Time travel into the future is easy, one just hibernates in some sort of way. Time travel in the pas

There are a million stories about time travel, but the good ones have to choose a side: when you go back into the past, either you can change the present hyatt hotel san diego or you can't. I'm not an expert on science fiction, but in my mind the canonical stories illustrating these polar opposite theories are one by Ray Bradbury and two by Robert Heinlein.
Bradbury's 1952 story " The Sound of Thunder" about a tourist who goes back to the dinosaur age and steps on a butterfly, making the present hyatt hotel san diego much worse when he gets home, is the source of the term "butterfly effect" about how small changes can have big results.
hyatt hotel san diego In contrast, Heinlein's 1941 time travel story " By His Bootstraps " is a good introduction to the paradoxes of predestination in which the time travel all unfolds as fated despite the best character's best efforts to change the past.
That's one of the weirdest endings ever. (That reminds me of all the cults that were forming at the time around around lesser sci-fi writers, hyatt hotel san diego such as L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand. There was something in the air in the run-up to the Sixties. It speaks to Heinlein's hyatt hotel san diego strength of character and/or short attention span that, despite his tendency toward solipsism that runs amok in 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land , he was less tempted than they were to give in to being a cult leader. Heinlein had the ego, but not the capacity for boredom.)
On the other hand, you could argue that Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is a proto-time travel story that takes Heinlein's side. How does the Oracle know that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother? Maybe she has a time machine!
hyatt hotel san diego I was thinking that maybe Bradbury's changeable history makes for better comedy and Heinlein's deterministic history makes for better tragedy, hyatt hotel san diego but perhaps the opposite is true. The gyrations that a Heinleinian time travel plot has to go through to make everything hyatt hotel san diego wind up being the same are often exhilaratingly comic, while Bradburyesque plots like the new Looper , which takes a strong stand at the end in favor of [ Spoiler Alert! ] mother love, often tend toward the sentimental.
I m of the opinion that if time travel into the past were possible, you could not change the present. The 2002 version of The Time Machine explains it nicy through Jeremy Irons s Morlock character: 1) The inventor made the time machine to save his fiancee s life; 2) but if he saved her life, he d never have invented his time machine in the first place; 3) so if he saved her from getting shot by a mugger, she d die in a car crash or something hyatt hotel san diego else instead. Of course that doesn t mean you can t write a good story from the opposite position either, i.e. that you can change the present. Basically, you d have to accept the multiverse theory. hyatt hotel san diego When Biff changed the present, for example? Makes you wonder what happened to all the people in that timeline when Doc and Marty erased it.
The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy is a good example of the you can t change it type. At one point, Arthur realizes he can t die because something he knows he s going to do hasn t happened yet. Star Trek did about a hundred hyatt hotel san diego time travel stories, and generally went on the Back to the Future model, except when it didn t. I think the you can change it model makes it a lot easier to tell a story, but it also introduces impossible paradoxes or pointless cheats like multiple timelines. Saying that you can t change things makes a lot more sense, but is limiting plot-wise. Hitchhiker s is pretty impressive the way it ties all the different times and events together without contradictions.
There is a middle way exemplified hyatt hotel san diego by a couple of stories: in Timescape hyatt hotel san diego a physicist sends messages to his past self by interfering hyatt hotel san diego in an experiment hyatt hotel san diego he was doing in the 70s with the intent of avoiding an impending natural disaster. He is able to change the present in limited ways by e.g. his past self putting things in a safe deposit box to send them forward, but is unable hyatt hotel san diego to avert the natural disaster hyatt hotel san diego in his own timeline. Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality has my favourite portrayal of time travel, being the most highly specified. The TSPE arc involves a lot of time travel and is deliciously mind-bending. In that, you can use time travel to influence future events, but only those which you have not yet observed the outcome of.
Asimov s The end of eternity was a pretty cool take on changing the future. The Time Police patrolled the corridors of time to unwind unauthorised changes. The far future was out of bounds, presumably because the inhabitants hyatt hotel san diego didn t want to get affected. But I read it as a teenager in the Sixties, so I probably didn t think the paradoxes through too deeply.
South Park has dealt intelligently with time travel on many occasions. In one episode it is explained nicely as Terminator Rules, Back to the Future Rules, or Timerider Rules. Anyway, parallel universes allow for all possibilities. As we all know.
