GIVEN: That the universe of discourse permits both time travel and the changing of the past. Unsurprisingly that is also its prime danger.Īll of the current "real" time machines visualized as thought-experiments by real physicists share a common flaw: you cannot use a time machine to travel to a point in time prior to the construction of that particular time machine. So the primary motive for time travel is to change the past. It is the desire for a "do-over" in other words. If they could only change history so that they had hit the baseball to the left instead of the right it wouldn't have broken Old Man Smith's picture window. In his The Theory and Practice of Time Travel, Larry Niven notes that the basic motivation for inventing time travel is the same motivation of a child fervently wishing that something had never happened. A closed timelike curve eventually doubles back, traveling into the past until it connects with itself. Ordinary world line start at a given point in space and time, then moves into the future like all normal things do. This is a world-line that is a loop, instead the more conventional wavy vertical line. To travel back in time, you need to follow what is called a Closed Timelike Curve. As it turns out, Einstein's relativity shows that FTL travel and Time travel are two different terms for the exact same thing. Why? Because time travel really cheeses him off, that's why.Īs previously mentioned, this is also the reason physicists are so hostile to faster-than-light travel. Stephen Hawking was so annoyed at this he formulated his Chronology protection conjecture, which holds that the laws of physics are such as to prevent time travel on all but submicroscopic scales. More technically: the distinction between cause and effect is not made at the most fundamental level within the field of physics. And believe me, they have been looking real hard. The only thing that makes physicists more angry is the fact that there appears to be nothing in physics that forbids time travel. So don't try to use a chronoscanner to see which horse will win at the racetrack or the time-police will show up and beat the snot out of you. This includes time-communicators (allowing one to talk to a person in the past or future) or a time-viewer (allowing one to see events in the past or future). Do remember that it is not just travel that can cause a temporal paradox, any transfer of mere information can be just as bad. And all it takes is one of those bad boys to blow causality right out of the freaking water. You see, time travel raises the possibility of creating a dreaded temporal paradox. So physicist hate time travel with every existential fiber of their being because time travel can kill causality like a sledge hammer splattering a roach. Step two of the Scientific Method, in fact. Science in general and physics in particular is all about making predictions. Causality mandates that causes must precede effects, or it becomes impossible to make predictions. Probably because without it the entire structure of physics crumbles into flaming ruin and you can't get any work done. Physicists hold exceedingly tight on to the concept of Causality. GURPS Time Travel by Steve Jackson and John Ford.Time Travel: a writers guide to the real science of plausible time travel, by Paul Nahin.The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes by Rudy Rucker.Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension by Rudy Rucker.The Theory and Practice of Time Travel by Larry Niven.This is actually such a huge topic that it deserves its own website. Thirdly one of my favorite atomic rocket science fiction authors when I was growing up was Lady Andre Norton, and she has written some pretty sharp time travel novels. The second reason is that some theories about time travel grow out the fourth dimension. The main reason this page is here is because if you start messing around with faster than light travel, you are going to be ambushed by time travel sooner or later. Yes, Time Travel is not very Atomic Rocket.
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