murder or otherwise) impeding a scientist's work that would eventually lead to the very information that you used to invent the time machine. An equivalent paradox is known (in philosophy) as autoinfanticide, going back in time and killing oneself as a baby.[2] The grandfather paradox has been used to argue that backwards time travel must be impossible. However, a number of hypotheses have been postulated to avoid the paradox, such as the idea that the past is unchangeable, so the grandfather must have already survived the attempted killing; or the time traveler creates an alternate time line in which the traveler was never born.
Scientific theories
Novikov self-consistency principle
The Novikov self-consistency principle and Kip S. Thorne expresses one view on how backwards time travel could be possible without a danger of paradoxes. According to this hypothesis, the only possible time lines are those entirely self-consistentso anything a time traveler does in the past must have been part of history all along, and the time traveler can never do anything to prevent the trip back in time from happening, since this would represent an inconsistency. In layman's terms, this is often called determinism. It conflicts with the notion of free-will. Succinctly, this explanation states that if time travel is possible, then actions are determined by history.
Grandfather paradox M-theory is put forward as a hypothetical master theory that unifies the six superstring theories, although at present it is largely incomplete. One possible consequence of ideas drawn from M-theory is that multiple universes in the form of 3-dimensional membranes known as branes could exist side-by-side in a fourth large spatial dimension (which is distinct from the concept of time as a fourth dimension) - see Brane cosmology. However, there is currently no argument from physics that there would be one brane for each physically possible version of history as in the many-worlds interpretation, nor is there any argument that time travel would take one to a different brane.
Nonexistence theory
According to this theory, if one were to do something in the past that would cause their nonexistence, upon returning to the future, they would find themselves in a world where the effects of (and chain reactions thereof) their actions are not present, as the person never existed. Through this theory, they would still exist, though. A famous example of this theory is It's A Wonderful Life.
Grandfather paradox role-playing game, which supposes that Time is like a stream; you can dam it, divert it, or block it, but the overall direction resumes after a period of conflict. It also may not be clear whether the time traveler altered the past or precipitated the future he remembers, such as a time traveler who goes back in time to persuade an artist whose single surviving work is famous to hide the rest of the works to protect them. If, on returning to his time, he finds that these works are now well-known, he knows he has changed the past. On the other hand, he may return to a future exactly as he remembers, except that a week after his return, the works are found. Were they actually destroyed, as he believed when he traveled in time, and has he preserved them? Or was their disappearance occasioned by the artist's hiding them at his urging, and the skill with which they were hidden, and so the long time to find them, stemmed from his urgency?
Destruction resolution
Some science fiction stories suggest that any paradox would destroy the universe, or at least the parts of space and time affected by the paradox. The plots of such stories tend to revolve around preventing paradoxes, such as the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A less destructive alternative of this theory suggests the death of the time traveller whether the history is altered or not; an example would be in the first part of the Back to the Future trilogy, where the lead character's alteration of history results in a risk of his own disappearance, and he has to fix the alteration to preserve his own existence. In this theory, killing one's grandfather would result in the disappearance of oneself, history would erase all traces of the person's existence, and the death of the grandfather would be caused by another means (say, another existing person firing the gun); thus, the paradox would never occur from a historical viewpoint.
Grandfather paradox
Other considerations
Consideration of the grandfather paradox has led some to the idea that time travel is by its very nature paradoxical and therefore logically impossible, on the same order as round squares. For example, the philosopher Bradley Dowden made this sort of argument in the textbook Logical Reasoning, where he wrote:
Nobody has ever built a time machine that could take a person back to an earlier time. Nobody should be seriously trying to build one, either, because a good argument exists for why the machine can never be built. The argument goes like this: suppose you did have a time machine right now, and you could step into it and travel back to some earlier time. Your actions in that time might then prevent your grandparents from ever having met one another. This would make you not born, and thus not step into the time machine. So, the claim that there could be a time machine is self-contradictory.
However, some philosophers and scientists believe that time travel into the past need not be logically impossible provided that there is no possibility of changing the past, as suggested, for example, by the Novikov self-consistency principle. Bradley Dowden himself revised the view above after being convinced of this in an exchange with the philosopher Norman Swartz.[4] Consideration of the possibility of backwards time travel in a hypothetical universe described by a Gdel metric led famed logician Kurt Gdel to assert that time might itself be a sort of illusion.[5] [6] He seems to have been suggesting something along the lines of the block time view in which time does not really "flow" but is just another dimension like space, with all events at all times being fixed within this 4-dimensional "block".
References
[1] Barjavel, Ren (1943). Le voyageur imprudent ("The imprudent traveler").; actually, the book refers to an ancestor of the time traveler not his grandfather. [2] Horwich, Paul (1987). Asymmetries in Time. Cambridge, MIT Press. pp.116. When the term was coined by Paul Horwich, he used the term autofanticide. [3] Deutsch, David (1991). "Quantum mechanics near closed timelike curves". Physical Review D 44 (10): 31973217. Bibcode1991PhRvD..44.3197D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.44.3197. [4] "Dowden-Swartz Exchange" (http:/ / www. sfu. ca/ philosophy/ swartz/ time_travel1. htm). . [5] Yourgrau, Palle (2004). A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy Of Godel And Einstein. Basic Books. ISBN0-465-09293-4. [6] Holt, Jim (2005-02-21). "Time Bandits" (http:/ / www. newyorker. com/ printables/ critics/ 050228crat_atlarge). The New Yorker. . Retrieved 2006-10-19.
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