![]() This self-consistency would prevent our time-traveler from landing her machine on granddad, even if she wanted to. Sometimes called the Novikov self-consistency principle, or Niven’s Law of the conservation of history, this principle prevents causality violation by placing some events in order on the same CTC. In the other type of CTC model , which is predictably called Type II, time travel has to obey a principle of self-consistency. Quantum Physics May Finally Explain Consciousness.Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have an idea of just how causality violation could be prevented. “There would be nothing logically wrong with going back in time and, say, saying ‘Hello’ to your grandfather.” “The grandfather paradox does not prove that you can’t go back in time, just that you can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather,” he says. Instead, the paradox just prevents what actions can be conducted on a trip through time. ![]() Though he doesn’t ultimately think travel backward through time is possible, Maudlin thinks that the grandfather paradox shouldn’t prevent time travel in and of itself. “So the hypothesis must be impossible because of the grandfather paradox time travel - or reverse causation - is not possible.” “The grandfather paradox is usually presented as a reductio ad absurdum, or a refutation of the proposition that time travel is possible,” Maudlin says. This problem arises from the risk time travel would present to one of the most preserved ideas in physics - causality , the idea that cause must proceed effect in all circumstances. “But if that happened, then one of your parents would not have been born, so you would not have been born, so there would be no you to go back in time. “The argument runs like this, if you could ‘go back in time’ then you could go back to a time before your grandfather had had any children and murder him,” Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of science who investigates the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic, explains to Popular Mechanics. And as much fun as this concept is in science fiction, it’s also something that actual physicists and philosophers are intensely thinking about. That’s the essence of a trap called the “grandfather paradox,” an idea that has been used to great effect in books, films, and TV shows-from Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder to Futurama to Back to the Future. If these changes jeopardize their ability to travel back through time in the first place, then surely the traveler can’t make that change to time, right? But then they can go back in time again, so, can make those changes again … and so forth. It’s a classic science fiction trope: a time traveler journeys back in time and causes a change in history that has disastrous effects on the present or even threatens their very existence.
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