And what was the theory? Please use a spoiler blur to reply.
That makes sense as a story device, but not so much as a law of physics - unless there were some constraint that time travel could only take you to a non-intersecting light cone (so you physically can’t get to any bit of the universe that affects your existing personal past timeline) - but I don’t think I have heard any ideas supporting that.
You win the thread!
See what I mean?
I think the Hulu show Devs stole your idea. I’m only spoilering that because it’s fairly new and its better you don’t know the premise before you watch it.
I don’t know what all the fuss is about, honestly.
I will now travel one minute into the past and post into this thread, watch…
I’m not concerned by temporal paradoxes; who would even notice? I’m concerned about the butterfly effect, however. To put it bluntly, if I went back in time and accidentally delayed my parents who were about to conceive me (by one second), I might not be born. Instead, someone who is genetically my semi-identical twin could be born instead. (Exact same egg.) Of course, this person would have somewhat different capabilities, somewhat different personality, might even be raised somewhat differently because of those different traits, etc. They wouldn’t be me or even a replacement for me.
(I read a Terminator comic where something like that happened. They got Jane Connor. Which causes me to wonder: shouldn’t each time loop cause enough of a difference for a different John/Jane Connor to be born each time? Within that fictional universe, John/Jane Connor is far more important than I am! Well, the actors do chance sometimes, so I guess that has been happening, “invisibly”. Fortunately they always have the same capabilities and upbringing.)
I doubt it!
I’m pretty sure we are able to calculate where the Earth is going to be a year from now.
Even without your interference, plain old randomness could result in that outcome (in fact, if it played out without that happening, it would mean randomness isn’t what we think it is)
Here’s one I never heard anyone talk about:
Let’s say the heat death of the universe ends tomorrow. No problem, just hop in your time machine and go back a few million years.
You’re effectively keeping the universe alive past it’s expiration date. At least from your perspective.
The many-worlds interpretation is rigidly deterministic. I am doubtful about determinism.
What are you doing right now? At the very moment that I am writing this? That is difficult for you to answer, because you can only tell me precisely what you are/were doing as you read this.
In other words, determinism relies on a temporal precision that does not seem to be attainable. The present is, itself, not a bright, clear line but an amorphous nebulosity that defies exact definition. We can only identify things that probably did or probably will happen at an approximate moment.
I am not convinced that even the past is inscribed. We look at history and it seems to keep changing. Which may seem like an illusion, but every event that happens relies on information about previous events that happened, and that information has a degree of variability to it.
In other words, the past appears to be as uncertain as the future, and, for all we know, future events will have already affected what has happened in the past. The strict mechanistic view of reality is an abstraction which I suspect lacks overall validity. It may work in small, closed systems, but even then it looks capricious (as in, why, exactly, that device failed at that moment in that particular way is often impossible to establish).
The universe doesn’t care when you think it should end.
Do you think so? I have always thought of it as almost the complete antidote to determinism - events are not predisposed to play out in any fixed way, because they play out in every way
Each world-curve is strictly defined, in a way that I believe is not consistent with the genuinely nebulous shape of reality.
Huh? This seems to be less about the past and more about how accurately it was recorded. I don’t notice the past changing, except for “Mandela effect” type stuff which I don’t believe is anything but large scale misremembering that is only apparent because of the invention of the internet.
I mean, true, most literary expressions of the many-worlds thing tend to describe it like a new timeline/world is created because you chose cornflakes, not toast, for breakfast - but it would have to actually be new worlds being split off every time any particle in the whole universe did something that could have been a different-something - absurdly-many universes spawned every moment.
It seems the opposite.
Instead of one path open for your life all paths are open. What are you doing right now? Anything that it is possible for you to do.
I think many worlds assumes an infinite number of possibilities (or if not actually infinite a truly stupendously big number).
Moderator Action
While the OP could be answered factually, we are instead getting a lot of speculation and opinion, probably because our factual knowledge in this area is a bit sparse. Rather than try to force this back into a factual-only GQ thread, I think this thread will do better in IMHO. Any factual information (published theories, physics cites, etc) is of course still welcome.
*My advice in making sense of temporal paradoxes is simple: don’t even try." - Capt. Kathryn Janeway
Next week I told you nobody would. Sheesh.