How Alternate Timelines Solve The Grandfather Paradox of Time Travel
Time travel has been a very interesting subject for us all. It doesn’t matter if you are a scientist or not. When the topic of time travel comes up, we all can’t help but get a little excited.
Scientists have tried to determine the nature of time for centuries and to come to a final conclusion whether time travel is indeed possible or not. Several scientists have gone back and forth on the matter.
Stephen Hawking, one of the leading physicists of the world, questions in one of his documentaries that if time travel was possible, why haven’t we heard from anyone in the future?
Is it because we will never be able to solve this riddle or is it because we did solve it but found it too dangerous to fiddle with and ultimately decided to bury the technology for good?
Well, we don’t know for sure. We don’t even know if we will ever know. But one thing is for sure. Time travel has been the subject of much discussion and something that is perhaps overused in our sci-fi movies and novels.
But we can’t blame ourselves for this. Whenever the topic comes up, immediately our minds start imagining the various possibilities that time travel brings with it. Just imagine, being able to interact with someone from the future and being able to learn from them to advance our technology.
One can also imagine being able to travel back in time to observe history as it unfolded and maybe even intervene in certain events to stop disasters from happening or to even stop yourself from making a life changing mistake in the past.
All this sounds really amazing and exciting in all the right ways, but we often forget the consequences of time travel. Firstly, we don’t know if it is possible or not, so whatever we discuss is purely based on logic and how we think it would work if it could.
CHANGING THE PAST
There is a really popular paradox called the “grandfather paradox” associated with time travelling into the past and altering events that have already occurred. Let me explain it to you.
Basically, if someone goes into the past and kills their grandfather, then that means, their father was never born. That also means that they were never born. So, logically, if they were never born, they never went back in time to kill their grandfather.
But if they never went back to kill their grandfather, it means that their father was indeed born and they were born too and therefore, they went back and killed their grandfather, but if they……you know where I am headed with this.
Based on this, some physicists argue that travelling back into the past is not possible, as time flows in a linear direction and nature just won’t allow you to travel against the flow. (Imagine the chaos!)
TRAVELLING TO THE FUTURE
Travelling to the future is something that physicists believe to be possible and it was Albert Einstein who came up with this conclusion. Basically, if you can travel very close to light speeds, time will flow very slowly for you while it will be the same everywhere else.
So, if you travel close to light speeds for some time (say 10 days), and come back to Earth, you will find that on Earth, several years have passed, essentially making you a time traveller.
Another possibility for time travel into the future is something that was shown in the movie Interstellar. It has been shown in physics, that time flows very slowly around objects in the universe which have a really, really huge mass.
So, if you were to revolve around a black hole and come back to Earth, you would find that several years have passed on Earth even though only days have passed for you.
So, even though time travelling into the future might seem like a possibility, there is one huge problem. We can’t simply go to the future and come back to our own time. That’s because ‘our own time’ has become the future.
ALTERNATE TIMELINES
Now, let’s go back to time travelling into the past. Some have suggested that alternate timelines may solve the paradoxes relating to it. This has also been a subject of a lot of sci-fi world, especially in The Flash. Let me explain it to you.
So, let’s say someone went into the past and killed their grandfather. This changes a key event in their past which will directly affect their future. So, according to this theory, the universe creates a new timeline from the point of this change.
So, now there are two timelines. One where the grandfather lives, the father is born, and the person goes back in time. But, the actual killing happens in the second timeline.
So, in the second time line, the grandfather is dead, the father of the murderer is never born and yet he can exist in that timeline. That’s because now, it is not a loop. The murderer disappears from the first timeline and continues to live in the second one, hence solving the paradox.
All this talk of time travel is a real mental exercise and one where you could easily get lost in the whens and the wheres. Nonetheless, it is pretty interesting to ponder upon sometimes. I hope we are able to find some concrete answers in the future once and for all.
The problem is mass.... when anything of mass travels at the speed of light its mass (a numerical measure of its inertia) increases....reach the speed of light mass becomes infinite, and so does the energy required to move it.
So basically...through movement I would be too fat to travel back or forth through time.... which is why I reccommend Cannabis, stay at home and travel back and forth through time with ease...perferrably on the sofa...near a stocked refrigerator....also known to stop time altogether. I think I just figured out this post.
Yes, exactly. That is why the option of travelling near a heavy object in the universe seems more likely.
Wasn't it Einstein (r at least his wife), that said all time happens simultaneously?
If so then we only need to find the portal or wormhole.
Yes, wormholes are another possibility, though one has never been observed before. But since the math allows for it, it should exist. It will be very exciting if and when we do finally observe one.
This is very interesting!
Yeah, great stuff to ponder upon! :)
Possible or not, it's always fascinating to think about.
Exactly. I spend a healthy amount of time pondering about the bigger questions!
And that is such an important one!
This is a topic that I've thought about, extensively, and the "exercise" that it puts my mind through is second to only pondering existence, itself.
I swear, there's a point of self-inquiry (searching deep into consciousness for insight into these types of questions) at which the mind shuts-off and can go no further into the search/ philosophizing, as if it was a built in mechanism to protect itself from...I don't know, insanity? discovering an unbearable truth? I can only hypothesize.
I don't know, maybe it's just a limitation that's specific to my mind, or range of intellect/ creativity that I fall within.
All I know is that when I deeply ponder questions like "what is death (the actual experience of it)?" and try to grasp the concept of non-existence, or even something relatively "simpler" like wrapping my mind around the concept of infinity, I quickly find my awareness getting stuck in some type of loop in an endless void.
So many questions and seemingly no answers within endless space and eternity - that I would call my consciousness (and "unconscious mind").
I have felt like that many times myself. It is like hitting a dead end. As you said, it might be a mechanism to protect ourselves until we are ready!
Maybe we will one day evolve into higher intelligence beings who be able to cope up with the 'truth'.
Very informative! Upvoted and following @sauravrungta
thank you :)
There is also a third version of time traveling. If someone goes back to the past all the even that they interact with have created the future that they knew to be true from before.
It goes along with the thought that time can not be changed. So if someone did go back in time then they actually were one of the cause of creating the future that they have always known to be true!