Late Night Philosophy

Time-Line Preservation

Hey, I'm back. I still exist. I've mostly been writing in an online journal (a different one). Alas, it does not relate directly with this journal... so I'm not posting a link. And you don't need to concern yourselves with my personal things (unless you ask real nice).

First of all, I'd like to point out that I'm writing this in honor of blackthorn, who asked me to write this for her (I love anyone who would actually ask me to write something on Time-line Preservation). Sooner or later, I would write this anyhow.

Time-line Preservation

Some people envision time as a straight line. Point A to Point B and so on. Other people imagine time as a river, flowing steadily. Time-travel, on the other hand, messes those theories up. First of all, I'd like to point out that I don't think time-travel is possible. It's very easy to go into a distant future, but very difficult (or just plain impossible) to go back in time. But for the sake of argument, assume that it is possible. If one could go back in time and kill one's father or create for one's self a fortune, then it is conceiveable that a paradox would result. If one killed one's father, one would never have been born, so one never went back in time and so on. It's a disruption in a logical cause-and-effect. Both realities can't exist together. Either the universe loops until a resolution is found or some kind of break in space-time occurs that would allow a paradox.

In the metaphor of the flowing river, a paradox would have the river flow back into itself. Have you ever seen the Escher drawing of the stream that always flowed downhill or the staircase that you could climb forever? It's an impossible situation that can be conceptualized, but never seen in reality. Time, for us, moves forward and can't go back onto itself. For time to simply turn around and flow back up would require a tremendous amount of energy and effort.

Consider the Law of the Conservation of Energy. A finite amount of matter and energy exists in the universe at any one time. In order for someone to move through time, the person or object must be completely removed from space-time and deposited back into it sometime and someplace else within the span of a quantum moment (I'm not sure how much time that would be exactly, but it's less than the time it takes for an electron to change energy states). If there exists more than one version of a person, there is an surplus of energy in the universe at one moment and a deficit at another moment. Then they would suddenly equalize when the traveller returned. However, if we consider the removale of the person or object from time and the placing the person or object back into the time-line, it would mantain the Law, but it would create a paradox.

However, for those people who believe in a multi-verse, whereby all choices occur at every point in time and the time-line continually branches out at every point, the problem of temporal paradoxes can be solved. Also, keep in mind the concept that nothing exists until it is observed. In a quantum sense, all possible states and choices exist in a closed system until they are observed. In essense, the entire multi-verse exists together until something that can observe the entire universe (say, God) does so. Also, in using the river metaphore mentioned earlier, I beleive that space-time wants to be in its lowest energy state; that is, time doesn't want to flow uphill. The universe, after all, started in a high-energy state and is continually moving towards a low-energy state. So complications like paradoxes and violations of the Law of the Conservation of Energy would be a problem.

So my theory is that, if one had a time-machine, this machine would have to use some sort of quantum-teleportation with the same matter and energy as existed in the past. An equal amount of energy would go through the machine (namely, the traveller) and an equal amount would have to come back. Essentially, the matter and energy that make up the present-day traveller in the past would suddenly disappear from where ever it existed in the past and reform at a different location (in the past) as the traveller from the present. In any case, any changes the traveller makes in the past would not have any bearing on his present self because the traveller would actually exist in a parallel universe. This is simply because of the fact that the travller exists "in the past", so the universe would have to branch off from the original time-line (i.e. the time-time that the traveller is from) in order to safe-guard against paradoxes. After all, these branches occur at all times on a quantum level. So even if you kill your father, only one version of yourself will cease to exist, but not all of them (including you). If you somehow manage to get back to your own time-line, you would find that nothing had changed.

That is about all that I can say about the topic at this time.

"I can't imagine a God who would care."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid."
Bishop, Aliens
Please read my journal "Late Night Philosophy" 
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