The Time Paradox: The Guide to Headache City

   The idea of time travel has always fascinated me. The ability to experience the past, our history; and the chance to see the future, what will someday be present reality. Man has dreamt of this possibility for hundreds of years, and the various literary works of the 1800's to present day display this. Scientists have long theorized at the possibility of time travel and have unofficially decided that travel to the past would never be possible, but time travel to the future might be. Still, this doesn't stop filmmakers, authors, and artists from exploring various types of time-travel stories. To me, the most interesting part of time travelling is the time paradox theory. Let me describe what a time paradox is.

   A time paradox (temporal paradox) is a theoretical paradoxical situation that is created due to time travel. For example, the grandfather paradox:

    A man goes back in time in order to kill his grandfather before the grandfather has any biological descendant. If the traveler were to succeed, either his mother or father would exist. In consequence, he would not exist as well. Thus, he would not be able to travel back in time in the first place (because he no longer exists) and his grandfather would  live and have a child who would  become the currently non-existent traveler's parent. In this way, the time travel would now exist again, and be able to go back in time to kill his grandfather. This would restart the situation. If the time traveler were to fail to kill his grandfather, however, the grandfather would still exist, produce offspring and eventually the time traveler would be born and the whole scenario starts over.

   It's in this way that we come to a paradox. The situation just keeps restarting itself. It's an infinite loop to nowhere.



   The purpose of the time paradox is to argue the impossibility of time travel. There are many theorized solutions, however. Below, I will highlight a few. They all suggest ways in which time travel could still be possible because the timeline avoids looping into infinity.

•  The Multiple Universe Solution.

This theory suggests the possibility of multiple universes, infinitely created whenever someone travels back in time. The example here is as follows: Were you to travel back in time to kill your grandfather before he had any descendants, an alternate identical universe would be created. Therefore if you successfully eliminated your grandfather, he would be dead in Universe 2 as would you be. But once you returned to your own time, you would be back in Universe 1, thus you'd still be alive. So you're dead in U2, but alive in U1.

• The Timeline Protection Solution.

This theory states that the time line would protect itself, thus protecting the universe from a paradox. This means that, no matter what a time traveler does, he would not be able to do anything to change the timeline. Back to the grandfather paradox. If the traveler were to attempt to kill his grandfather, time would have him fail. His gun would jam, be in the wrong place at the wrong time, be caught and thrown in jail, etc.

• The Novikov Self-consistency Principle.

This particular principle details a timeline which does not allow for a paradox because it defines a hypothetical scenario where nothing can be done to change time, because whatever happens must already have been part of the past. For example, say I went back in time to before the atomic bomb had been developed and gave Oppenheimer the plans to build one. Nothing would change. Because this has been a part of history all along. And if I went to kill my grandfather, I would fail for some reason; gun jammed, wrong time/place, etc. This part of the principle is similar to the Timeline Protection Solution.

• The Butterfly Effect.

This solution protects the universe from a time paradox, but that's all it protects it from. The butterfly effect is described as a physical effect on math, weather, and even time where a small change in the root definition of the subject grows exponentially to be a huge change to the original subject. This is easier said with an example. A man travels back in time to the 1940's, simply lights a cigarette, smokes it, then leaves. When he returns to 2012, he finds that the United States is now known as the United Communist Republic, we have a dictator, and he is a fugitive on the run from the law. In this example we see how one tiny change to the fabric of time (smoking a cigarette) can hugely change the rest of the world. And the farther back in time you travel, the larger the changes are to the present time. For another entertaining example of the butterfly effect, read Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder in which an actual butterfly causes the butterfly effect.


   These are just a few of the many solutions to the time paradox. As of right now, we don't actually even know if time travel is possible, but someday it might be. When that happens we will need to be prepared. We will need to know what we are doing. When time travel is possible, we'll need a Guide to Headache City. Hopefully the one you just read will do. But until we have a definite yes or no on the possibility of time travel, we will continue to dream. Of the past. Of the future.