THOUGHT: THE PARADOX OF TIME

Grandfather Paradox :

Time travel is impossible as exemplified by the famous grandfather paradox. Imagine you build a time machine. It is possible for you to travel back in time, meet your grandfather before he produces any children (i.e. your father/mother) and kill him. Thus, you would not have been born and the time machine would not have been built, a paradox.

Perhaps the craziest of the time travel paradoxes was cooked up by Robert Heinlein in his classic short story "All You Zombies."

A baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. "Jane" grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She falls in love with him. But just when things are finally looking up for Jane, a series of disasters strike. First, she becomes pregnant by the drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery, doctors find that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life, they are forced to surgically convert "her" to a "him." Finally, a mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling from these disasters, rejected by society, scorned by fate, "he" becomes a drunkard and drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop's Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the "time travelers corps." Both of them enter a time machine, and the bartender drops off the drifter in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan woman, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops off the baby in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time travelers corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together, becomes a respected and elderly member of the time travelers corps, and then disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop's Place in 1970.

The question is: Who is Jane's mother, father, grandfather, grand mother, son, daughter, granddaughter, and grandson? The girl, the drifter, and the bartender, of course, are all the same person. These paradoxes can made your head spin, especially if you try to untangle Jane's twisted parentage. If we drawJane's family tree, we find that all the branches are curled inward back on themselves, as in a circle. We come to the astonishing conclusion that she is her own mother and father! She is an entire family tree unto herself.

Imagine you build a time machine. It is possible for you to travel back in time, meet your grandfather before he produces any children (i.e. your father/mother) and kill him. Thus, you would not have been born and the time machine would not have been built, a paradox.

that's not a paradox, that's a fallacy. this whole paradox rests solely along the fact that you would kill your grandfather(which most people probably wouldn't) that goes into like Quantam Physics which is like for every possible choice there is a multitude of different outcomes. so, in theory, the time machines creation never would have been built in most situations, seeing as its impossible to go to the past without affecting the future in some small way(with the exception of becoming invisible)

a great example of this is when homer simpson kept going into the past and affecting things in the past, which in turn resulted in him returning to an altered state in time which was his present.

additionally, as any person who knows the Chaos Theory can tell you, you wouldn't have to kill your grandfather. That's a stupid assumption in the first place. any slight change in the past can have a drastic effect on the future. let's say you just tell your grandfather, "i am your grandson from the future." that could have a limitless amount of possibilities that impact the future depending on his interpretation of your statement and his following action.

the second one, however, was pretty cool

EDIT: and again, the second one would also go into quantam physics. in one dimension, she obviously joined the military but in another dimension she didn't. in other dementions she might not even gone into the bar, or in the direction the bar was in, or possibly commited suicide; and again in other dimentions, lets say that the man stealing the baby was shot by a security officer, what then? an end to the paradox

if you're really interested, the butterfly affect is a great movie in showing how the chaos theory works. and, realistically, the end, in theory, the end would have worked out too(but again, all goes into quantam physics)

we're only experiencing one of many possibilities in many dimentions.

Now we come to the solution of the paradox problem that quantum mechanics predicts, parallel universes. In the quantum universe everything is probabilistic. The occurrence of an event is ruled by the probability of its happening. In quantum mechanics a particle has no definite position, energy, momentum or time. The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, and , tells us that we can only measure these quantities within a certain accuracy and beyond that accuracy they are uncertain. This is not simply a technological issue of measurement but the actual nature of the universe. Beyond a certain point the universe is in a state of mixed probabilities. This is what the universe is like. Down to a limit we cannot look and the universe remains uncertain. There is an interpretation of this that says that all things that are possible to occur will occur in separate universes. These parallel universes would exist alongside each other in hyperspace with the universes of similar probability closer to each other. The universes very close to one another would differ by very little and those farther away by much more. There would be a constant creation of these universes as time progressed. The universes could connect to one another via wormholes or Kerr tunnels. As we have seen the wormhole and black hole solutions connect to regions of spacetime that are not necessarily in our own universe.
Now let us look at one of our paradoxical time travel situations and see how parallel universes save the day. Let us return to the Kennedy assassination. Again I have found a time machine and decide to go back in time and stop the assassination from occurring. Once again I am successful in stopping it. Now I would like to return to my own time and witness the changes that have occurred. But I have just created a parallel universe. One which was identical to my own up until the moment that I arrived in the past. Until that moment the universes were one. But in my universe there was no me in 1963, so the act of placing myself in that time has already created a new universe that will undoubtedly be different. In this new universe I go forward in time, perhaps through special relativistic effects and find a future very different from the one I knew. I might also find another me, the one that was born in this universe in 1973. We would be different people as we have experienced different lives. But what if instead of going forward in time through relativistic effects I simply decided to step back through my wormhole, what would I find? I would find that nothing has changed. Kennedy is still dead and there is no other me, because the past I visited is not in this universe. When I stepped through the wormhole I disappeared from this universe into another. It is easy to see that If I were not careful I could get lost in parallel universes and never find my way back. Consider the scenario where I travel to the future of the new universe and meet my doppleganger. What if I don't like this universe at all, what if saving Kennedy leads to a nuclear war, can I go back to my original universe? No. I am now in another universe and I find a wormhole time machine with my counterpart. We decide to set it for November 22, 1963 and change things once again. But once again we create another parallel universe, this time there are 3 versions of me in 1963 and we all have different agendas.
If parallel universes are real and some advanced society can create a stable wormhole and turn it into a time machine then time travel is certainly possible. The journeys that one could have in time would be quite an experience, to say the least.
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IMAO I don't believe we can travel backwards in time (parallel universe or not).. I do however believe in Einsteins theory that we can in a sense travel forward in time.
ie. If I was in a spacecraft travelling 0.95 the speed of light and travelled to the center of the milky way (well - near it anyway - I wouldn't fly into the super-blackhole) and then returned.. Let's say around 50 years would pass in my perspective.. Millions of years would pass for the people on earth - in fact the planet may no longer exist! (maybe 200 million years - I don't know the exact numbers but you get my drift). That is the only type of time travel that I think is possible only because someone travelling near the speed of light has their internal clock slowed down so immensely.


In the case of time most still think of it as a line but it is much better expressed as a "Ball Of Yarn". That in fact has a beginning but not a set end.

Note: The ball is spinning around and around as time passes.

Now think if i were to go back and say change some thing very small. This small change would not be seen in the future layers of yarn only having an effect on a small part.

But is i were to change some thing big? like to change the out come of WWII witch is possible. Not only would it be shown in a few layers of yarn time but it would have a effect on every layer after that their for mass change and rewriting time its self.

But this is were you must think how small is small enough? in this case, nothing is for every little thing had an effect.

But in the case of over all time travel it is possible and can be done in a safe way. But us being how humans are could not handle it we would not knowing we did rip time or cut a peace of the yarn at the best of luck a new ball would forum or the more likely destroy the ball itself