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Science & Technology

Time travel theory avoids grandfather paradox

By T.K. Randall
July 23, 2010 · Comment icon 81 comments

Image Credit: sxc.hu
Physicists have come up with a new theory for time travel that avoids the infamous 'grandfather paradox'.
. . . a new theory proposed by physicists at MIT suggests that this grandfather paradox could be avoided by using quantum teleportation and "post-selecting" what a time traveler could and could not do.


Source: PhysOrg.com | Comments (81)




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Comment icon #72 Posted by danielost 14 years ago
I think you could go back in time and change an individual history. i do not think you can go back in time and stop major events. this means you could go back in time and kill hitler as a child, but the holocaust would take place anyways. maybe at a later time.
Comment icon #73 Posted by sepulchrave 14 years ago
Ok, now I am switching sides in this debate: I just realized that in my previous post I (somehow) quoted myself in that very same post. Obviously that has something to do with time travel. Perhaps my future self is out to get me.
Comment icon #74 Posted by StarMountainKid 14 years ago
I just realized that in my previous post I (somehow) quoted myself in that very same post. That's great! I think what happened is your future time-traveler self, who is now in an alternate universe, was typing the same as you here were, and somehow, because of the psychic connection between your two selves, this mysterious self-quote incident occured via these elusive self-referential multi-universe time-stream convergence correlations, which are self-replicating throughout the whole mega-psychic, mega-universal synchronic boundary transformations which undergo continuous deformations that per... [More]
Comment icon #75 Posted by Siara 14 years ago
My understanding of relativity is that you can't reverse time, you can only change the pace at which it goes forward. So the grandfather paradox could never arise. My belief is that if we ever develop warp speed maybe we could send zillions of cameras focused on earth out in a massive shell around our planet. If the cameras had been transported faster than the speed of light and each one somehow represented a few pixels on a giant screen we could conceivably watch reruns of our history (the cameras would record images that happened before those cameras launched because they beat the light into... [More]
Comment icon #76 Posted by sepulchrave 14 years ago
My understanding of relativity is that you can't reverse time, you can only change the pace at which it goes forward. So the grandfather paradox could never arise. That is through conventional space travel. General Relativity appears to allow the creation of wormholes, and there appears to be no difference between creating a wormhole to a different region of space and a wormhole to a different period in time (or, of course, a combination thereof). Now obviously making a wormhole is currently impossible, and might always be impossible, since we'd need some very strange forms of exotic matter to... [More]
Comment icon #77 Posted by danielost 14 years ago
i wish to point out that the ops fix for this paradox is to make rules.
Comment icon #78 Posted by psyche101 14 years ago
Well, no, that's just it. The multiple universe idea is just another idea that is grounded in our innate desire to return to a linear timeline. What I'm talking about is the third option of "We won't be able to logic it out." What I am saying is that there may well be a paradox for us, because we are unlikely to be able to understand existence in the 4th dimension, whereas to someone in the 4th dimension, there is no more paradox to this than there is to us seeing the star within the circle. Just hoping to see if I am understanding you post correctly. Are you saying there is no point in specul... [More]
Comment icon #79 Posted by The Silver Thong 14 years ago
Just hoping to see if I am understanding you post correctly. Are you saying there is no point in speculating because we do not know what we are speculating about? I would have to go with that. We could speculate till the cows come home but in the end the debate will have not moved at all. Theorizing is one thing putting it into practical use seems a waste of time.
Comment icon #80 Posted by aquatus1 14 years ago
Just hoping to see if I am understanding you post correctly. Are you saying there is no point in speculating because we do not know what we are speculating about? Not at all. Speculating is fun! What I am saying is that one cannot assume the same rules apply from one dimension to another. In the same way that the rules of the quantum universe do not apply to ours, our rules do not apply to that of the 4th dimension. The Grandfather Paradox may seem like a paradox to us, but it may be no more a paradox to someone in the 4th dimension than Schrodinger's cat is to someone in the quantum world.
Comment icon #81 Posted by danielost 14 years ago
Not at all. Speculating is fun! What I am saying is that one cannot assume the same rules apply from one dimension to another. In the same way that the rules of the quantum universe do not apply to ours, our rules do not apply to that of the 4th dimension. The Grandfather Paradox may seem like a paradox to us, but it may be no more a paradox to someone in the 4th dimension than Schrodinger's cat is to someone in the quantum world. i think the rules of one spatial dimension applies to all spatial dimensions. that being said, there could be rules/laws in the higher dimension that modify or negat... [More]


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