Time travel stories without paradoxes

AI Thread Summary
The discussion focuses on time travel stories, particularly movies, that avoid paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox and do not involve alternate timelines. Notable examples mentioned include the Terminator series, 12 Monkeys, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which feature time travel without altering the present. Other films like The Time Traveler's Wife and Star Trek: First Contact are also highlighted for their unique approaches to time travel. The conversation notes that relativistic time compression and future travel at a constant rate are free from paradoxes. Additionally, the Novikov self-consistency principle is referenced as a framework for understanding these narratives.
greypilgrim
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Hi,

I'm looking for time travel stories (preferably movies) without paradoxes (grandfather paradox and similar). Also, I'm not looking for stories that try to explain changes in the past with the creation of alternate timelines. I'm talking about stories where people travel into the past and do things which in the end don't change the present from which they departed. Coming to my mind:

- Terminator series
- 12 Monkeys
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

And maybe Primer, but I'm too confused to tell.

Any more?
 
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Travel into the future at one second per second is free of paradoxes. So is relativistic time compression.

Movies which did not exploit time travel paradoxes? That is simply how they told a fictional story.
 
The Time Traveller's Wife
Whichever one of the Harry Potter stories has the Time Turner.

Star Trek: First Contact. Star Trek in general plays it both ways - City On The Edge of Forever destroys all of history; Time's Arrow is completely pre-destined.

There's a rather odd Robert Heinlein short story called All You Zombies... that relies on pre-destination.

I'm sure there are loads more.
 
Thanks, I found that this conjecture is called the "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle" . On the Wiki page there are also all the examples we found and a lot more.
 
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