Paradox? Changing the present by changing the past

[jaynebeal]

You have an enemy who wishes to kill you before you become a thorn in their side. The year is 2007 and they send information back to 1994 of your whereabouts and they arrange an "accident". You are sitting on the back of a truck with your legs dangling over the edge. The killer drives a forklift and sweeps the forks backward under the end of the truck to relieve you of your legs...the girl sat next to you warns you of impending danger and you move just in time. Does time itself save your life, do events construe to make it impossible because you are here in 2007? Is it because the information used to track you down was sent back through time that it does not work?

 

[gabee]

Is it even possible to send information back in time? :tongue:

I don't think nature has a sense of plot. By that, I mean that if you traveled to the past and saved someone from dying, I don't think circumstances would arrange for their death to occur in a different way. That just doesn't make sense :P

 

[jaynebeal]

It must do mustn't it? For if it didn't then the "accident" would in all probability ben successful would it not?..How can I be killed yers ago if I am sat hee talking to you now? Does that not involve a rearranged plot that nature/time whatever you want to call it, does not accept? I cannot surely be sat here one minute and have died in 1994 the next...or I would never have gone through the life that lead me to be sat in this particular house talking to you now...which would also not allow me to have just lost my legs either because again...my whole life course would probably not lead me to be sat here now. Maybe nature dislikes time attained murder attempts!

 

[gabee]

Did this actually happen to you? lol

 

[DaveC426913]

If you allow for the possibility of time travel without explaining the mechanism, you create a dead-end wherein the problem cannot be solved.

 

[jaynebeal]

ok..just say..for answers sake that it was achieved using an out of body scenario to send bits of information back ..whether you believe it's possible is irrelevant right now but would the nature time construct allow the event or not?

 

[gabee]

That's up to you...if you assume the laws of nature don't apply anymore, what else goes?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture:

Rather than consider the usual models for such a paradox, such as the grandfather paradox in which a time-traveller kills his own grandfather (and, thus, prevents his own birth), Novikov used a mechanistic model which was more amenable to mathematics; a billiards ball being fired into a wormhole in such a way that it would go back in time and collide with its earlier self, thereby knocking it off course and preventing it from entering the wormhole in the first place.

Novikov found that there were many trajectories that could result from the same initial conditions. For example, the billiard ball could knock itself only slightly astray, resulting in its going into the past slightly off course, which winds up causing it to knock its past self only slightly astray; this "sequence" of events (actually a causal loop) is completely consistent and does not result in a paradox. Novikov found that the probability of such consistent events was nonzero, and the probability of inconsistent events was zero, so no matter what a time traveller might try to do he will always end up accomplishing consistent non-paradoxical actions.[continued]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle

 

[ray b]

if there could be time travel in the future
there would be time travel NOW

 

[DaveC426913]

Niven's Law: there will never be time travel, since there isn't NOW.

 

[DaveC426913]

As gabee points out, you can't simply suspend laws as you see fit and still get a sensical answer.

The thing that stops the paradox is not separate from the thing that stops you from looking to see what would happen.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

That is an assumption on your part. The notion [question] of closed time-like curves is certainly an open one.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Until Evo checks in I'm closing this thread. Few here are qualified to speculate on the matter, and those who aren't, shouldn't.