Slashdot Mirror
New Model Solves Grandfather Paradox
goldfishy writes "If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated. Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is 'complementary' to the present. In theory, you could go back in time and meet your infant father but you could not kill him." From the article: "Quantum behaviour is governed by probabilities. Before something has actually been observed, there are a number of possibilities regarding its state. But once its state has been measured those possibilities shrink to one - uncertainty is eliminated."
The one thing that always bothered me about those time travel movies (besides the ridiculous timetravel part) like "Back To the Future", is that you wouldn't have to go to extremes to prevent your birth. All you would have to do is bump into your Mom or Dad to delay them for 1 second; that slight change in the timeline would guarantee that it would be a different sperm that won the race to impregnate your mom.
Power to the Peaceful
Yes, it sounds similar.
And this frustratingly vague article makes a meaningless argument.
It tries to use the fact that we observe no disappearing people, or other strange temporal modifications as an argument that such things don't happen, and are thus impossible. But if somebody actually changed the way a wave function collapsed at some time in the past, why on earth would we expect to remember things from the way it was "before" it had been changed, since the change by definition happened in our own past, and thus to us it always occurred the way it now occurs? This isn't a logical argument. And it explains part of the aesthetic appeal of the many-worlds interpretation.
In pure quantum mechanics, time is a special property because wave function collapse via quantum operators (i.e. "observation") is a privileged thing that moves in only one direction. In general relativity, time doesn't have a privileged status. I don't see how you are going to reconcile that basic difference without coming up with a more complete theory (i.e. quantum gravity, GUT, etc.), but then again, my undergrad physics major knowledge is a bit rusty five years later.
Something I don't think a lot of people really grok is that the laws of physics are time symmetric (actually the full symmetry is CPT, charge+parity+time, an electron going back in time would be a positron for example) so the fundamental weirdness is why we perceive time to flow in one direction in the first place. That's why I've always loved Feynman's absorber theory and it's associated spin-off the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. Those theories don't discard the so-called "advanced" (that is, backwards in time)solutions and work out how in a universe with appropriate boundary conditions you get an arrow of time. The advanced solutions actually exist but because of the boundary conditions they cancel each other out except where they "count". So according to the theory, when you go to push an electron every other particle in the universe sends waves back in time in response to push back on the electron at the exact instant you push it! The advanced waves only manifest themselves as the normal radiation resistance we observe when accelerating charged particles. The transactional interpretation takes this line of thinking with regards to the collaspe of the wave function. When one particle of a two particle entangled system wave function collapses it sends an advance wave back in time to collapse the wave function of the other particle. So in the EPR experiment there is no instanteous "spooky action at a distance" but travel exactly at the speed of light but in the opposite direction in time.
Actually, philosophers have had the theories, but time-travel sci-fi is, like most sci-fi, just a futuristic take on one philosophical idea or another.
:p.
The "new" model is actually called the "B theory" of time and isn't new at all (although this scientific explanation of it is I guess). The B theory is that every instance in time exists somewhere and it is always "now" in that instance, so there is no real past, present or future. In the B theory if you were to go back in time you would merely fulfil the events that happen in that instance of time, always as the way they were intended.
So if you went back in an attempt to kill the parents of the bully who harassed you in school you would find out that your attempts failed, and that they didn't change your "present" at all. In fact, they would have helped created your present. A good example of this theory in effect is the sci-fi series "Andromeda", which follows the B theory of time in its time-travel episodes. A more well known example is the movie 12 Monkeys.
Star Trek on the other hand follows the multiple futures theory, whereby if you go back in time and change something you actually from that point on move down a different branch of time into an alternate future. The Butterfly Effect is another movie example of this.
The problem with the B theory of time is that it requires a deterministic universe, which is an unpleasant who isn't a materialist (ie. you believe you're made up of more than just matter). Of course the alternate timeline theory also has its own problems in that regard, wherein if you can exist in multiple timelines then which one is really you and where is your soul? If you're a materialist then no worries
My own theory on the matter is that time is nothing more than a human construct. Matter changes, and one change takes place before another, and we measure the order in which these changes occur and call that 'time'.