If, like me, you’ve spent altogether too much time being ‘educated’ by the (questionable) logic of science fiction shows, movies, books or even some form of heated discussion among geeky interested friends, you’ve doubtlessly had the ‘time travel’ discussion. You know the one: the conversation about what period of time you’d go back to, who you’d visit, what tyrant you’d assassinate, and so on and so forth.
But all of this theorising was under the strict assumptive disclaimer that changing thing A in the past would affect thing B in the present/future. For example, if I shot back in time tomorrow and pitched the idea for Google the day before the guy who pitched the idea for Google did, I’d be a rather rich person today, right? Well now, according to this story on the PopSci front page, the strict assumptive disclaimer that goes hand in hand with any time travel discussion/TV show/film is about to change.
The article talks about the theory of quantum time travel that allows you to travel back in time, without having to worry about a chronological butterfly effect. And while this blog has already touched on the need for science-fiction to step it up a notch to influence science actual, along with the more recent lamentations about the influence that advancing technology has on movie drama, I’m interested in a slightly different topic today.
With the theorising of quantum time travel, a particularly large mirror in geek culture has been shattered or, at the very least, fractured. As sure as we geeks will debate the eventual date we’ll wield a real-life lightsaber and all agree that there are only three real Star Wars films, there is sure to be a reckoning in regards to this new time travel theory. It may be accepted, outright rejected or cause a division in the ‘time travel’ discussion, but it certainly has some interesting ramifications.
Now the potentiality of time travel is potentially a different poorly disguised moral/ethical conundrum. If I can travel back to a point in time and not worry about my changes there influencing the future here, why wouldn’t I do my own thing?
For the record, I’m very excited about this evolution of time travel, particularly as it relates to all things geek, but I really want to know what you all think about it in the comments section below.
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Intruiging. However nice it is to know that you can go back in time and not destroy this future it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can then return to this, present/future being that for you, as i understand it, the quantum timeline has shifted tracks. In fact at that point, as far as i understand it, there are infinite futures.
This is all coming from the wheelchair guy when i listened to his universe in a nutshell among other stuff i have read.
There is always only one past, being that these are the ‘decisions’, all throughout the history of the universe, that brought about a universe in which you exist. But, if you go back there is absolutely no guarantee that you will return to the same universe you left because there is no one future. That is unless, at the moment you leave you can take a snap shot of the entire universe, the position and direction of every particle (if not the speed… damn you Heisenberg) then you may be able to return to a universe that has those exact properties out of the infinite number of universes.
Unfortunately time in this instance would have absolutely no meaning, you can’t say ’send me 50 years in the future’ since time and space are uniquely intertwined and time travel is really a lot like normal travel. 50 years here is not 50 years there. A photon for instance doesn’t experience time as we do. So the only way to do it would be to take a carbon copy printout of every single particle in the entire universe and return you to a point where every single particle was travelling along that exact same trajectory in that exact same position. The problem there would be if you also ran into two universes that had the same thing but unfortunately a couple of particles were travelling faster than they were meant to.
That is even if you are allowed to be able to tell a things trajectory AND its position under the uncertainty principle, which i am not sure that you can. If you can’t then you are screwed.
good talk.
Love it! I’m obsessed with the concept of time travel, and have printed out the paper to have a read. Look at me go… it’s like a uni reading… but voluntary…
@ Muffin - You’re more dedicated than I am then! Would love to hear your thoughts on it once you’ve finished; particularly as it relates to debates about sci-fi related topics (which you’ve brought up before in the comments section).