I saw a Charles Addams cartoon once (either that or it was a Sam Gross cartoon) where a shadowy figure in a trench coat, standing in a dim alley was whispering to a man in a suit and saying, “Psst mister, want to buy a copy of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal?”
The butterfly effect is the idea that small changes in the past can have large consequences in the future. For example, if you travel back in time and step on a butterfly, you might change the course of evolution and create a different world when you return to the present.
To avoid this, you have two options:
• Make your time travel as harmless as possible. Don’t interfere with anything that might affect history, such as killing Hitler or saving Lincoln. Just observe and learn, without leaving any trace of your presence.
• Make your predictions as quick as possible. Don’t wait too long between traveling to the future and telling people in the past what you saw. The longer you wait, the more likely something will change and invalidate your predictions.
Imagine you are in a room full of mousetraps, each with a ping-pong ball on top. If you drop a ball in the room, it may trigger one or more mousetraps, which may trigger more mousetraps, and so on. This is a chain reaction, similar to the butterfly effect.
The outcome of this experiment depends on two factors:
• The size and elasticity of the ball you drop. A larger and bouncier ball will hit more mousetraps and cause a bigger chain reaction. A smaller and softer ball will hit fewer mousetraps and cause a smaller chain reaction.
• The time you measure the result. If you count the number of triggered mousetraps right after you drop the ball, you will see a low number. If you wait until the chain reaction stops, you will see a high number.
The analogy is clear: the ball you drop is like your time travel, and the number of triggered mousetraps is like the butterfly effect. If you want to minimize the butterfly effect, you should drop a small and soft ball (harmless time travel), and count the mousetraps right away (quick predictions). If you do the opposite, you will create a large and unpredictable butterfly effect, and your predictions will be useless.
None of this remotely matters, IMO. Your mere presence means you have a small gravitational influence which travels outward at the speed of light. The perturbation is imperceptible, but chaotic systems like lottery drawings don’t care. Even the tiniest influence will completely change the outcome. And there are enough of these random systems that they will quickly dominate the large-scale evolution of the timeline.
In your mousetrap analogy, imagine measuring the position of each of the post-triggered mousetraps. No matter how closely you think you’re recreating the experiment, the result will be completely different each time.
I think there is a deeper problem. Leave your time traveler out of it, and come up with a mechanism that allows you to rerun history from some arbitrary point. The results will diverge wildly.
Or another way of putting it: If we had 10 identical universes, each with an identical Earth starting in, say, 1970, and let them run, by 2000 they will all be wildly different from each other. There are many things that happen that are purely random, and the butterfly effect tells us that those random fluctuations can have dramatic consequences over time.
The predictability and stability of the future is an illusion. It all random walks, and no two paths are going to be the same, even if starting from nearly identical conditions.
Go back in time and there is no guarantee that the things that happened in your past will happen again. No matter how careful you are.
Agreed with that too, but only due to quantum indeterminism. Newtonian physics is deterministic, so actually identical universes will evolve the same way. Perhaps quantum mechanics isn’t truly random, and a duplicate would evolve like a Newtonian world would… but that goes against experiment.
Well you flapping about outdoors will change the weather given a long anough period of time. Imagine a storm prevents the landings at Normandy, or a hail storm on the day that Gabriel Princip was supposed to murder Franz Ferdinand?
Anyway, back to the original OP.
I would certainly try to use the natural world. A meteorite or event in the sky might not work as you might have just made an observation before anyone else. But how about something on Earth?
What if I bring back a slice of a tree? A section with some unique pattern within its growth rings. I can take people to the same tree and we can cut it down. They will examine the tree and be forced to conclude that it is the same tree. I could not have known what the rings would look like before it was cut yet my sample contains not only the same unique patterns but also a number of additional rings.
I don’t think that “history” for the purposes of time travel paradoxes is limited to the big large-scale events you read about in history books. Even seemingly insignificant events are part of our timeline’s history, such as whether I’ll have chicken or pasta for dinner tonight, whether this leaf falls from the tree or not, or whether a particular atom of a radioactive isotope decays now or a millisecond from now.
If I understand the scenario correctly: You collect a bunch of information available to you from the internet now, then jump back 24 hours and convince people that you actually made the jump.
