Wednesday 14 January 2009

The Time Paradox

Whenever the talk of time travel occurs, a phenomena that is sure to be the topic of discussion in the trusty time paradox. A time paradox is explained by the most common example: the "Grandfather Paradox". In this paradox you go back in time to kill your own grandfather and hence you wouldn't exist in the future and so you wouldn't have been able to go and kill your grandfather........(The sentence runs off as much as the effect does.). This explanation was invented to explain some of the concepts of time travel that we did not quite understand.

In my opinion the time paradox does not exist. We cannot change the past. If in the future I go back to change the past in some way, then we are already feeling the repercussions of my actions. If I go back I've already been back. This leads to the one definite statement: We cannot change our past or present, we can only change our future. But however if we do an action in the past which affects my going back to the past then we go into another parallel universe in which the results of our actions can happen. 

That is another implication of time travel. It implies that there are many millions of parallel universes in which the many million possibilities of that could happen, happen. In the case of the grandfather paradox the person who kills his grandfather is transported to another universe in which this twisted reality can happen. At least that is my understanding.

There are many methods of time travel that exist only in theory.On very radical theory is the transport of information through wormholes or space shortcuts. Any objects with mass cannot travel faster than light or at the speed of light. So they cannot travel through wormholes unharmed. The idea is to send streams of information through this wormhole to beam ourselves to the past. We convert ourselves into a stream of information that the time tunnel will reconstruct into our bodies at the end. According to theory information cannot be destroyed as it travels through the time tunnel or wormhole.

Another method involves using circular beams of high energy lasers to bend the space-time fabric. According to Einstein, sapce and time are closely related, interwoven and interlocked like a fabric. If space is bent enough it will warp time with it allowing us to slow down or speed up time.

The world of science is interesting indeed....