Arrgh - time travel fecks with your head!If you go back in time and kill your parents before you were born what would happen?
Because if you did that then you would never have existed to go back in time and do it, so they would still be alive, so you would exist to go back and kill them, so you wouldn't ....
(Because if you did that then you would never have existed to go back in time and do it, so they would still be alive, so you would exist to go back and kill them, so you wouldn't ....
Cheeky Boy! loves horses...,
Sat 18 Jun 2005, 12:19,
archived)
Well, if you accept the concept of multiple universes, in which each moment in time is a seperate universe,what happens is that you don't go back to any of the moments in time which led to your birth, since by definition your parents survived through all those moments; instead, you go to a moment (a parallel universe) which differs in the important respect that you arrive in it as a time traveller and kill those versions of your parents. But you still exist afterwards, as do the versions of your parents who gave birth to you. It's just that other version of you in the universe/time thread you travelled to who is never born.
BBC news has a bad article about time travel which proclaims excitedly that a new model "permits time travel". What this model tries to do is produce a concept of quantum time travel which doesn't involve multiple universes; there is only one time thread in this model and consequently it has to contain a sort of fatalistic element where you simply can't kill your parents, for reasons that aren't specified. But the multiverse model of time travel has been around for ages, maybe ten years now.
and it would ruin every Dr. Who plot
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Sat 18 Jun 2005, 12:28,
archived)
BBC news has a bad article about time travel which proclaims excitedly that a new model "permits time travel". What this model tries to do is produce a concept of quantum time travel which doesn't involve multiple universes; there is only one time thread in this model and consequently it has to contain a sort of fatalistic element where you simply can't kill your parents, for reasons that aren't specified. But the multiverse model of time travel has been around for ages, maybe ten years now.
and it would ruin every Dr. Who plot
If you want silly alternative universe moviesyou can't go past "what the bleep do we know"
new age wank with lots of "experts"
great to watch after consuming mind altering substances (alegedly)
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Sat 18 Jun 2005, 12:41,
archived)
new age wank with lots of "experts"
great to watch after consuming mind altering substances (alegedly)
I know what you mean. I rather hope the new age ended in 1999.Multiple universes make more sense to me than a single thread of time, though, since there blatently are multiple alternative things that can happen in the future which are all physically allowed. I see no reason why the course of events which we perceive as having happened should have special status over alternative courses of events, or why now should have special status over the past, apart from the relationship between the moment we call "now" and our memories. Apart from what our individual, subjective memories tell us about our position in time, all physically possible things ought to exist as definitely as those things that exist "now".
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Sat 18 Jun 2005, 13:07,
archived)
Other views put forwards.You are an impartial bystander that has no effect on anything or one.
You can only go one direction, if you go back you cannot go forwards, or the other way.
Everything is predetermined, so if you go back and kill someone, it'll turn out that you were supposed to anyway, and even if it hadn't happened in "your present" you wouldn't know, because it would have happened in your past and you'd just think they had before but now you know who did it.
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Sat 18 Jun 2005, 12:43,
archived)
You can only go one direction, if you go back you cannot go forwards, or the other way.
Everything is predetermined, so if you go back and kill someone, it'll turn out that you were supposed to anyway, and even if it hadn't happened in "your present" you wouldn't know, because it would have happened in your past and you'd just think they had before but now you know who did it.
At least 10 years.It's derived from the Everett, Wheeler, Graham multi-verse interpretation of Quantum mechanics (ie, every quantum event which could go either way creates multiple universes where one has one outcome and one has another).
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Hagbard ... it's been a long time.,
Sat 18 Jun 2005, 13:05,
archived)
Oh yes.It was popular 35 years ago, and backed up by the double-slit experiment, and still most people intuitively decide that multiple universes are bullshit. But it sounds more reasonable to me than 17 dimensions or fate.
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Sat 18 Jun 2005, 13:17,
archived)