It's about time I wrote something. I found this text half finished after being neglected for over a year... I hope you have a good time:
"How could time travel be possible?" - This question has occupied my mind now and again, but a simple way of answering this question has not found its way into my mind until recently.
It is known by physicists that subatomic particles can, and do, travel in time, but few talk how such an event is possible at all. Also, many writers have thought of the eventuality of travelling to the past and how it would affect the future, but the issue of travel into the future and back is equally interesting and less charted. Putting aside cliches of flying 'time-cars', amulets and special portals, let us consider the situation where a 'consciousness' can travel back and forth into time (I will leave it to the reader to extrapolate this example to the simple physical world...).
Imagine that your mind - let us exclude the body for the sake of simplicity - could travel into the future and back again. Whether you could have changed anything in this supposed travel is so far (relatively) irrelevant. However, acquiring information about the future would likely affect your future actions, which would again change the future. This results in a paradox, since the future that you have visited exists no longer, hence, you cannot have travelled into that same Universe in the first place.
Aside from saying that a parallel universe is created, with the old one remaining, you can still 'get away' with a single Universe. Let us think of time as of a strange kind of quasi-mathematical funcion that stabilises itself after infinite reiterations.
Imagine, for example, the archetypal situation, where you witness your 'future-self' painting a still life. Having seen yourself doing this, your 'present-self' will likely change the way it paints in the future, thus changing the painting of the future-self. Such change in the painting will, no doubt, be reflected in the perception of the present-self of the painting, which will in turn change his actions again, thus again changing the painting. This could be equated to a function that loops into itself, changing the outcome each time. Such a loop could, in theory, last infinitely, but as the number of iterations tends to infinity, the situation would stabilise itself, so that a point will be reached when the beholding of the painting by the present-self will not have any effect in the way this painting is made by the future-self. However, there are two arguments that could work against this:
First, imagine now another archetypal situation where you have witnessed yourself in the future, say, dropping a cup of coffee onto the floor. Knowing this, you may check yourself and not drop it. However, this means you would not have seen yourself dropping the cup of coffee and thus should drop it, given you had no reason to check yourself. This argument is weak, however, since no action is binary; thus there should always be a way for the most stable action to be reached. Imagine it as the point of lowest Entropy, or a curved rocky terrain where a small marble is dropped and rolls downhill until it finds a trough or well where it can 'sit'.
The second, more serious problem with such an explanation is that perhaps the loop would not ever completely stabilise itself, due to the effect of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, meaning that no two events could ever be exactly the same. Thus, rather than living in a time-line, we live in a sort of multi-dimensional 'time-band', which has different probabilities of existing at different cross sections of it, that varies according to the exact probabilistic make-up of the entire 'situation' - the entire universe at a moment in time (but note that time itself is likely probabilistic too!). Thus, our marble above would be constantly moving about the well, depending on the 'geography' and on the energy posessesed by the marble, which would exist in many places in the well at once, just as an electron cloud 'orbits' about its nucleus...
"How could time travel be possible?" - This question has occupied my mind now and again, but a simple way of answering this question has not found its way into my mind until recently.
It is known by physicists that subatomic particles can, and do, travel in time, but few talk how such an event is possible at all. Also, many writers have thought of the eventuality of travelling to the past and how it would affect the future, but the issue of travel into the future and back is equally interesting and less charted. Putting aside cliches of flying 'time-cars', amulets and special portals, let us consider the situation where a 'consciousness' can travel back and forth into time (I will leave it to the reader to extrapolate this example to the simple physical world...).
Imagine that your mind - let us exclude the body for the sake of simplicity - could travel into the future and back again. Whether you could have changed anything in this supposed travel is so far (relatively) irrelevant. However, acquiring information about the future would likely affect your future actions, which would again change the future. This results in a paradox, since the future that you have visited exists no longer, hence, you cannot have travelled into that same Universe in the first place.
Aside from saying that a parallel universe is created, with the old one remaining, you can still 'get away' with a single Universe. Let us think of time as of a strange kind of quasi-mathematical funcion that stabilises itself after infinite reiterations.
Imagine, for example, the archetypal situation, where you witness your 'future-self' painting a still life. Having seen yourself doing this, your 'present-self' will likely change the way it paints in the future, thus changing the painting of the future-self. Such change in the painting will, no doubt, be reflected in the perception of the present-self of the painting, which will in turn change his actions again, thus again changing the painting. This could be equated to a function that loops into itself, changing the outcome each time. Such a loop could, in theory, last infinitely, but as the number of iterations tends to infinity, the situation would stabilise itself, so that a point will be reached when the beholding of the painting by the present-self will not have any effect in the way this painting is made by the future-self. However, there are two arguments that could work against this:
First, imagine now another archetypal situation where you have witnessed yourself in the future, say, dropping a cup of coffee onto the floor. Knowing this, you may check yourself and not drop it. However, this means you would not have seen yourself dropping the cup of coffee and thus should drop it, given you had no reason to check yourself. This argument is weak, however, since no action is binary; thus there should always be a way for the most stable action to be reached. Imagine it as the point of lowest Entropy, or a curved rocky terrain where a small marble is dropped and rolls downhill until it finds a trough or well where it can 'sit'.
The second, more serious problem with such an explanation is that perhaps the loop would not ever completely stabilise itself, due to the effect of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, meaning that no two events could ever be exactly the same. Thus, rather than living in a time-line, we live in a sort of multi-dimensional 'time-band', which has different probabilities of existing at different cross sections of it, that varies according to the exact probabilistic make-up of the entire 'situation' - the entire universe at a moment in time (but note that time itself is likely probabilistic too!). Thus, our marble above would be constantly moving about the well, depending on the 'geography' and on the energy posessesed by the marble, which would exist in many places in the well at once, just as an electron cloud 'orbits' about its nucleus...
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