Spring Break
Science fantasy: Time travel isn't happening, get over it
Time travel is impossible. Hollywood needs to realize this.
By: Abid Mujtaba
Issue date: 6/30/08 Section: Opinion
This is a subtle violation of causality and one that physicists consider to be not allowed. The eminent physicist Stephen Hawkings has pondered over this issue and came up with several explanations. My least favorite one requires a cosmic censor who intervenes whenever causality is about to be violated. Circumstances will be created which disallow any violation.
The other explanation is even more far-fetched but much more elegant. Hawking suggests that every time someone travels back in time a parallel universe is created in to which the traveler is deposited. The original universe continues unchanged minus one time-traveler and all changes made to the past are incorporated in to the new parallel universe. This preserves causality because the cause of the change is preserved in the original universe.
This alternative raises philosophical questions about the rationale for time travel. You could go back and kill your enemy in the past but all that will achieve is the creation of an alternative universe and one with a very weird past at that. It is also possible that the time traveler is copied in to the parallel universe with no observable change whatsoever in the original. We wouldn't even know and we could be sending people back in time in what we consider to be failed experiments. Something to consider the next time we are about to create a black hole at CERN.
The other explanation is even more far-fetched but much more elegant. Hawking suggests that every time someone travels back in time a parallel universe is created in to which the traveler is deposited. The original universe continues unchanged minus one time-traveler and all changes made to the past are incorporated in to the new parallel universe. This preserves causality because the cause of the change is preserved in the original universe.
This alternative raises philosophical questions about the rationale for time travel. You could go back and kill your enemy in the past but all that will achieve is the creation of an alternative universe and one with a very weird past at that. It is also possible that the time traveler is copied in to the parallel universe with no observable change whatsoever in the original. We wouldn't even know and we could be sending people back in time in what we consider to be failed experiments. Something to consider the next time we are about to create a black hole at CERN.
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