Asimov s science fiction short story The Red Queens Race was about exactly this. The title is from Lewis Carroll, obviously, and likens time travel to the race where it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place .
I thought the butterfly effect was born out of the science of chaos theory and strange attractors. Namely that a tiny change to the input conditions at time A can result in a very different system state at time B. I m surprised no pedant has posted about this yet.
I thought the butterfly effect was born out of the science of chaos theory and strange attractors. Namely that a tiny change to the input conditions at time A can result in a very different system state at time B. I m surprised no pedant has posted about this yet.
In reality (if the term has meaning) the Everet multiple universe thoery (that every possible action happens and creates a new universe) solves the paradox. Though it produces new ones, it seems to be genearlly accepted hyatt hotel san diego now by those who study quantum effects and astronomers hyatt hotel san diego who study the largest subject. Artistically an unchangable universe can only be a field for tragedy, something the Greeks were good at. On the other hand for any sort of continuing drama a changeable universe hyatt hotel san diego tends to discredit the basic bible - almost all Star trek plots could be ended just by going back in time to before hyatt hotel san diego the action started hyatt hotel san diego - that even includes hyatt hotel san diego the time travel plots.
How does the Oracle know that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother? A little off-topic, but does Sophocles ever state the ages of the characters? I don t see how the story works unless maybe Jocasta is about 13/14/15 years old when she gives birth, so that when they are re-acquainted many years later, Oedipus is maybe 18/19/20-ish, and she, at 31/32/33-ish, is still sufficiently teh flaming hawtness to be the object of his carnal desire. But if you fast forward several thousand years, to our era, then she s gonna be an early-40s aging feminazi spinster, living all alone with her cats, who decides to go to the sperm bank for a baby [or who pulls a very brief Stanley Dunham fling with a negro], and Oedipus is gonna be in his mid- to late-30s before he s gonna wanna quit playing the field and settle down, so she could be almost EIGHTY before hyatt hotel san diego they re re-acquainted. And before you charge me with exagerating the problem, Chelsea Clinton is 32 and married with no children, Kate Middleton is 30 and married with no children, Jenna Bush is 30 and married with no children, and her twin sister, Barbara, is still single. PS: Apparently hyatt hotel san diego Oedipus Jocasta had FOUR CHILDREN after they were married, so she must have been not much older than her early thirties when they were re-acquainted.
Asimov s The End of Eternity hyatt hotel san diego also exemplifies a strong aspect of time travel fiction: paranoia. How do you know the past is the real past and not the product of tampering? The dictum hyatt hotel san diego of The Party in Orwell s 1984 , Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past, becomes a practical process. In Oceania, The Party did it all on the cheap - by simply altering the records of the past to make it look like their preferred version happened. But if you can go back in time you can make it happen. In Asimov s story it results quite logically in a stultifying regime of control.
There are several view of time. The only thing that bothers me is when a sci-fi plot makes use of several hyatt hotel san diego conflicting theories. Star trek and Star gate both did that change the future and the parallell universes thing. You can have one or the other, but not both. Another thing they don t delve too deeply into : if there are infinite parrallell hyatt hotel san diego universes, then teh value of teh unique idnividual and the unique historical outcome is irrelevant since all the outcomes good and bad eventually happen anyway, somewhere. And the value of human life diminishes, approaching zero since every human life is infinitely replacable with an exact copy.
Maybe Jocasta is about 13/14/15 years old when she gives birth In Classical times, Greek women married in their early teens, so these ages are plausible. hyatt hotel san diego If Oedipus was 16-18, he could marry her when she was around 30 with plenty of time for four kids. Cennbeorc
Time travel into the future is easy, one just hibernates in some sort of way. Time travel in the past is a bit different though, and you re dancing around some effects of the obvious stuff. hyatt hotel san diego Married bachelors are logically impossible, in that it s something that one can say, but it s not something that someone can think. A clean shaven barber of seville who shaves all and only the men who do not shave themselves is also logically impossible, but it s not as obvious that it is as the married bachelor. Time travel is as logically impossible as a final digit of the square root of two, but it s not as obvious, so there are stories about it, that lead to the paradoxes. Part of the definition of past is cannot be changed . Just traveling there would change it, so... Last but not least, the laws of physics say it s impossible, thou