Grandfather paradox solved?

[BrandonLucas]

I know this is a dead thread, but it's interesting to look at...

I don't think the theory is correct, though.

The report uses an example of going back in time to kill your father, and the simple fact that you know your father is alive now will prevent you from killing him.

The problem is what happens if someone who doesn't know your father goes back in time and kills him?

I think that, going by the theory that is stated, our reality is more of an understood perception. We know and understand what is in front of us now, and we know what has happened in the past.

If someone or something were to alter the past, then our present would be altered without our knowledge of the change. It would be accepted as reality, or our perception of reality, as to what has happened in the past and what is currently happening.

For instance, if someone travels back in time and kills my father before I'm born, then I cease to exist in the present time. Everyone who ever knew me or knew of my accomplishments would forget that I ever existed, and anything that I accomplished or built or impacted would be erased.

Basically, it's the butterfly effect. If you travel back in time, and step on a butterfly, the ripples of the effect of you killing that butterfly can drastically change the present. That butterfly could have flown onto the windshield of a car driven by the next Hitler, made such a mess that he cannot see and hits a tree, instantly killing him and any chance of world domination.

However, without that butterfly to obstruct his vision, he could finish his trip to whatever destination he is headed to unharmed, and continue on with his evil plan of death and destruction.

It can all get a bit deep. But that is just my hole in that theory.

 

[Marginal]

As I understand the classic paradox:

There's no paradox if someone else goes back in time and kills your dad before you were born. You going back in time and doing so would mean that someone who never existed killed him, which is the paradox since if you never existed, there's now nobody going back in time to kill the father. So he wouldn't die. Which means that he'd live to father you...

 

[MA-Caver]

It is the paradox of time travel.
You can't go back in time and kill your father because then you wouldn't be alive to go back in time to kill him.

By the same token, you can't go back in time and kill Hitler as a boy, because then you wouldn't have wanted to go back in time to kill him since he was never a problem so therefore he wouldn't be killed by you causing you to want to kill him.

Y'all with me on this?

Few more bong hits and I'll be catching up with ya on that one Bob.... (NOT!)

Sigh... I think I'll stick with Doc Brown's explanation to Marty.

 

[CanuckMA]

Well its not always a wanting to change things...

If time travel does become a reality, and historians go back a couple thousand years to watch the Crucifiction of Jesus... The fall of Rome...The building of the pyramids... Dinosaurs... or any other historical event, what danger to the present (if any) does that pose.

I don't think any scientist would go back and try to change a bad event in our past, the bad things help define who we are, and getting out of them made us stronger. Any changes could be either very bad, very good, or do nothing at all.

50 years ago there was a question of "If we walk on the moon, what will happen?" Fortunately scientists figured out enough to keep the people doing it alive before they stepped out of the ship

Let's hope they figure out enough about time before sending someone back...

Best example of what the 'past' is. Read "The Dead Past" by Asimov.

 

[kaizasosei]

Most of this is fairly obvious. It has to do with the laws of cause and effect within linear time. Also, it also has to do with our subjective obvervation and conciousness both individual and collective.
The underlying subject is attempting to be objective and explain the laws of the universe, happenings and time.

Thing is though, the next step is to ask ourselves to what degree can we hope to grasp even a fraction of the univeral elements that constitute existence with our limited minds and limited language. Our conciousness is greatly restricted by our language as much as it is created,quickened, and perpetuated by language. We think of nouns, we are centered on verbs of doing and we cannot think outside the box of past, present and future- but what if all that is an illusion and the true nature of existence is quite independent of many of these earthly essentials that we experience as subjectively real. Mythology for example in many archetypal ways is just as real as history is and what we call history or the past is more like a type of mind trick or manipulation of conciousness. So the question would be; what is reality in the first place and what's it to us?

I was going to mention a little more on alternative ideas proposed by religions such as that of a personal God that watches everything and is omnipotent, but i due to the fact that we most likely cannot even agree on the definitions of universe, the solarsystem, the self or the soul-manmade or not, i can see it all getting mighty complicated and taositic to the point of being unproductive.

Ofcourse, the past was and is real, the present is real and the future will become real. So the common denominator is reality. The only chance we have to change anything actively is the present. The future also will become the present at a future time and the past was once the future too. Without the glue of the present, the past and the future would not hold together and there would not be any linear time. And when people say things like history repeats itself, it would be wise to apply this saying to the subject at hand and ponder if the future itself is related to the past in some harmonious way.

The present is something that we call present due to the experience of linear time, however, everything points to the fact that it may well be less linear and more cyclic in nature. As in a circle is whole and the largeness thereof depends on the circumference, a line can be shortened or lengthened depending on the substance and force.

Within our realm polarity of conciousness vs reality is constantly alternating at some level. For example, an individual is a dual thing that cannot be separated. Man and world, individual and a species, sun and sunsystem. Each part is only a half of it's collective opposite. Each sun is only a half, each person is only a half and the collective is it's other half.

What we perceive as time, is a function of our planets size and speed as it orbits the sun. What we are perceiving is not completely an illusion, as everything on our planet follows this and is created and destroyed within the time that we experience. However, the aspect of creation and destruction are in direct opposition to the phenomenon of existance. Basically science would say that energy is neither created nor destroyed.
I see time as having layers like onion, or a seed that sprouts under certain conditions, and yet on the deeper side i see time as something irrelevant to the nature of existence.




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[Shizen Shigoku]

That's why I like the Multiple Worlds / Parallel Universes theories - cleans up that mess quite neatly.

 

[Cryozombie]

The real question is if I put jiffy pop in the microwave while observing a star going nova, will the red and blue radiation make me go back to roswell and become my own grandfather?

 

[Shizen Shigoku]

The real question is if I put jiffy pop in the microwave while observing a star going nova, will the red and blue radiation make me go back to roswell and become my own grandfather?

Yes. This phenomenon has already been observed.

 

[hpulley]

That's why I like the Multiple Worlds / Parallel Universes theories - cleans up that mess quite neatly.

I'm surprised it took (unless I missed this in an earlier post) three years for someone to state this.

With the multiple worlds theory, at every point where more than one thing can happen, you get multiple universes splitting off. So to think about it, when playing craps you roll two dice. Generally there are numbers from 2-12 which can come up so there are 11 possibilities but there are actually 36 combinations and this doesn't include all the physical ways in which they can occur. BUT, what if you went back in time to before the dice were rolled so you would 'know' the outcome and could bet on it? Well, this doesn't work because you don't know which universe you are returning to and in fact the universes where you went back in time are different from the universes where you didn't go back in time.

Sooo... the reason why you can't change the present is simply because it is in a different universe. If you go back in time and then return to the present you are in a different universe than one in which you did not go back in time.

So, whenever you flip a coin or roll the dice or anything like that, rather than finding out if it is heads or tails or snake-eyes or boxcars you are really just finding out what universe you are in!!!!!