As mentioned, lottery numbers, sports results, stock prices etc. will be worthless because of butterfly/quantum effects. Your best bet would be to immediately tweet out a bunch of events that (1) have already happened but not yet been reported (celebrity deaths; company sales/mergers/layoffs; planes disappearing; disasters in remote locations…) or (2) that are yet to happen but have so much momentum that no butterfly wing could stop them (volcanic eruption, sinkhole collapse, freight trains barreling towards each other on the same track, multi-pronged surprise military attack).
What I would do is wait for something really juicy to happen, then jump back and report it.
Not necessarily. Some physicists argue that the butterfly effect doesn’t apply to quantum systems, and that modifying a quantum state in the past will not significantly alter the present (even strong modifications). In this case, time-travel paradoxes would be unlikely to occur in the quantum realm.
I think they are talking about quantum effects that create macro changes. And that certainly happens.
‘The Butterfly Effect’ isn’t just about the weather. It’s a way of describing high sensitivity to small changes that occurs in non-linear dynamical systems. Here’s an example:
Two ants from the same anthill are foraging for food. One ant is heading towards a food source to the left, another to the right. A random breeze knocks a leaf into the path of one ant, slowing it down slightly so the other ant reaches a food source first. This causes the anthill to divert to that food source. Eventually, the anthill migrates in that direction.
An Aardvark comes along and eats some ants. Then he walks away onto a road, and a car swerves to avoid him and crashes. If the anthill had been located by the other food source, the aardvark doesn’t cross the road.
The car contains a child who is a future general who would have made a brilliant decision that saves his country in a war. But the child is traumatized by the incident, and decides to become a doctor instead. So, his country loses the war and the entire world changes.
All because a leaf slowed down an ant for a few seconds.
Sure, but keeping things at the macroscopic level: just because a small event can lead to a massive butterfly effect doesn’t mean every small event will do so. I believe the vast majority of small events peter out before propagating too long, or too far.
In other words, I don’t think you blinking your left eye in Canada today is likely to affect the price of tea in China tomorrow. Unless, of course, you are a secret agent who uses eye blinks to communicate with your contacts, and your left eye blink means “sell all the tea stocks now”. In that case, you might want to be more careful with your eye movements.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to trace the exact causal chain of events from a minor perturbation to a major outcome. Many small events may have negligible or canceling effects or may be balanced by other factors.
It seems that the only true answer to the OP is to bring the person along with you on another travel through time, so they can experience the phenomenon for themselves.
I’ll go back to 1848 and pick up a fine bottle of Burgundy, then pick up Christie Brinkley in 1975, and bring her back to 18th century Venice for a romantic gondola ride.
Even if that doesn’t convince Christie I’m a time traveler, it’ll be worth the trip.
…all for the benefit of science, of course.
Complexity exists ‘on the edge of chaos’. You’re absolutely right that most tiny things have tiny effects that never ppropagate - but they don’t really have to, because there are a zillion ‘butterfly effects’ happening all the time. The world is far more random than you would think.
That said, another concept in complexity is the ‘attractor’. Some things tend to evolve in the same way even after starting out very different. It’s possible that in most possible universes some things happen again and again. In evolution it appears that we converge on similar abilities or traits. Bilateral symmetrry, vision, and other features have evolved independently because they are apparently favored by the environment.
It is probably a fallacy to just concentrate on the large scale effects on the butterfly effect. We are all ants in the state of the system. A small perturbation may leave the large scale view of the world looking the same, but the individual ants may all be different.
The confluence of events that has each of us existing, rather than some other person, is ridiculous. The world will for the most part be essentially unaltered even if history is rewritten to replace a large fraction of the population with alternates. History may not care, but you might wink out of existence to be replaced by a sibling who is a month younger than you would have been. History being rewritten with nothing more than a loud knock on the bedroom door a critical moment.
Probably. However I mentioned above I probably would believe it was good VR or that I had gone crazy. To minimize the “I’m crazy” excuse, you’d want two+ people to go.
I think the best answer to the question: if you were a time traveler what’s a fast and easy way to prove it? Find someone who will believe it.
You might be even more sceptical if your name was Truman Burbank.