Physicists Tame Time Travel by Forbidding You to Kill Your Grandfather

By Laura Sanders, Science News

Novelists and screenwriters know that time travel can be accomplished in all sorts of ways: a supercharged DeLorean, Hermione’s small watch and, most recently, a spacetime-bending hot tub have allowed fictional heroes to jump between past and future.

But physicists know that time travel is more than just a compelling plot device — it’s a serious prediction of Einstein’s general relativity equations. In a new study posted online July 15, researchers led by Seth Lloyd at MIT analyze how some of the quirks and peculiarities of real-life time travel might play out. This particular kind of time travel evades some of its most paradoxical predictions, Lloyd says.

Any theory of time travel has to confront the devastating “grandfather paradox,” in which a traveler jumps back in time and kills his grandfather, which prevents his own existence, which then prevents the murder in the first place, and so on.

One model, put forth in the early 1990s by Oxford physicist David Deutsch, can allow inconsistencies between the past a traveler remembers and the past he experiences. So a person could remember killing his grandfather without ever having done it. “It has some weird features that don’t square with what we thought time travel might work out as,” Lloyd says.



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/time-travel/

It's all very confusing, you know. :rofl:

That's perverted!

it all to you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7x1ETPkZsk

From Mr. I'm-my-own-grandpa! Screw history!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7x1ETPkZsk

Maybe, then, you'll understand the joke. Or, maybe not...who knows?

Oh, yes, madness runs in our family. Some people even called ME mad! And why? Because I dared to dream of creating a race of atomic monsters... atomic supermen with octagonal bodies that suck blood...

Wyman's son married his step-mother's mother.

oh..here are some details..
http://www.amusingfacts.com/facts/Detail/bill-wyman-marriage.html

I'm My Own Grandpa is an old song. Everyone's done it, pretty much.

It's enough to make one closed timelike loopy.

...for a time travel paradox that would turn a klein bottle inside out.

Maybe this is happening now.

Maybe eye witness accounts and confessions are wrong even though they're right.

Maybe until there's actual evidence of time travel it should remain in the science fiction category.

Now, take my friend Napoleon Bonaparte for example .......

I just ordered it for my Kindle.
Thanks!

You wouldn't exist after having done it, so they could not try you for murder

It's one of those areas where "there ought to be a law" really holds.

;-)

CHRISTOPEHR LLOYD? Dun dun dunnnnnn!

TlalocW

But if time travels in any direction with any number of simultaneous possibilities, then one could travel through time and be there (then) and interact with events that will spin however they do. But it wouldn't change the fact that one came from a particular timeline that ended up producing who they are. Therefore, one could destroy the possibility of their own future within a particular timeline but not necessarily all and specifically not the one from whence they came.

But this is hardly the problem we face. Our problem is this terrible black hole full of negativity and hatred that is pulling on everyone in this world like gravity. If there ever was a timeline worth jumping out of, this one would be it. Just so long as we're not jumping "out of the frying pan and into the fire".

:thumbsup:

I've been saying for a while that I feel as if I were sucked into a bizarre alternate universe back in December 2000 and have been looking for a way back home ever since.

This is just going to wind up costing us grandfather-killing jobs.