The Paradox
of the Time Travel Paradox
by Lane Cohen
Time
travel. Eyes widen at the possibility. As I recounted in my last
column, fiction, both written and film media, is filled with time
travel plots, from the action/adventure type, to the romantic, all
the way to the ridiculous. And at the heart of these stories is
the embedded hope in all of us that perhaps, some day, we might
be able to either 1) travel to the future, or to 2) travel into
the past, either to experience world-changing events first-hand
(death of Christ, Lincoln’s assassination) or to CHANGE something
that occurred in the past, to correct or modify the course of present-day
events.
The
science of time-travel is unproven, but firming, and has become
more accepted recently, at least on theoretical grounds. If movement
faster than light becomes possible, then traveling into the past,
at least in some way, could be possible as well. For example, the
lights we see in the night sky were generated from stars generations
ago, and yet the light is just now reaching us, in our “present”.
If we were able to travel faster than the speed of light, then we
could travel back to before the light actually reached the skies
of Earth, to the time when the light was first generated.
The major problem with most time travel
stories, that is, when the travel is into the past, is when the
protagonist changes the course of events in the past, thus nearly
always changing the course of current events. Prime examples of
this are the Back to the Future films, several Ray Bradbury
stories, the film Kate and Leopold, and the more recent,
and truly terrible film, Timeline. Here is the problem:
While changing the past in order to alter later events is an appealing
concept, it is as impossible as finding a reasonably priced hybrid
vehicle. The black letter law of time travel to the past can be
stated this way: the past cannot be changed because it has
already occurred. Simple? Yes, but ignored by most screenwriters,
readers and filmgoers. And the fact that the past cannot be changed
also destroys the age-old time travel paradox questions, such as
the Grandfather Paradox. (if you travel back and kill your grandfather
before he has your father (or mother) then how could you ever have
been born?) That paradox has instilled headaches for decades, and
yet, the answer to that riddle is simple: you cannot go back and
kill your grandfather because your grandfather lived a normal life/death
and those circumstances cannot be changed. Here’s why that
makes sense.
In
Back to the Future, the Micheal J. Fox character could
not go back and change events so that his father (in present day)
was successful and confident, because that’s not the way things
actually happened. Events cannot be changed. Period. Now, on the
other hand, if time travel to the past were possible, then AFFECTING
the past may be possible, but not actually changing it. So that
if your travel to the past results in an event occurring THAT IS
ALREADY SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN, then that might be a possible outcome.
Headache yet? Next column I will list several great time travel
books written by real scientists who tear apart time travel in modern
fiction and expose the scientific truth.
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