But it brings up the whole "time travel will fuck with your brain" discussion of how things could go down. So, here's my example:
I get in my time machine. I go back to the year 1933, to Berlin, to a Siemens factory where Hitler gives a speech to the workers. I choose this venue specifically because it has been documented. I appear on the platform next to Hitler, whip out a Franchi Spas-12 shotgun, and Buh-BAMM, blood and bone everywhere, Hitler's head pretty much a mangled cabbage. His body goes through the remarkably coordinated antics that can be seen in headless chickens, spasming and convulsing about, with perhaps an involuntary final Nazi salute as the right arm twitches and flails upward, the hand extended rigidly out almost as if to wave bye-bye. Despite my laughter at this unexpected comedy performance, I manage to pump maybe two more shots to the body for dramatic effect, and then Poof, back to the future.
And when I get back to the future, nothing has changed. Nazi Germany forms. WWII takes place. Hitler dies in the bunker with Mrs. Hitler in 1945. Wait a minute, now. I offed him. I got his blood and bone fragments on my overcoat. I even had a little helmet cam to document it, and sure enough, I offed him. And yet I go to that youtube video, and there he is giving a speech without incident.
What happened? Well, according to many-worlds interpretation, I went to the wrong past. That resolved the paradox.
Of course, the paradox is the Grandfather paradox. You can't go back in time to kill your mean old abusive cuss of a grandfather, because if you had, you would never have been born (assuming he was your biological grandfather, with no cheap trick Hollywood resolutions). This is a logical paradox.
But then again, it could be that there is something akin to Stephen Hawking's "Chronology Protection Agency", which is not a time cop force, but rather, some type of inelastic quality of the cosmos that prevents events in the past from having a different outcome.
Fritz Lieber explored this idea in the story "Try and Change the Past", in which a time traveler attempts to foil his own death by fatal gunshot wound through an increasingly desperate series of interventions. In the end, he manages to remove any chance of death by bullet, only to have his past self killed by an outer space meteorite fragment right between the eyes. buh-BAM! (Can you tell I am channeling Santino Corleone from the Godfather today?)
The Conservation of Reality, as Lieber called it, serves any time travel story well, and is clever enough, but there's no reason for it. It only satisfies our principle of parsimony, but there is absolutely no reason that reality has to be parsimonious. We would just like for it to be that way.
And speaking of reason, that's the problem with the paradox. The impossibility of the paradox relies on the violation of a principle of Boolean algebra - a thing cannot be one thing and its opposite.
Well, that's true enough for binary yes/no logic, but who said the Universe has to obey a human conceptual invention?
Quantum mechanics does not have this problem. All sorts of things can be one or another thing at the same time down in the subatomic world. And now, there's a suspicion that causality itself may not be so cut and dried. Scientists at the University of Vienna and Libre de Bruxelles have used quantum mechanics to conceive of situations where an event can be both the cause and the effect of another one - in short, the past and future and be superposed and entangled.
"The idea that events obey a definite causal order is deeply rooted in our understanding of the world and at the basis of the very notion of time. But where does causal order come from, and is it a necessary property of nature?"Further reading can be found at http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n10/full/ncomms2076.html.
Wait a minute? Didn't I write about this already. Shit, it's deja vu all over again!
Oh, and speaking of deja vu, Sputnik would be celebrating its 55th year in space today, if it hadn't burned up on reentry: Missile #27.
"Such a superposition, however, has not been considered in the standard formulation of quantum mechanics since the theory always assumes a definite causal order between events", says Ognyan Oreshkov from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (formerly University of Vienna). "But if we believe that quantum mechanics governs all phenomena, it is natural to expect that the order of events could also be indefinite, similarly to the location of a particle or its velocity", adds Fabio Costa from the University of Vienna.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-quantum-causal.html
"Such a superposition, however, has not been considered in the standard formulation of quantum mechanics since the theory always assumes a definite causal order between events", says Ognyan Oreshkov from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (formerly University of Vienna). "But if we believe that quantum mechanics governs all phenomena, it is natural to expect that the order of events could also be indefinite, similarly to the location of a particle or its velocity", adds Fabio Costa from the University of Vienna.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-quantum-caus
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