I'm aware that this post has been a long time in the writing. Thank you for telling me that, Matt. Well, I'm very sorry, but I've had things to pursue and people to kill, past, present and future. Try and make sure you don't end up on the list.
Anyhow, I shall now present to thee paradoxes and other temporal conundrums.
It's a matter of great speculation and controversy as to whether you could theoretically change the past in a bid to alter the present. Such classic films such as the 'Back to the Future' trilogy and TV series like Doctor Who (coming back for a Christmas Special!) portray it as an almost trivial inconvenience of time travel. Fact is that it's more difficult than that. At least, that's what I think.
Read no further until you've read the previous posts in this series. Otherwise it'll make no sense whatsoever.
Okay, you've done so now. Let us press on!
So, to time travel.
Changing the past is quite the cliche of time travelling sci-fi. It's all happened: Abraham Lincoln getting saved, predators of unrivalled brutality bleeding through from the future and threatening to blast humanity into oblivion via certain time gates known as anomalies, someone killing their own grandfather. Except the thing is, according to me and most probably me alone, you can't change events in the past at all.
There's a law to do with time travel that gets repeated time and time again in books and cheap novels: Don't change anything. Inevitably, someone steps on a butterfly or shoots Osama Bin Laden at the wrong time or something, but that's just it. It shouldn't happen. Simple reason? It would create a paradox.
Yeah, David. You wanted paradoxes? Here, have a truckload. Merry Christmas. (And seeing as there is no Christmas scheduled for 2012 according to the Mayans, consider this the only one you'll ever receive.)
Okay, here's how things work. If something happens, it's set forever. Tough noogie. Basically, what's done is done and there's no undoing it. However, I've fallen into the trap which I've just set myself. That trap manifests itself in the form of a question.
How can you travel to the past then? Surely if time is set then it would be changing something to go back and be there. That's altering history enough as it is.
Aha! I planned for this question. You shall watch as I take the limelight and give you the answer to said question.
The simple answer is that, if you travel backwards, you're part of history. The moment you arrive, you're part of it. However, there are complications, as shown in this long, convoluted complex answer which - if you'd scroll down a little - you can now read.
The Complex Answer
(Muhahahaha, I even put that lovely title thing in bold and underlined it. I like formatting for effect.)
Ahem. Back to the script.
There is a complex answer to the rather annoying, nagging little question that was asked just a little way up the page. That answer is here.
This is all to do with the Temporal Uncertainty Principle (ta ever so, Sir Terry Pratchett!). The Temporal Uncertainty Principle is really to do with the future, but I can apply it to the past too. Now the Temporal Uncertainty Principle when talking of the future states that:
- There are potentially infinite possible futures.
- If you had a looking glass to the future, it would choose a single future at random to be viewed.
- Once viewed, the future selected is unable to be averted.
Now the Temporal Uncertainty Principle has some very interesting effects as far as time travelling back and forth is concerned. However, when applied to the past then it takes on a slightly different tone. The general effect is still the same, to a degree. However, there are definite differences.
Let us revert to analogy. (I like analogies. Can you tell?)
One day, you decide that it would indeed be nice to go back in time and meet William Shakespeare. Your name happens to be Romeo, so you know all about Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'. You hop onto your time machine and go back to a random date during Shakespeare's playwriting career.
Take a break a second. According to generally perceived ideas, entering the past begins to change time and therefore alter the future, or your view of the present. Get me? I shall tell you now that you are wrong. The second that you step back in time, you are part of events. Once you are there, you will always have been there, even if the records say otherwise. (After all, records are kept by humans, and humans are fallible. Therefore, anything created by us is also fallible. Ergo, records are fallible.) So from that point in, you are part of events. Just keep that in mind.
Do you see where this is going yet?
You don't know the date that you get set down in, but you are definitely in Shakespearean times. You go to the Globe Theatre, where the man himself is having a difficulty with names. He can't get the right name for his male character. You walk up, introduce yourself ("Hello, I'm Romeo,") and bang! He gets a flash of inspiration. He uses your name (Romeo) as the name for his male protagonist in his new play, to be entitled 'Romeo and Juliet'.
Oops. You've just changed history! Or have you...?
No, you haven't. Your name is Romeo and, silly as it seems, you've just managed to strike the spark that sent you into the past in the first place. This seems rather strange, and indeed it is. Some of you may even say that a paradox had been created.
Incorrect. All you've made for yourself is a temporal loop. In this loop, as I call it, all that happens is that you in the present travels to the past and create the cause for you travelling to the past. Get it? You decide to go back a week to pick up a copy of a book that's sold out. You go back in time and buy the last copy of said book. Oops, you cause a temporal loop to form. That's it. There are no ill effects of this operation, except a minor annoyance for yourself.
The Slightly More Simple Solution
There really isn't much difference between this answer and the one shown above, you if you understood the above answer fully, skip this bit.
The basic reality of it all is that you can't change history. If you travel back in time, then you have always been there and will always be there at that exact moment, therefore meaning that when you decide to travel back, what you intend to do has already been done (as far as possible - more on this later) and therefore you cannot change what's been done, even if it's in the future in the past. Ja?
(By 'the future in the past', I am, in the most simple fashion, saying that if your personal timestream leads to an event taking place in the past, then your future takes place in the past. That's all there is to it. Now leave that alone, and get back to the problem at hand.)
So, if you choose to kill the president of America two days ago, then you would be unable to because that would remove your reason for attempting to kill him. Removing a base reason for doing something (removing the motive) undermines the whole operation. It would create a paradox, and for the purposes of the general universe, this would not and could not occur.
Of course, you'll now want me to explain paradoxes to you and reason as to why they shouldn't work. I shall do this. Later. Quite simply, I can extend this series by asking more questions than I answer, and this means that I could potentially carry it on to infinite.
Therefore, I bid you farewell... Until I can write about paradoxes.
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