Time Travel

A detailed Summary of Time Travel

The concept of time travel has always been a prevalent idea used in science fiction. Many science fiction stories and novels have dealt with time travel, from classics such as The Time Machine by H. G. Wells to more modern stories such as Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Most believe that real scientists would scoff at the notion that time travel could be possible. It is widely assumed that only naive science fiction fans would believe that time travel is actually possible. However, there is much debate between physicists in the science community today over whether Einstein's theory of relativity allows for the possibility of time travel or not. This purpose of this paper is not to discuss the hard science debate on time travel, however. I am going to assume that there is a way to travel in time which modern science cannot comprehend yet. However, if science does eventually allow for time travel, I believe that the question is whether the paradoxes involved in time travel allow for the possibility of going to the past or future. That is the subject of this paper.

First, let us look at an example of the paradoxes involved in time travel. There is of course the classic paradox that is most widely used when discu

How are these paradoxes resolved? Does the universe simply cease to exist in order to end the paradox? Or is it something more simple, such as the time traveler and whatever he causes to become a paradox just wink out of existence, and the world moves on as if they had never been there? Or is there another explanation that could be given to resolve such a paradox?

I have pointed out many of the paradoxes involved in the theory of time travel. A great multitude of stories and movies has dealt with time travel over the course of science fiction's history. Some of these have dealt with the paradoxical questions raised, and some have ignored them. What is the truth about the solutions to the paradoxes in time travel? Perhaps the solution is as simply that time travel is scientifically impossible. Or perhaps one of the solutions I have mentioned previously in this paper solves the problem of paradoxes. New ideas are constantly being generated, and possibly the answer is waiting out there for someone to discover. If time travel is possible, we will not know the answer to the question of paradoxes until the first time traveler makes his first trip into either the past or future.

ssing time travel. This is the question of what happens if a time traveler goes back in time and kills his parents? The answer is he was therefore never born. But if he was never born, how could he have traveled in time to kill his parents? He could not have, so therefore his parents should meet and he should be born. And so on, the paradox spiraling in an endless loop of impossibility.

Another theory is that time travelers would merely play out the role they have in history (Kiekeben). If we take the example of the assassination of Hitler in the previous paragraph, then the time traveler would go back in history and for some reason he would be stopped in his attempt. This theory says that the time traveler was present during this period of time but the natural course of history plays itself out and Hitler continues on with his plan of genocide. The problem with this theory is that the time traveler could simply figure out what he did wrong on his first attempt, travel back to the present, and proceed to go back to the past to try again and again until he succeeds (Kiekeben). Eventually there could be a whole army of time travelers trying to assassinate Hitler. Why could they not succeed? A solution to this problem would be that time travel is limited. Perhaps it is not possible to travel to a time where you already exist. This would make sense and fits in with the theory nicely. In the Hitler example, the time traveler would travel back in time, be stopped in his plot to assassinate Hitler, travel back to the present, and in any future attempts to travel back to that time period would be unable to do so.

One more possibility raised by the question of time travel is the occurrence of closed loops (Myers 34). An example of this would be if a man traveled to the past and impregnated a woman with a male child. That child then has a child, who grows up to be the original man who traveled into the past. The time loop presented here is obvious. Gilbert Fulmer presents

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Approximate Word count = 2153
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Science