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He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
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:: Today's soundtrack: Bruce Cockburn "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" ::
I'm a fan of the whole science fiction thing. I enjoy it on many levels. It really can open up your mind to different possibilities....
Now then, one of those possibilities which has always made me curious is the whole time traveling thing. Time travel is kind of dodgy business, if you think about it. There are concepts and ideas involved with traveling through time that I just can't wrap my brain around. I mean, if I were to travel back in time to, oh I don't know, 1955, could I do something to "change the future"? is that even possible? I mean, 1955 already happened, so wouldn't what I do when I get there have always been done? Sure, for me, as far as my linear time line goes, I haven't done what I'm going to do in 1955 yet, but even before I go back, I should be able to find bits of evidence already in existence, shouldn't I?
Even if it were possible to "change history", wouldn't that bring up the "alternate timeline" thing? Because what if I go backwards in time and do something to keep myself from ever being born, then how could I have caused the event preventing me from being born in the first place? Aaaaah! A paradox! A paradox, my braaaaaaiiin!
Yeah, they actually call it the "grandfather paradox", and in that specific theory, if one were to travel back in time and murder their own grandfather before their father were conceived, they would cease to exist and thusly preclude any of their actions. Contrarily, there is the "predestination paradox" which states that everything which happens was already meant to happen, and the time traveler is only setting in motion events they were meant to, and not changing anything at all. You can't really have it both ways, can you? Which is it? If I travel back in time, CAN I change things or NOT?
One that always gets me is when people "see the future" or have their fortunes read, whatever, and it's bad so they try to stop it and in them trying to stop it from happening, cause it to happen in the first place (re: "predestination paradox"). You know, like in the play Oedipus, the king finds out from an oracle that his son will kill him, so wounds his baby and leaves him in the woods to die, only the baby is saved by a shepherd and raised there, and Oedipus grows up and does kill the king not even knowing it's his father. And to a lesser extent the Ben Affleck movie Paycheck, in which a company creates a device to see the future, and Ben Affleck uses it and sees that humanity sees a prediction in the device of a terrible war, so they go to war to prevent the war, so Ben sets out to destroy the machine. The people in those stories never learn.
There are some people who say that only time travel forward is possible, and those who say the opposite, that backwards time travel is the only plausible way. They say that traveling faster than the speed of light, your own personal time will slow down and therefore when you stop, much time could have passed for everyone else, but little for you, and then there is the whole time actually slows down so much that it goes backwards for everyone else theory. Or something. I may have messed that up as I'm not a physicist, but you get my meaning, I hope.
We all LIKE to think that if time travel is possible, that it works both ways. I mean, who would want to go back or forward in time drastically if they could never get back? The time period I get would have to be pretty damn nice for me not to ever see my family or friends or, well, my stuff, ever again. What good is winding up in a beautiful future if I can never play Nintendo Wii???
I heard Stephen Hawking say once that backwards time travel is not possible because if it were, then why haven't we seen any tourists from the future ever? This is often countered with the idea that just because we can never manage it, doesn't mean it's not possible, it just means we never figure out how to do it, or choose not to do it for various reasons. I say that we have seen tourists from the future, we just don't know it because they have to blend in with us in order to come. But my idea is less on the science and more on the fiction side, really. But it's fun to think, isn't it?
William (did you catch the South Park reference?)
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